“This is the night when the Hamptons gets funky,” Cameron Silver, owner of the Hollywood vintage shop Decades, told me at the Watermill Center’s annual Summer Benefit on Saturday evening. Draped in 40 pounds of Balmain crystal fringe, Silver was hanging out nearby Swedish/Mexican choreographer Adelina Larsson Mendoza (who was performing equinox rituals with a giant walking stick), along with visual artist Alicja Kwade’s pendulum installation Die bewegte Leere des Moments: a station clock outfitted with a boulder swinging menacingly from a crane. “I love all the people-watching and permission to be eccentric.”
Silver wasn’t kidding: as I wended my way through more than 20 site-specific performances and installations spread across the wooded 10-acre campus in Water Mill, New York—a space founded by theater director Robert Wilson—the attendees sporting vintage Versace Baroque-print silk shirts and more Luar Ana mini bags than I have ever seen at an East End party provided a lovely grace note. Dressed in his signature head-to-toe leather, Peter Marino posed for a photo opp with the Brazilian multidisciplinary artist Robson Catalunha, who was casually sipping a martini in a blazer dress and pig prosthesis. Solange Knowles wafted in just before dinner in a billowing pleated set from The Row’s resort 2025 collection paired with sculptural Jil Sander earrings.
Peter Marino and Robson Catalunha
Photograph by BFA
“I haven’t been in the Hamptons since I was an Elle intern 17 years ago, but this has been a great reintroduction,” said musician and spoken word artist Mykki Blanco, one of the evening’s featured performers, as they tucked into heirloom tomato galettes and spicy smoky cucumbers with a Monet tea towel from the gift shop at Tokyo’s Artizon Museum draped over their right shoulder.
The evening honored legendary choreographer Lucinda Childs, a member of Judson Dance Theater, the 1960s downtown collective of choreographers, composers, and visual artists that also included Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg. Ticket sales and proceeds from a live auction featuring works by Robert Longo, Shirin Neshat, and more benefitted Watermill’s artist residencies (ten of the evening’s performances were created during its International Summer Program) and arts education programming for local schoolchildren.
Guests put down their glasses of rosé when Childs took to the stage to give an electrifying performance from a role she originated in the 1976 Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach, which Roberts had directed and Childs choreographed. The Hamptons setting was perhaps the closest the experimental work—which is not really about Einstein, nor the seaside; it’s filled with nonsense syllables and strings of numbers, all in a classical theme and variation structure—has been performed to the ocean.
Einstein has led to nearly five decades of friendship and collaboration between Childs and Wilson, all thanks to a serendipitous meeting in Connecticut. “I saw this beautiful woman at a bar in New Haven and I went up to her and introduced myself,” Wilson recalled. “I’d heard about Lucinda’s work from the ’60s. She was an icon. And Andy Warhol had made a film series called The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women—she was one of them.”
Earlier in the evening, Childs’s niece Ruth Childs, her long-time collaborator Ty Boomershine, and members of the Dance On Ensemble presented five of her seminal works: Pastime (1963), Carnation (1964), Untitled Trio (1968), Radial Courses (1976), and Katema (1978) on loop. “These pieces were always performed in alternative spaces and it’s nice to present them in the open air,” Childs said. Audience members entered and exited the square stage area throughout the two-plus hour cocktails—not entirely unlike the way they might have first experienced Einstein, which ran approximately five hours without an intermission in its original production.
The evening also marked the beginning of a new partnership between Watermill and Van Cleef & Arpels’s contemporary dance foundation, Dance Reflections, which presented several of Childs’s pieces as part of the Dance Reflections dance festival in New York last fall. “Whether you’re designing jewelry, a play, or a building, all that exists in time are the classics,” Wilson said. “Socrates said the baby is born knowing everything, and the uncovering of knowledge is the learning process. Nicolas Bos [the CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels] understands that work like Lucinda’s is based on classical mathematics that man is still rediscovering.”
