BODY AND SOUL: Alexander Beller: Mindful recuperation

Alexandra Beller (photo: The GingerB3ardmen)

 

A curly-haired red-headed white woman with green eyes and an inviting smile

 

Alexandra Beller (photo: Judith Stuart)

 

A dancer standing in a one-legged balance, holding a single egg

Listen to Alexandra Beller: Mindful recuperation

on my Body and Soul podcast here.

  

NOTE: For a glossary of Laban terms mentioned in this episode, click here.

Alexandra Beller, Artistic Director of Alexandra Beller/Dances, (2002-present), was a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company member from 1995-2001. Alexandra created over 50 original Dance Theatre works, presented at theaters throughout the US and companies in Korea, Hong Kong, Oslo, and Cyprus. She has created dance theater works for over 45 universities throughout the US.

Alexandra currently choreographs predominantly for Theater. Credits: Off Broadway: Sense and Sensibility (Sheen Center, Judson Gym, Folger Shakespeare Library, American Repertory Theatre, Portland Center Stage), (Helen Hayes Award, Lortel Nomination, IRNE Best Choreography), The Mad Ones (59E59), Bedlam’s Peter Pan (Duke Theatre), How to transcend a happy marriage (Lincoln Center Theatre), Regional: Two Gentlemen of Verona (Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival), As You Like It (Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Folger Shakespeare Library), The Young Ladies of... (Taylor Mac), Chang(e) (HERE), Current: Antonio’s Song (CATF, Milwaukee Rep), Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes) (La MaMa, and touring), Directing/Choreographing Macbeth. She wrote and directed an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for 92Y.

She was on faculty at Princeton 2015-2022 and teaches at The Laban Institute for Movement Studies, HB Studios, UWM grad program. Alexandra holds a BFA/Dance, MFA/Choreography, and CMA (Certified Movement Analyst).

www.alexandrabeller.com

www.alexandrabellerdances.org

www.praxispace.com

Beller's house of stories

Excerpt from other stories

How many times have I seen versions of other stories? I forget, but it's likely at least three now with the opening of Alexandra Beller/Dances' 10th Anniversary season last evening at Joyce SoHo. And, of course, no matter how many times other stories is seen, it will always be different according to which guest--chosen from among contemporary dance's most fascinating artists--has been tapped to catalyze the current performance.

As described by the company, the game plays out like this: "Each performance is a high stakes event featuring a pivotal, improvisational performance by a guest artist who has rehearsed minimally, if at all, with the company." Yeah, bring it.

Last night, that catalyst was Jennifer Nugent, a lithe, springy, Puckish spirit of vitality and fun. Some of her best moments came near the end of other stories, as she returned to a circle of the dancers, scattering them and, to my mind, dispersing the mystifying fog of gestures and juxtapositions, mosaics of story fragments, dream-like driftings and memories constructed through lush, sensitive choreography and Martijn Hart's beautiful filmwork.

other stories, for me, inspires unconditional love, the way one takes a good friend to heart, accepting that there will always be things about that person that cannot be fully known or comprehended. This seems to be a dance about just that--opening with Hart's videocamera focused on one corner of a lovely Flatiron District building and a couple, just behind its large windows, holding a conversation that we cannot hear. The camera zooms in close but to no avail. We will never grasp what is being said nor know its history or current context. We're left to project interpretations onto the couple's body language and gestures.

We do much of the same throughout other stories with its plethora of imagery. When we hear words, they merely fan out in the general direction of something that we can only imagine out of our own personal experiences: "This is the only place that makes me laugh," or "This is the space that will not close," or the disjointed recounting of a medical history, audibly redacted. We watch inexplicable expressions wash over the face of one or another dancer; the look is soon wiped away, replaced by another or...nothing. It feels as if we're being plunged into the life recall or dreams of not just one person but a whole tribe, simultaneously.

So, of course, it's not going to make sense. And, of course, it makes sense.

Have I mentioned that I love it?

