By: Alex Rivera
Published: May 10, 2024
About twelve miles east of Savannah, where the tidal creeks braid through salt marsh grass, a wooden piling has become a ballet barre. Here, dancer Noah Chen balances in arabesque as fiddler Ruth Darity plays a stripped-down refrain from a century-old Geechee work song. Mosquitoes hover. A great egret glides past, unbothered. The twenty-three audience members—boots mandatory, phones discouraged—watch from a narrow boardwalk as the tide begins its evening rise.
This is the work of Salt Marsh Songs, a performance collective founded in 2022 by choreographer Jamie Tucker, and it has become one of the most talked-about—and debated—experiments in American dance. Tucker, who grew up in nearby Thunderbolt, has built a practice around performing inside a protected coastal wetland, using the marsh itself as set, collaborator, and occasional adversary. The result is neither site-specific installation nor conventional concert dance, but something more unruly: a ninety-minute trek through mud and spartina grass where performers and spectators alike contend with heat, insects, and the faint possibility of alligators.
The Trouble with Stages
Tucker started Salt Marsh Songs after returning home from a touring career with a contemporary company in New York. "I kept trying to make work about this landscape in black box theaters," Tucker told me during a rehearsal break in late April, sweat still drying on her neck. "And it kept feeling dead. The marsh is sinking. It's smelling. You can't translate that into pressurized air and flat floors."
Her first work, Low Country (2022), was performed for an audience of nine. Tucker and three dancers moved along a half-mile loop of borrowed boardwalk, with audiences following in single file. There was no lighting design beyond sunset. Costumes were simple—undyed cotton that darkened with sweat and mud. The piece told no linear story, but returned repeatedly to images of bodies folding toward the ground, as if mimicking the marsh's own process of accretion and erosion.
By 2023, the company had grown to seven performers and added live music. This season, their largest work to date, Sinking Song, expands to fourteen performances across three weekends in June and will accommodate up to forty ticket holders per show. Demand has been sharp: the first weekend sold out in four minutes.
What the Audience Actually Sees
A Salt Marsh Songs performance resists clean summary, but certain images recur. In Sinking Song, dancer Amara Osei stands waist-deep in a tidal pool, her torso torquing in slow increments as if fighting an invisible current. Later, four performers haul a fourteen-foot wooden skiff across a mudflat, their footsteps amplified by contact microphones into a percussive score. During one sequence, the audience is guided to a small clearing where dancer Luis Vargas performs a solo of falling and recoveries in silence, except for the popping of fiddler crabs retreating into their burrows around him.
The music, composed by Darity in collaboration with sound artist Milo Jenks, layers Gullah Geechee spirituals and field recordings of the marsh—wind through cordgrass, the hydraulic exhale of oysters at low tide—with sparse electronic processing. "We're not trying to preserve anything," Darity said. "We're trying to be honest about what's still here and what's already gone."
That honesty extends to the production's relationship with failure. The company has a detailed protocol for cancellations: water too high, lightning within six miles, or heat index above 103 degrees, and the show does not go on. During last year's run, three performances were scrapped due to thunderstorms. One mid-show evacuation occurred when a water moccasin settled on a boardwalk near the audience path. "People think nature is picturesque," Tucker said. "We want them to feel that it's also indifferent to their comfort."
Contested Ground
Tucker's work has drawn praise from dance critics—in Dance Magazine, Gia Kourlas called Low Country "the most genuinely immersive performance I've experienced in years"—but it has also faced scrutiny. The collective's name and much of its aesthetic imagery draw from Gullah Geechee cultural traditions, yet Tucker, who is white, has had to answer questions about authorship and appropriation. She is direct about the tension: "I'm not Gullah Geechee. Ruth is. Some of our performers are. I'm the director, and that means I have to keep asking whether this story is mine to shape."
The company has responded structurally. Darity holds veto power over any musical choice. Community elder and historian Pat Brown serves as a paid dramaturg and has altered or removed several sequences
