We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alexandra Beller. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alexandra below.
Alexandra, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
I got my MFA in 2006 in the hopes of becoming a tenured professor. I did this in large part to create financial stability for my family. Although I love teaching, full-time academia was not my happy place. Teaching seemed to be a fraction of the job, and the rest of it was not satisfying. I took the risk to stop trying to get a full time position, and instead backed myself to be able to support my family through my creation (choreography and direction for theater) and teaching on my own terms through my company, Alexandra Beller/Dances. So far, so good!
Alexandra, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I do a lot of disparate things that somehow all feel like the same thing. I am a Choreographer/Director for theater. I entered the world of Theater through the back door of dance. Along the way, I became a teacher and a writer. I stopped performing and started guiding creators and performers in their journeys. I became a Mentor and coach. My hyphens are many, but I feel that everything I do is about connecting, listening, keenly observing, reflecting, shaping, and most of all, healing.
I am committed to revealing myself: as a woman, an artist, and an American. I make art because I want to find out where I mesh with and where I challenge my community. I use the creative process to develop compassion for that which is foreign to me. I want my work to trigger memory, emotion and heightened awareness through images that are electric, disarming, and provocative. As a member of a sometimes-oppressed gender, an oppressive race, and a country that has exhibited questionable human values, I am fascinated by issues of morality, compassion, greed, manipulation, victimhood, power, and absolution. The work traffics through the dangerous territory of homophobia, sexism, and emotional isolationism.
Empathy is the cornerstone of my approach to everything. This means sensing myself, rejecting assumptions, questioning and investigating, and battling intolerance from multiple angles. I believe in holistic, student-centered, somatic education that creates a consensual playground for self-challenge, new ideas, and profound transformations. I am committed to honesty, listening, learning on both ends of the teaching relationship, and adaptation.
I have been working in communion and collaboration with artists, teachers, healers, and organizers for over two decades. Although the work often follows very different paths, what is important to me remains a thru-line. I value the client’s knowledge, intuition, and experience. I value their vision, aesthetics, and priorities. I am not there to exert my beliefs, opinions, values, or personal aesthetics. I believe in honesty, kindness, clarity, and integrity. I challenge myself to release assumptions, biases, expectations, and givens. I charge myself with creating the safest space possible for discovery, discomfort, doubt, and revelation. I also seek fun and release, pleasure and possibility.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
I am always nervous to tell people that my driving force as a creator is HEALING. I feel like there is a bias against that word in the art world, as if healing art is not “real” or “good” art. I disagree enthusiastically. I believe that deep emotion can be healing, so creating a scene or sequence in a play that allows the audience to feel deeply is a gift words healing. I believe authenticity, in all its prickly honesty, is healing, and I am honored to support actors, dancers, and creators to get really truthful in their bodies and voices.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
One lesson I am STILL unlearning is that rest is a dirty word. I spent most of my life feeling pride about how burned out I was. It meant, I thought, that I was “good,” and working hard, and therefore, doing my best and shouldn’t be judged badly. I wasn’t “lazy.” I pushed until I got sick, and then would be forced to rest. But I danced through stomach viruses and broken toes, and grief, and I missed so many quiet moments and opportunities to be present with myself by rushing, moving, going going going.
Honestly, it’s still a struggle, and I am not there yet. I hear, particularly older women, lifting up the experience of rest, and I am listening. 
Contact Info:
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alexandra.beller.73/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-beller-0a56a57/
- Youtube: @alexandrabeller9868
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@alexandra_beller_dances
Image Credits
Steven Schreiber, Judith Stuart, Scott Shaw, Maria Baranova