Photo: Judy Stuart Boronson
Hometown: New York, NY
Current city: New York, NY
Age: 41
College and degree: BFA University of Michigan
Graduate school and degree: MFA University of WI at Milwaukee. I started at 32 and graduated at 33, 3 weeks before my due date for my first child.
Website: www.alexandrabellerdances.org
How you pay the bills: teaching technique and composition at Long Island University, Gibney Dance Center, curating the Guest Artist program at Gibney, teaching residencies/making work at universities nationally and festivals internationally, facilitating choreolabs, mentoring choreographers
All of the dance hats you wear: Teacher, Choreographer, Artistic Director (managing a manager, grant writer, PR person, interns, dancers, designers), Dancer (sometimes), Mentor
Non-dance work you have done in the past: food service, including hostessing on a Kosher dinner cruise, massage therapy
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Describe your dance life in your….
20s:
Dance life in my 20s was: graduating college, dancing for 6 small companies in NY, including the Isadora Duncan Dance Company, waiting tables, and then, at 23, starting intensely and suddenly full time touring with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, touring the world, making new work. My major performance life started and ended in my 20s. I left the company 2 months before my 30th birthday.
30s:
Dance life in my 30s was: starting my own company, choreographing like mad, getting my grad degree, and having children.
40s:
Dance life in my 40s is: well, I’m just one year into this but… negotiating my family and art, looking ahead at what I want from my career (mid life crisis?).
Photo: Judy Stuart Boronson
Can you talk about your work with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane? How did you land the position in the company (audition, seen in class, workshop, etc)?
I went to an open “cattle call” audition for the BTJ/AZ Dance Company. I had been weirdly pushed to go by the fact that five or six separate people asked me if I was going and I started to take it as a sign that I should be there. I had absolutely NO fantasies about actually getting the job/ but I had never been to a big audition, and felt that I should be at one. Paul Taylor had had an audition earlier that month, and I’d considered going even though I didn’t want to join that company because it felt like one of those rites of passage you must go through as a dancer: the cattle call. Since I loved Bill’s work, I thought it could serve as crossing a big audition off my list as well as getting to be in the room with him once in my life.
There were 425 women at the audition, for one part. He was trying to replace a tall African American thin woman with great technical facility and legs for days, as well as an Afro that would not quit.
We did the first round, and he made a cut, and it was unclear to me whether he had pointed at me or not, so I started to leave (I figured if I had a question about it, I was probably cut…). He grabbed my arm and said, ”Where are you going? I kept you!” Oh… so I stayed. Did another round. Did another round. I was having a blast. I’d never been in a room with so many dancers, and so many of them were simply amazing and stunning dancers and I was blessed out to be in such a mix. The last cut was to come to callbacks in an hour after he’d done this round with another 150 women.
I went out to get a bottle of water and was floating. Being able to say I’d “made it to callbacks” seemed like an awesome end to the story I would tell my mom. When we went back in, I realized I wasn’t paying attention because I was telling my mom the story about how I’d made it to callbacks and then gotten cut. “You should get everything out of this moment,” I thought to myself, “it's going to end any second.” He made another cut on the next phrase. I looked around. There were 25 women there. All of the sudden I thought. “Wait… 1/25? That I could do.” There were about 22 tall black thin women and me. I forget what the other two looked like. I thought, “Either I really have this, or I REALLY don’t.”
Bill turned to me, took both my hands and said, “I don’t know what we are going to do, but we are going to work together.” I completely did not believe him, but I was thrilled that he’d talked to me. What a truly brilliant end to the story!
Three months later, Janet Wong asked me to come to a 2 week rehearsal period as a callback with 6 other women. I asked my restaurant for the time off and they refused. So I quit. The day before the rehearsals started I came down with strep throat. I had a 103 degree fever on the first day and was practically hallucinating, but that was the least of my concerns.
We rehearsed for 8 days and then they offered me a position with the company. I toured with them for over six years.
How has being a dancer shifted/changed since becoming a parent as well? Talk about motherhood in terms of your own dancing body, your artmaking, and the new logistics of being an artist and mother. Is it “yes/and” or “either/or?” Have your expectations shifted? Do you feel like you have made sacrifices?
Becoming a parent has shifted everything, as I believe it should. Depending on my mood, I'd characterize things as sacrifices, opportunities, gifts, stressors, etc, but there is no comparison to the life before and the life after.
Here are some of the things I love about the combination:
-Once I had kids, no event in my art life could seem that dire. The tech is not working for the show? Dancer sprained an ankle? They suck. But once you have stayed up all night with a sick baby, or worried that the fever was the beginning of meningitis, nothing seems that deep. I love having that perspective. Because ultimately, come on… It’s a dance piece, not world peace.
-Feeling that my nurturing gene was turned up a notch and I was better able to care for my students, dancers, etc.
-Coming home from rehearsal and NOT being able to continue thinking about the piece.
Here are things that I hate about the combination:
-Coming home from rehearsal and NOT being able to continue thinking about the piece.
-Having no time to just do nothing, hear nothing, see nothing, to have the piece form in my mind. I used to just sit quietly. There’s really no more sitting quietly anymore.
-Being able to take jobs without thinking about anyone else. I was recently offered a month long gig in Senegal to make a piece on a group of female dancers, many of them mothers. Good lord, that sounded great. But, when I really thought it through, I just couldn’t swing it. I could have, of course, But I didn’t want to.
Photo: Judy Stuart Boronson
Do you still perform?
Less and less. I am just less and less interested in being on stage. Go figure.
As a choreographer, when did you know it was time to take the leap and form a company?
When I found myself, in Bill’s rehearsal, thinking, “No, no, don’t do that; we should do it this way…” I thought, oh, not good. He should have someone without their own artistic agenda. Hey, I have an artistic agenda. I should go do that. I had my first evening of work less than a year after I left the company.
What do you look for in a dancer? How do you find your dancers?
It’s hard to describe. Usually I find them first in class, so their beautiful, liquid, idiosyncratic, personal dancing and ability to fill the material with themselves usually strikes me first. Then, I often notice their ability to create narrative out of simple movement, without text, which I don’t give in technique classes. Then I get a sense of them over time, often long periods, like a year or more. Often then I will ask them to come in and play with the group to get a feel for them, or there will be a guest role in a piece and I'll ask them to rehearse or perform it. Then I’ll ask them to join. I rarely, if ever, audition.
Resources and resourcefulness being a choreographer….how do you stretch dollars, prioritize, and budget?
Oooh, its so hard. I don’t have enough money to pay my artists and collaborators what they deserve. When I get a job that feels like it pays me more than my usual, whether it's teaching or choreographing or massaging, I donate the fee to the company. I barter. I find people who are interested in learning things we do in exchange for some admin work. But it’s hard and I never have enough to give what I wish I could. I try to make rehearsal fun and I always bring snacks, good snacks!
What are the key skills a “modern dancer” needs in 2014?
I think it really depends on the work that interests them but, to be general:
-To be a person with opinions
-To be curious and investigative
-To demand personal rigor but live with personal compassion
-To take care of themselves
-To develop a practice or ritual that heals them
-To have a true abiding love for dance, and to pursue through reading, writing, dancing, watching, listening, discussing, and agitating dance everywhere they go
Current passions and curiosities:
-How words create and destroy dances
-How words fail dance
-How babies and children dance and what those dances would mean inside our grown up bodies
-How the plie can be so many different things
-How to shift the Faschial sheath through somatic practices and massage
-How to create rebounding rhythms in the body
-How to create cinematic work with live dance
What is on your plate/on your calendar for the next year’s time?
-Residency at UCSB to make a piece Jan 1-10
-Preview shows of our new evening of work at The Green Building January 16, 17
-Premiering my students work at Fieldston January 24
-Tour to make a piece and perform at St. Olaf College in February
-Teaching at LIU, Gibney Dance Center
-Mommy-ing
Advice to young dancers in general:
Enjoy yourself. Work hard, Be kind to yourself and your community. Leave the studio, your town, your country, etc better than you found it. Never say anything about yourself that you wouldn’t say to someone else, to their face (i.e: “You’re so fat/stupid/untalented/ unimportant.”). Develop a practice that feeds and heals you, that takes care of YOU. Buy knee pads. Drink water. Give up sugar when you can, and enjoy it without guilt when you can’t.
Advice to young dancers wanting to move to NYC:
Brace yourself. Dive in. Try to milk the city for everything its got. Usher for shows, intern at a company you love, get all the things your hometown didn’t have.
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