Dear Dance Colleagues,

Over the past few years, veteran teacher and choreographer Alexandra Beller has developed and honed a unique and valuable format for guiding dancers and choreographers through explorations and exercises in dance composition. The result of her work, the PRAXISPACE website, has become a thriving online community for dance and movement artists.This PRAXISPACE package offering, geared toward preprofessional dance/movement students, combines articulate essays and reflections with scores and prompts to guide dancers and movers through a progression of a dozen well-crafted studies. Each activity poses grounds for reading, action, dialog and discussion, and these essays and scores can enhance and support your current curriculum or stand alone as an entire dance composition course.

As online learning becomes a part of our present delivery methods, Alexandra Beller has now made this valuable material available to assist college and university faculty. In the following pages, we’ve presented some examples from the essays and a score included in the package, pondering such topics as Space, Time, Communication, Process and more.We invite you to review the information below and we welcome your questions and consideration as to how PRAXISPACE can enhance your coursework this semester.

Please reach out to us with any questions and we wish you well during this time.

Sincerely,

Maureen and PRAXISPACE team

praxispace@gmail.com

Essay and score package for University professors

$500 Package includes:

►A one year membership for you personally to access the full PRAXISPACE website including a connection to the greater PRAXISPACE community of professional dance and movement artists, reading materials and a video archive.

►12 Essay reflections written by Alexandra Beller intended to prompt creative thought and discussion.

►12 movement/dance Scores developed by Alexandra Beller to share as movement and compositional activities with your students.

More about PRAXISPACE (the site)

PRAXISPACE is an online community of collaborators, dancers and choreographers. Each month, members receive an essay and score from Alexandra Beller. Membership also gives access to the PRAXISPACE platform which includes member profiles, community board, score pages (to share your work!) and access to PRAXISCHATS, which are monthly Zoom meetings with Alexandra to discuss work and response to the scores, held the last Friday of every month. 

Built as a virtual studio, library, and coffee shop in one, PRAXISPACE is an online platform for choreographers, artists and makers looking to engage deeply with other artists, regardless of physical location. As part of the Essays and Scores Package for University application, faculty members who sign up will receive a 1 year free membership to PRAXISPACE.

SYNOPSIS OF ESSAYS AND SCORES

Essay and Score 1: Time

In Time, we discuss how the sensations of duration, tempo, and repetition are in direct relationship with our mortality, and fear of death. I state that attending to Time is a high-stakes point of artistic decision-making. Is attending to Time always about attending to death? No. But it’s in there. Our mortality is all we can be sure we know. Everything else is a question. And yet, death seems to bring with it the biggest question of all… and then what? THAT question propels so much of our choice-making, emotional experience, and relationship to fear. For some of us, the sense of not knowing can be freeing, and for some, a terror. My question is: how consciously are we sensing how not knowing is affecting us, both in life, and in our creative process, particularly through our attending to technical aspects of time in our composition?

Takeaway: The passage of time always relates to survival. Treat your attention to Time accordingly.

Essay and Score 2: Space

In Space, we examine how oblivious we often are to the way that power, privilege, and hierarchies shape our sense of ownership, and availability, of space. Our use of space tells the story of our power, our agency, our relationship to others. It indicates psychology, pathology, nuance, and need. Yet we often ignore our relationship to space, either local, immediate space or the larger, more global contexts. We inhabit space, and use space in art, in a deeply ingrained and inherited manner, full of norms and assumptions. I run through a series of possible ways we might see our use of space, free from givens, asking the reader to radically reconsider their power to be visible, or contain themselves, as an act of rebellion against the system.

Takeaway: You have a load of invisible beliefs about space, ownership, and visibility. Don’t let them enact themselves upon your work without consent.

Essay and Score 3: Relationship 

In Relationship, we interrogate our relationship to the audience. The audience forms a relationship with our art that is entirely subjective, and forms a unique understanding of the work based on memory, bias, habit, hope, trauma, taste, and attention. How do we manifest a particular relationship with the audience? In my opinion, we can’t, and shouldn’t. For one thing, they are all different people, and expecting them to respond to the work in a uniform manner lacks empathy, and subtlety. Must we, then, resort to manipulating or ignoring them? No. We must consider them. We can ask who may be out there, where they came from, how they identify, how the work may touch, bore, hurt, or urge them towards something. In thinking about them, the work changes. Do we change it to suit them? To disturb or interrupt them? Are we beholden to them?  We often bypass the sweet spot of considering our audience. We either think of them too much, and stop making the work on its own terms, or too little and take them for granted.