Dancing by Beller, Lea Fulton, Toni Melaas, Kendra Porter, Edward Rice and Simon Thomas-Train plus the evening's guest artist. Original music composed and performed live by Robert Poss. Lighting by Amanda K. Ringger. Costumes by Karen Young. Set design by Brian Ireland.

See other stories at Joyce Soho through April 21. There will be also be a 10th Anniversary Celebration on Friday, April 13. For season schedule details and ticketing, click here.

Joyce SoHo
155 Mercer Street (between Houston and Prince Streets), Manhattan
(directions)

Keep an eye on CULTUREMARTists

HERE's CULTUREMART festival concludes this evening with a shared program featuring samples of two promising works-in-progress:

Shaun Irons, Lauren Petty and Mei-Yin Ng consider their multimedia performance work--Keep Your Electric Eye On Me--to be at a very early, very sketchy stage of development. I'll have to take them at their word, although KYEEOM already brings enough ominous razzle dazzle to make me wonder what radical changes, as the creative team calls them, we'll be blown away by when the final product debuts. Irons and Petty contribute the lysergic video and sound, and Ng, the enigmatic choreography and performance, in an already well thought out, well structured display that nevertheless seems to emanate from inside one damaged or very disturbed head. While I can't wait to see what this one becomes when it grows up, I'm a little scared, too.

I saw an early rehearsal of part of Alexandra Beller's other stories at the Gibney Dance Center, and that experience drew me to this CULTUREMART showcase where Beller is showing an excerpt. This interesting ensemble piece, set to premiere at Joyce SoHo in April, comes with three unique features.

The first is a video view into the window of a building in Manhattan's Flatiron District, a voyeuristic monitoring of a couple's unheard, but clearly troubled, conversation.

The second is a big white portable structure designed by Brian Ireland--a clever abstraction of a house with a simple rectangular cutout for a door and an external, embedded ladder. "Stories"--in the form of mystifying allegiances, provocations and conflicts--smoothly drift in and out of this house. (If you go, for a view into the house, where there's always something going on, avoid sitting at the extreme left end of the audience.)

The third, and most exciting, is the guest drop-in collaborator from among the royalty of New York's contemporary dance scene. Here's how Beller describes the collaborator's role:

Every show features a different guest artist...[who] works with us for 1 hour to one day, depending on the event. Their role is structured improvisation, which is then set and developed live during the course of the performance.

So, of course, for that to work, your company must be perceptive and game and, in that, Beller can thank her lucky stars. (Performers for the HERE showing, besides Beller and the guest artist, include Lea Fulton, Toni Melaas, Kendra Portier, Edward Rice, and Simon Thomas Train.)

At GDC, I saw the troupe stirred by the guesting Paul Matteson who moved clean and elegant as an angel on a mission. Last evening, the springy, lusciously flexible Luke Gutgsell gave this vanguard role a far scruffier, feral edge and seemed to rouse an uncommon animal intensity in the company at the conclusion. Alex Springer will perform tonight.

Look for this work when it comes to Joyce SoHo, April 4-21.

The final presentation of this shared program runs tonight at 8:30pm. For program information, click here for Irons/Petty/Ng and here for Beller. For general ticket and box office information, click here.

HERE
145 6th Avenue, Manhattan
(Enter on Dominick Street, one block south of Spring Street.)
(map/directions)

Belladonna*: "Body of Words"

When the spoken word and the dancing body smack up against each other, what these two vital forces can open up, for our experience and consideration, is not necessarily an easy space. The Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist literary collective, created that dynamic, uneasy space last night at Dixon Place with Body of Words, a fascinating program of four developing works by Lauren Nicole Nixon, Rosamond S. King, Sally Silvers and Alexandra Beller's collaborative troupe.

It was an evening devoted to "performances without boundaries," as its manifesto proclaims, a gathering of "bodies that are both themselves and quoting." The program was curated by Emily Skillings, and Saifan Shmerer moderated the post-performance discussion.

