Jamaica Bay, in Queens, has long been a mecca for migrating birds. So it makes perfect sense that one of Merce Cunningham’s loveliest dances, Beach Birds, should be performed on nearby Rockaway Beach. Costumed in black and white like the laughing gulls that populate East Coast beaches, the dance catches the intuitive spatial calibrations of these birds standing and moving along the shoreline, and also the sense of eternity we associate with gulls. “I had three things in mind,” Cunningham said in an interview. “One was birds, obviously, or animals or whatever, but also humans on the beach and also one of the things that I love so much on shores—the way you are looking at a rock and you go around it, and it looks different each time, as though it were alive too. Those three images are part of what I worked at.” Beach Birds will be staged by Patricia Lent and Rashaun Mitchell. There are 11 dancers. —Laura Jacobs