NEW YORK, NY.- Faye Driscoll has been spending a lot of time at the ocean, in the ocean, with the ocean — watching it as it stretches into the horizon. What if, she wondered, instead of poisoning and polluting the ocean, we were able to crawl inside it? To merge the water in our bodies with the water of the sea?

For this summer’s iteration of Beach Sessions, a performance series at Rockaway Beach now in its 10th year, Driscoll was drawn, at first, to the choreography of beachgoers — swimming, lying on the sand, lugging their gear. She was also drawn to the lifeguards, decked out in bright orange. But then her gaze shifted.

“What I really sunk into was the sea,” she said in a video interview from Rockaway, where she has lived this summer. “Just daily staring: looking at this vast horizon, this great mystery, and feeling the sand and the wind.”

On morning walks, though, she couldn’t ignore the plastic. “I think climate crisis is on all of our minds,” she said. “It’s not like I came here thinking, I’m going to make a piece addressing that” — and she hasn’t — “but I started thinking, what would it mean to put my body on the altar toward the ocean?”

Driscoll, an experimental choreographer, has built a body of work embracing a primal, sensorial side of dance; in last year’s “Weathering,” dancers performed on a rotating platform, like a raft, on which they fought to survive, eventually morphing into a sculpture of flesh. In “Oceanic Feeling,” to be performed Saturday at Beach 106 St. at Rockaway beginning at 6:30 p.m., the dancers, succumbing to the elements — sand, water, wind — melt into one another.

The starting time is crucial: Driscoll is pairing her dance to the phases of twilight. “It’s a long period of time, actually,” she said. “There’s the civil, which is where everyone can still see and move around. And then the nautical, which is when you can still tell the difference between the sea and the sky.” Finally, there’s the astronomical when the sky appears to be fully dark and when stars become visible.

“It’s supposed to be close to a full moon” on Saturday, she said. “I think it will be really exciting to lean into the darkness.”

Sasha Okshteyn, who founded Beach Sessions and now runs it with Morgan Griffin, has long admired Driscoll and how she works with bodies and groups. “The beach is one big exploding mass of bodies and feeling and senses,” Okshteyn said. “I thought it would be really interesting to have her in dialogue with this type of environment.”

Okshteyn also knew it would be a challenge to Driscoll: The beach is uncontrollable, and Driscoll loves to be in control. The interruptions have been constant. “It’s like: Oh, there’s a rainstorm,” Driscoll said. “It’s so windy today. Everything’s covered in sand, my notebook’s blown away.” But that’s been exciting.

“I really wanted to do this to kind of relax that muscle and give myself a new way of thinking,” she said. “Stepping away from the cycles that we’re all in. Produce, produce, produce. Tour, tour, tour. And that can’t help but affect the imagination.”

Driscoll, who mainly developed the work on site rather than in the studio, has a structure mapped out for “Oceanic Feeling.” It could change — nothing is set on a beach — but the plan is that dancers will move from the sand to the water as the sun sets. But she has lost valuable creative beach time. Last week, after a heat wave broke, there were drenching rains. (That said, there is a rain date for “Oceanic Feeling”: Sunday. And on Saturday, as part of Beach Sessions, there will be a looping screening of footage from Moriah Evans’ “Repose,” a 2021 work, at Averne Cinema.)

On the bright side, a storm brought seaweed to Driscoll’s shoreline stage. She hopes it doesn’t drift back out to sea, and for good reason: At a rehearsal this week, the rosy sky seemed to melt into blue and purple water and beneath that, the soft floor of emerald seaweed. The dancers, seemingly frozen in states of embrace, painted silhouettes against the lapping waves. It was slow, trippy and transcendent.

When Driscoll started choreographing, one image that she came back to was the famous kiss scene in the 1953 film “From Here to Eternity” — and with it “something about couples on a beach, hot in the water, you know, making out,” Driscoll said. But the dance is “turning much more toward the ecological body.”

Couples stretched across the shoreline from jetty to jetty into what appears to be infinity; covered in sand and seaweed, they were rocked, pushed and pulled part. Driscoll and her dramaturge, Dages Juvelier Keates, viewed this as the dancers laying themselves on an altar as offerings. “What does it mean to be in the state of offering and succumbing?” she said.

Before heading back out into the water to rehearse some ideas, Driscoll and her cast — 16 exceptional dance artists, including Leslie Cuyjet, Miguel Alejandro Castillo and Lena Engelstein — discussed how they should react to the elements, how they might think about having the ocean as their audience instead of the crowd watching from the sand. Driscoll spoke about the full embrace of a wave. She said, “It’s almost like we’re acclimating our body in a whole other way with the ocean as collaborator.”

And that fits with what Driscoll is adding to the environment: There is little extra. The costumes, by Karen Boyer, blend with the tones of the beach, from the color variation of sand and seashells to the more dusky, evening hues of water and sky. “It’s very fleshy,” Driscoll said. “It’s a lot of skin.”

There’s a sense that they become embedded on the shoreline or part of the sea itself. Fittingly, there is no score, just natural sounds — although, at the beach, there is always danger lurking. Sometimes it has nothing to do with riptides or sharks.

“Hopefully, there won’t be any cover bands playing nearby,” Driscoll said. “Just the sounds of the ocean and the wind.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.