The Beller troupe's finely-wrought, coolly-danced excerpts from other stories gave the most conventional pleasure as an invitation to feel the juicy and intelligent writing of bodies curving, jutting, twisting and springing as they absorb and interpret one another's movements. They seemed to both channel and complicate elusive stories revealed and concealed by the disjointed voice-over text.

Nixon's solo, fresh batch, opened with the charming poet/dancer approachinig the audience, proffering a tray of mini-cupcakes and whispering in each taker's ear. It is a Big Bang of taste (those cupcakes), sound, music (from Brenda Lee to Marvin Gaye and points in between), film clips of Angela Bassett getting vengefully evil in Waiting to Exhale and Nixon's own rambunctious self moving and talking. She is an irrepressible talker, and her piece takes off from her own sense of frustration about secrets, specifically the things family members refuse to say to one another. So much to take in--and Nixon just throws it out there and lets us work the puzzle of it.

King's Spectacle/SPECTACULAR offers a juxtaposition of voguing and minstrelsy, live performance and video, as well as a dead serious, deeply embodied, affecting performance of text that references race and racist objectification. Of the four works, hers is the one in which text and body seem firmly locked together and grounded in purpose and methodology. Spectacle/SPECTACULAR is, at once, satisfying and disturbing, mainly because she happens to be one hell of a performer.

FIX IT--with text and dancing by Sally Silvers (read by Corrine Fitzpatrick) and music by pianist Connie Crothers--makes no attempt to mediate the meeting of elements and make sense of it all. Silvers said it best in the post-performance discussion: "The word 'pinball' comes to mind. Different layers of possible meanings just pinball off each other." And so do the words, the music and her playful dancing.

In my experience, much of this evening demanded that I either hold my ground as viewer--deciding which competing element would get my attention--or simply surrender, in any given moment, to whatever was strongest. When things blended together--as they did in King's solo--I felt that I could settle down and catch my breath, even as I was horrified by what I was hearing. Happily, although sometimes feeling tugged this way or that, I never found myself withdrawing. All of these works will be worth tracking in the future, although I'm most interested in seeing what Nixon and King will do. 

Body of Work also put me in touch with the fact of my own hybridity as a writer in the world of dance, a writer whose understanding of the dance before me starts first in the body and the intuition, not the intellect.

Click here for information on Belladonna*, and here for Dixon Place and its upcoming programs.

Alexandra Beller/Dances at Abrons

The word "overwhelm" comes to mind. At one point in Alexandra Beller's new egg--an imaginatively metaphoric fantasia on her experience of being a new mom--the dancer-choreographer shares the stage with dozens of eggs. Let that stand in for much of what happens in this solo with assistance: It's an impossible, absurd, delicate, dangerous and exhilarating situation. And Beller's performance is just that, too: impossible, absurd, delicate, dangerous and exhilarating. It's also a performance that, for anyone seeing Beller for the first time, will tilt the mind towards the impossible, absurd and so forth. Beller is famously lush, pillowy, curvaceous of physique, quite unlike the stereotypical dancer--especially the female of the species--and I bring this up because this largeness informs so much of what makes her dance theater gracious and distinctive.

There is, simply, a lot on offer and of the kind that's rare in contemporary "downtown" dance. The other new piece on her Abrons Arts Center program--what comes after happy--not only takes on the complex topic of the American (and, as shown here, often self-involved and desperate) pursuit of happiness, but it takes it head on through spotlit vignettes and sharply-observed, often wickedly humorous character studies that could have been plucked out of a Broadway show and with performers with big auras, gutsy personalities and the skills that kill. Add to that Beller's free and freeing, lavish and explosive choreographic style. It's an outrageous and quite diverting dish and, although it runs a tad longer than it might, when it finally gets to where it's going, you find yourself in a sweet and gorgeous place. I won't spoil that moment for you--since I hope you'll go and take a look for yourself--but I will guess that Beller's motherly concern extends not just to her own child but to her dancers as well.

Alexandra Beller/Dances concludes its season with performances tonight and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 5pm.

Abrons Arts Center
Henry Street Settlement
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street)
212-598-0400