Risking Complete Embarrassment

Check out our exclusive interview with Alexandra Beller, our first Choreolab facilitator!
Dance New Amsterdam’s Choreolab is already underway. The eight week workshop is a guided process that allows choreographers to create work within a supportive, safe, and inspiring environment. A forum called Choreolab is now here in DNA World to bounce ideas, questions and comments off one another that are buzzing around in that non-stop head of yours! Get some perspective, agree and agree to disagree --- all in the name of Dance. The forum will include participating artists, who will share their philosophies, techniques, and hopefully generate discussion about this intimate, yet public act of choreography.

To kick off the first session of Choreolab, DNA faculty member Alexandra Beller of Alexandra Beller/Dances will facilitate. In a recent interview Beller, shares the nuts and bolts of her creative process, her unrelenting search for truth on the stage and how risking complete embarrassment is the surefire way to finding it.

About the development of Choreolab, Beller says, “My intention with Choreolab is to provide a safe, generous, fertile space for choreographers to engage their questions. At the same time, I believe that challenge, vigor and sometimes disappointment are often tools in renovating the creative mind.”

Since her time with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company from 1995 until August 2001, Beller has been artistic director of Alexandra Beller/Dances. Beller's choreography has been commissioned at Dance Theater Workshop, 92nd St. Y, Aaron Davis Hall, Danspace Project at St. Mark's, Joyce SoHo, P.S. 122, WAX, HERE, The Connelly Theater, SUNY Purchase College, The Frederick Loewe Theatre, DNA and Jacob’s Pillow. She has also been a teaching guest artist all over the U.S. and internationally including DanceArt in Hong Kong, D-Dance Festival in Korea, and Cyprus Summer Festival in Nicosia. You can find her locally on the Modern Guest Artist roster at DNA offering her students rich and juicy phrases as well as tapping into new and subtle connections in the body.

Beller’s dance theater works are stylistically and thematically different, but we discussed what is true and common among them. She said, “Hopefully there is an authenticity of experience, one part, one moment of being human, that resonates with both the performers and the audience. For me, I am not that interested in the elements that have often been defined as ‘virtuosic.’ I think virtuosity is the ability to speak and move with equal directness, to be truly present onstage, to have an abiding sense of gravity and liquidity and to be able to narrate with both text and physicality. Ferocity, ingenuity, versatility and ease are all qualities I need from performers, among many others!” In Beller’s work, text, music and visual art are all just as significant as the movement itself, creating a very physical theatre where honesty and deft emotionality can breed.

Beller usually starts her process with ideas and relationships at the forefront, rather than form or structure. “The first rehearsal is always task based. I need to bring the dancers and their histories into the project from the beginning. My own phrase material, which can be very detailed and specific, always comes later when I am working with my own company. But that first day, it is about how they might relate to the ideas I am working with, how they might inspire me, what accidents might happen.” Then, once material is set, she often allows dancers the freedom to explore, shift and deepen the movement and relationships into more resonant moments for themselves. Every dancer, to her, is unique and extremely individual. "Not one dancer could be replaced with any other dancer," explains Beller, "the work is a totally different dance when someone is not there. Their lives, their physical idiosyncrasies and their rich emotional lives are essential to the work. To lose any of that means losing an important part of the piece"

As the facilitator of Choreolab, Beller will be there to invite dancers to surprise themselves physically, artistically and emotionally, and to take big risks in order to find where they can still develop their ideas, even if it means facing embarrassment. Beller believes that, as creators of art, we should all experience embarrassment somewhere along the way whether it's in the studio in front of your dancers or even taking it as far as risking it all on stage. “This was a beautiful idea introduced to me by the amazing director Anne Bogart in her book, ‘A Director Prepares.’ In it, she suggested that if you are never embarrassed by your work at some stage in the making process, you have not taken enough risk to push yourself beyond the comfort zone. I’m a big proponent of embarrassment…”

Choreolab workshop will culminate in a performance in the DNA theatre on June 6. Please feel free to comment in our forum and share your thoughts about choreography, your aesthetic and any aching questions you might have for Beller. We can all learn from each other and push the creative envelope.

Attachments: