Aquabatix Synchronized Swimmers Turn Time Into Living Sculpture at the Side Hustle Gallery
At the launch of Countdown at Side Hustle Gallery, time didn’t just tick, it flowed Busby Berkeley style.
Guests arriving at the Beverly Hills Side Hustle Gallery were met not with a static artwork, but with a living one: Aquabatix USA, the elite synchronized swimming entertainment team, performing a live, site-specific art piece at the edge of a historic pool. Bodies surfaced, aligned and reassembled, forming the numbers ten through one in precise succession transforming the countdown itself into a choreographed meditation along with other movements insprired by time.
The performance was conceived and created by artist and choreographer Madeline Hollander, who worked in collaboration with Val Williams, Aquabatix USA’s artistic swimming choreographer to bring the piece to life.
Together with the artistic swimmers, Hollander and Williams spent a month developing the work in the pool, merging contemporary performance art with the rigor and spectacle of synchronized swimming.
The setting was as intentional as the movement. The piece unfolded within the iconic 1934 James Dolena–designed pool, located in designer Kelly Wearstler’s Beverly Hills residence. The pool’s Deco geometry and cinematic history provided a perfect architectural frame, both glamorous and exacting, for a work obsessed with structure, repetition, and collective precision.
Captured on film, Countdown reimagines Busby Berkeley’s infamous kaleidoscopic choreography, translating his overhead, camera-driven spectacles into a spatial study experienced from the pool’s edge. Rather than relying on cinematic tricks, the swimmers’ bodies became the mechanism, human instruments of alignment, symmetry, and shared breath, with each number emerging briefly before dissolving into the next.
Countdown also marked a compelling intersection of art, athletics, and design. Hollander’s conceptual approach met Aquabatix USA’s elite technical training, resulting in a work that felt neither purely performance art nor sport, but something hybrid and expansive. Williams’ role as collaborator was essential, translating Hollander’s vision into movements that honored both artistic intention and the demands of synchronized swimming.
In staging Countdown as both live performance and film, Hollander and Aquabatix USA offered more than spectacle: they created a reminder that time can be marked not just by clocks, but by bodies moving together, with purpose.
At Side Hustle Gallery’s launch, Countdown didn’t just open the night—it set its rhythm.
Click here to watch a clip from Countdown on the Nowness platform.
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