Takeaway: If you want more control over the story you are telling, you must consider your relationship to the audience.

Essay and Score 4: Meaning

Meaning traffics through our desire to name, and therefore reify the world. If something is known to us, it seems safer. That type of concretization acts as a stumbling block for the type of magical thinking required for art. We may have stopped ceaselessly asking the questions from our childhood, but somewhere inside, we are still asking Why is this like this? Why is that there? Why can’t I just…  When we view a work of art, whether we announce it to ourselves or not, we seek meaning. We make up the why through an elaborate series of assumptions or theories or biases. Often when we start to make up meaning, we start to name things. This chapter asks the reader to consider staying in a space of not knowing in order to listen to deeper meanings, and find ways to share those with an audience.

Takeaway: At some point in your process, stop trying to “know” anything with your mind. Rely on your body to tell you the truth, and share that truth with your audience.

Essay and Score 5: Environment

Environment asks us to think of the aperture of our lens, how much of the context of a situation we take in. We usually default to a “medium” amount of information surrounding our art, usually too much or too little context to do our work efficiently. We have a political environment, a social environment, a familial environment. Environment is tone, and mood, and temperature. Environment is how much we choose to see, but it is also the way things assert themselves into our field of sensation without our consent. The one thing we can’t do, though, is ignore it. We can set the aperture of our lens to any field, take in exactly this much and no more, but we must do it by choice. Otherwise our art has been violated by chance. 

Takeaway: We can control how much we see, and can change our lens to suit our need to contextualize.

Essay and Score 6: Process 

Process asks the student to consider the how of their work. Creating a conscious way of working can be transformative. Process is both initiation and sequencing. It is the seed, and the fruit. More than that, it is the gardener’s fantasy about the fruit, and their decision to buy the seed. It’s their to do list that includes shopping, buying a bag of soil, and procrastinating by sitting with their coffee, avoiding the gardening. Process is working, and not working, talking about our work, avoiding our work, staring out a window slack-jawed. Judging our process is a colossal waste of time, but that doesn’t mean we can’t attend to process, shift it, align it, and beckon it to our particular needs. Learning to adapt our process to the needs of a particular work is a life-altering skill set.

Takeaway: Deciding on HOW you are going to make your work is an essential part of the creative process. Don’t rely on past methods and assume you’ll get a new product.

Essay and Score 7: Facts

Facts are interested in separating concrete material from the load of fiction it often bears. Inside the idea of facts, we have often hidden “givens,” things we have accepted or agreed to implicitly, based on lineage, hierarchy, and habit. When people finally open their eyes, they seem like mavericks, or revolutionaries. Assumptions are stumbling blocks to the flow of creating art. What is the smallest thing we know to be true in our work? What can we build if we start from there, and resist building upon the accumulation of material we have laid upon our small facts?

Takeaway: Boil things down to the smallest possible known fact and know that that is all you KNOW. Everything else you are making up. Own your own fiction.

Essay and Score 8: Faith

In Faith, we discuss the fact that art-making requires  faith. We tackle the plague of all artists: insecurity. The feeling that “I have never been here before. There are no signposts or even breadcrumbs to lead me to the end. I may stay lost and alone here forever. I may humiliate myself in front of everyone” requires attention, empathy and, sometimes, tough love. Facing the wall requires faith, every time. It requires we start over and believe in both ourselves and the physical act of making art. This chapter challenges the artist to examine whether they tend to prioritize an inner or an outer source for the answer. 

Takeaway: Making art that is unknown to you will ALWAYS require deep faith in the ability of the work to find YOU. This will sometimes require sitting still and waiting for it to appear. It’s scary.

