milkdreams

milkdreams is an evening length quartet that uses the movements of babies and children to access a physicality that relents to the imbalance of not knowing

milkdreams strips the performers of veneers of ego, agenda, and shame, and lays bare their authentic selves. The process and ultimate work sift the habits and presentations of the trained dancer to recover a physicality that bypasses intellectual and neurological patterning; a physicality motivated entirely by sensation, desire, joy, curiosity, and, ultimately, love. 

To mine this territory, the company meticulously recreated the dances and researched the movements of Alexandra’s two children (14 months and 5 years at start). To aid the process, the company studied with Developmental Movement experts, including Martha Eddy (Body Mind Centering, CMA), and Cheryl Clark (BMC, CMA). The result is a subtle, morphing, intricate work that challenges and gives autonomy for the audience to have a self-curated experience, and reveals a dimension to movement that is magical, unconscious and utterly personal. 

The work is performed by Carly Berrett Plagianakos, Lea Fulton, Edward Rice and Simon Thomas-Train and understudied by Doug LeCours and is supported by live accompaniment from former Band of Susans musician Robert Poss with Kato Hideki, who was instrumental in the Tokyo noise music scene. 

Give up, or a bird lying on its back

Give up, or a bird lying on its back is an athletic, improvisational score for five dancers that exhausts the ways in which words fail dance, and vice versa.

Give up, or a bird lying on its back stems from the points of friction and shortcomings that exist between words and dance. It reveals the humor that can emerge as words fail dance, and the poignancy and longing that exist in the disconnection of bodily expression and language.

The work travels through the space between instinctual physical understanding and language, an uncomfortable, sometimes laughably inaccurate space. It is simultaneously inspired by the feelings that arise in artists as we are subjected to the language around our dances (criticism, journalism, publicity), and the words that we are required to use about dance (teaching, funding, marketing, pitching work). The text has been drawn from all of these sources as well as an invented process where we spontaneously invent descriptions of dance, and then must dance those words.

The creative process has undergone 7 layers of translation (including sign language interpretation by Jessica Ames and poetry by Emily Skillings) as movement is described through words, the words are interpreted back into movement again and again.

Performers: Christina Robson, Carly Berrett Plagianakos, Simon Thomas-Train, Edward Rice, Lea Fulton

Photos by Anton Martynov

other stories

other stories is a layered multimedia performance that triggers memory, emotion and heightened awareness through deeply personal and evocative movement.

A collection of interwoven movement events that highlight the friction between stories, other stories attempts to unearth our memory of our lives through a physical process. If we are all a compilation of stories about our selves, our country, our friends, lovers, parents, children, teachers, what happens when we are confronted, particularly within an intimate relationship, with a story that diverges from ours, how do we deal with that friction against our reality? Further, what does it mean to believe that there is no one reality, but to give our selves over wholly to our stories? What happens to our relationships when our stories change?

The structure includes a high stakes event, which reveals the creative process in real time onstage. A guest artist performs at every show with no prior rehearsal or knowledge of the work. They improvise onstage about a story of their choosing. The Company dancers catch material from the guest and feed it back to them in short bits throughout the work, inviting them back onstage at the end to perform a story of a story of a story.

This event illuminates the fragility of “reality” and allows us to see the building and unraveling of our constructions, both physical and narrative.

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Photos by Steven Schreiber

piece

piece places the conflict between Israel and Palestine into the bodies of two women and watches as they attempt to negotiate through dance, game show, high stakes games, and extreme physical partnering.

piece is a repertory trio which reimagines the conflict between Israel and Palestine as a conflict between two women. Through watching their strained relationship, we witness both the simplicity and complexity of their problems, alternately aligning ourselves with one or the other.

The work utilizes detailed and personal dancing, intricate partnering, a moveable fence, historical projection, and a commissioned film by Martijn Hart. Vigorous, provocative and compassionate, piece attempts to bring the political through the single bodies of two women fighting for their space, desperate to be witnessed.

what comes after happy

While other countries give deep value to the states of sadness, anger, passion and fear, we often whitewash our everyday lives to announce to the world and ourselves that we do not covet, that we are not filled with unrest, that we do not mourn. What comes after happy asks the titular question through humor, irony, extravagant fantasy and honest confessions.

A fierce, ribald, often hilarious hybrid work that boldly fuses movement and text, the characters break through fear, humiliation and unrequited love in search of the ultimate end: happiness.

Dancers: Toni Melaas, Milvia Pacheco Salvatierra, Edward Rice, Jenna Riegel, Tim Cusack

egg

egg is an assisted solo unearthing the turmoil, ecstasy, passion and ambivalence in the first year of motherhood.

Confronting both personal and cultural expectations for women and mothers through humor, confession, and a construction of impossible tasks, egg reveals why we fail as mothers in the eyes of society and attempts to find love within the matrix of perfection. Celebrated dancer Alexandra Beller uses dance, text, mathematics, and 12 dozen eggs in her search for balance, humor, love and justification.

The piece demands an answer to the unanswerable questions of both motherhood and the artistic life.

You Are Here

You Are Here visits the characters from Sartre’s classic “No Exit” to question responsibility, divinity and “hell as other people.”

A frustrated Broadway diva, a baby-killing debutante, a cowardly soldier and a lesbian tap dancer find themselves trapped in a room together forever. Using characters from Sartre’s “No Exit,” You Are Here begs the question: Why are we here and what is going to happen? The performers, both physically and spiritually tied to the stage, force each other to find meaning in one another in order to escape from Hell.

Boldly mixing both dance and theater, the work challenges us to see acts of communication as both survival and subversion.

Performers: Megan Brunsvold, Toni Melaas, Eric Jackson Bradley, Lillian Stillwell

us

us is an evening-length solo show for Alexandra Beller in which she struggles to defend her body, mind, liberty and inspiration from government assault through dance, text, puppetry, and ultimately her relationship to the audience.

us, created through the HERE Artist in Residency Program, is an evening length solo work for Alexandra Beller. “us” is a critique of contemporary American politics and the psycho-social fallout from legislative descion-making. In various duets with objects (including an American flag, an infalatable sex doll and a mop), Beller confronts the threat of the anti-choice movement, the hypocrisy of gay marriage opposition, and the state of disrepair of the arts.

We follow one woman in her struggle to defend her body, mind, liberty and inspiration from government assault. Beller, "a seductive mix of bravado and despair" (Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice ), uses rich theatricality and vigorous physicality to challenge the phenomenon of blind patriotism.

Past Repertory

Diet Coke Can Save Your Life

Diet Coke Can Save Your Life, created through an NCCI grant at Montclair State University, is a repertory work for 5-15 women. The work has been re-created on Alexandra Beller/Dances, Rhode Island College, and others with the help of Dance Space Center’s Artist in Residency Program. Using gestures drawn from mass media, Ball gowns made entirely of diet coke cans, and a sound score of infomercials and driving music, DCCSYL an examination America’s cultural obsession with physical perfection, especially in women.