Essay and Score 9: Communication

Communication can be either direct or indirect. We can use the body, verbal language, even spatial choices, to be literal or metaphorical, simple or nuanced. In art, all of these modes of communication are available to us, but we are often not making a conscious, informed choice of how to communicate: with abstraction, subtlety, and a bit of guise, or with immediate, definitive meaning. Making a decision about the mode and tone of your communication, either between performers, or between performers and the audience, even in your grant applications and press materials, can allow you to listen to your work more profoundly.

Takeaway: You must decide what form of communication you are using at any given moment, both between performers, and between performers and the audience. Direct or indirect?

Essay and Score 10: Material

Material reframes itself as an active participant in the creative process, the intrinsic energy of a work. How do we define what the material is? How does material become sacred to us? As soon as an idea becomes form, it is material. Choreographers will often call their phrasework “material,” but so is the light, the floor, the stage dressing, sound, video, text, written descriptions of the work. Are the dancers “material?” To me, and I say this with utter reverence, yes. They are the before, during, and after. They are the blood and pulse, the breath and tissue of both the creative process and the results from process. Working tenderly and consciously with every element of material allows us to design our work more efficiently and generously.

Takeaway: We must use material in our work with reverence, respect, and humility.

Essay and Score 11: Priorities

Priorities are why we respond one way to one story, and a different way to almost the same tale. What is it about a particular choice that catalyzes a moment? In writing a book of questions, priorities are the answers that interest me most. What do you want? What do you believe in? Who are you responsible towards? Why are you making this? In both art and pedagogy, the most prevailing question is: why? 

Takeaway: How you tell a story can create collaborators from your audience but only if you align your priorities with theirs.

ESSAY AND SCORE 12: Exertion/Recuperation

In Exertion/Recuperation, we examine how to find a balanced rhythm of Effort, Shape, Space, and Body in order to find systemic balance in both our creative process, and within our actual work. Change of any kind offers recuperation from exertion. An activity that recuperates the body/mind engages its own form of exertion. In our process, how do we balance thinking with writing, moving, talking, listening? How do we balance instinct with analysis? Deciding and not knowing? In our work, how do we consider the audience’s needs in terms of ongoingness and pause? Tempo, duration, use of space? How do we consider fatigue and renewal in our audience?

Takeaway: Learning to step back and consider our effort and recovery will allow us to work in more efficient and conscious ways, and allow us to consider our audience more empathetically.

Sample score: 

Space

ALEXANDRA BELLER

4/1/20

SPACE 

In a field 

I am the absence 

of field. 

This is 

always the case. 

Wherever I am 

I am what is missing. 

When I walk 

I part the air 

and always 

the air moves in    

to fill the spaces 

where my body’s been. 

We all have reasons 

for moving. 

I move 

to keep things whole. 

( Mark Strand, Keeping Things Whole) 

I have an assignment for my Contemporary Dance students at Princeton where I ask them to free write about the topic of Space. We have already covered Time in that class, and have discussed Anne Bogart’s “The Viewpoints of Space.” So I am surprised each year when every single paper is about the cosmos and outer space. I get essays about space travel, aliens, astronomy, telescopes. I have yet to get one paper that discusses either kinesphere, and negotiable, visible space, or inner space, and sensations of the body as it takes up room in the world. I don’t get essays about boundaries, proprioception, landscapes, terrains, or countries waging war over territory. Interrogating my reaction, I have come to suppose that in Western countries, especially among the privileged, our physical space is taught to be non-negotiable, part of both a hierarchy and a birthright. There is both a limitation on space, and an assumption that you’ll have a minimum of it, and neither is taught to be noticed, questioned, interrupted, or valued. 

Space is both ubiquitous, and precious. It is a birthright and a sought-after resource. Are we born with space as a right, as a resource? Certainly we can look at space politically, and see how class, race, physical ability, economics, greed, power, and national identity play into ideas of space. Recent tragedies around immigration have brought our borders into fiercely painful debate and violence. But let’s zoom in for a moment.  

Babies are born nearly blind. The only thing they can see for a while are the faces directly above them. Everything else is just sensation and sound. Eventually, as they begin to organize themselves, the world starts to open up, and it is endlessly interesting.  

Watching a baby’s relationship to space is one of the most dynamic artistic experiences I know. The draw to move beyond the known, to reach and touch everything they can see, and then move beyond those things, is profound and unassailable. As anyone who’s ever cared for a mobile infant or toddler knows, they are unstoppable, fearless, and their curiosity is unquenchable. Yet they lack any context for space. For them space is immediate, and complete. Whatever is in front of them is what is. 

When do we lose this? When does space become compartmentalized, possessed, boundaried? When do ideas of right and wrong, available and unavailable, safe and dangerous start to carve up space? How does the introduction of those tensions affect art-making?  

Space is my favorite thing to use as a choreographer. The simple act of splitting 3 people into two and one, or letting a group leave one lone body behind, are so immediately narrative as to preclude the need for explicit storytelling. The look of a huge group in a small space, a single body in a large space, and all of the possibilities in between are fascinating stories unto themselves, and we recognize the story of the body in space on a visceral plane. 

Our use of space tells the story of our power, our agency, our relationship to others. It indicates psychology, pathology, nuance, and need. Yet we are often oblivious to our relationship to our space, either our local, immediate space or the larger, more global context. We inhabit space, and use space in art, in a deeply ingrained and inherited way, full of norms and assumptions, and givens. 

I remember the wonderful Martha Meyers giving me choreographic feedback at The Yard when I was in residence with my company. “I’m curious about the space above your head,” she said casually. It renovated the entire piece for me, introducing a series of relationships with semi filled helium balloons, which stood as a substitute for their relationship to the divine, and death.  

In speaking with a friend recently, someone who coaches entrepreneurs on renovating their perspective, we discussed the ideas of assumptions and givens. What do we inherit from the system, and how much do we even see it? Most of us are brought up with the idea that space involves some kind of entitlement, or ownership, and proximity relates to both to danger and intimacy. But what happens if we interrupt some of assumptions about space that were never a choice or agreement? Here are a few. Doubtless, you can think of an infinite number more. 

Space is a commodity 

Space is free 

Proximity is narrative 

Proximity tells a story of sexual relationship 

Space is a right 

Space is a privilege 

Space confines us 

Space protects us 

Space is freedom 

Space is terrifying 

Space is the unknown 

Space is controllable 

Owning space is possible 

There is power in controlling space 

I have to share space 

Space must be divided equally 

Coming too close or staying too far away from others indicates some form of dis-ease 

Art requires a specific amount of physical space 

Space is something you can “give” or “take” 

If we release some (or all!) of these assumptions about space, what remains? Can we invent space? Can we define it for ourselves, or for a particular piece of art? Just as every person has their own comfort level around how much space they need to feel both free and safe, does every piece of art have its own desires for space? How can we listen to our art’s request as we might listen to a partner, child, or ourselves?  

That sounds pat, too easy. I don’t mean to diminish the work required to let go of ingrained assumptions around something as inherent as space. Space defines us and, also, IS us. Obviously, without space, there would be no us. Where would we be? The relationship between Inner and Outer is both entirely about a boundary and absolutely intrinsic. When we make a piece of art, it seems that a part of our inner space becomes visible to the outer world. What a gift for us to see ourselves in relation to the world so legibly. What a responsibility to tell the truth we have. How high are the stakes between us and the audience, and our environment. Space, to me, seems to be the feeding ground, the playing field, the church, and the graveyard for all of those relationships. 

Suggested exercise:  

Create a highly obstacled landscape for yourself by building some type of sculptural environment or putting yourself in a danger-free space that has extreme limitations not only for locomotion but also in the air. Build a movement sequence within the limited space. This does not have to be a solo, but if there is more than one person, attempt to make each other a limitation as well, meaning don’t touch. Once you’ve built your sequence, move it to as large a space as you can find and decide exactly where in that space to place it. See if you can feel where it wants to live. While doing your small phrase in big space, notice if there is a particular moment where it feels almost painful to stay small. Allow that to be a place where you create something new that breaks out only momentarily from your small kinesphere. 

PRAXISPACE SCORE: SPACE

Throughout this score, use SPACE in a conscious manner. The choices around space are about both aesthetics and meaning, but you do not have to consciously attend to both at each juncture. 

Make a rule about the space, and break it once.

The must be an event that uses a TINY KINESPHERE to large effect.

Make a phrase that is not a walking phrase that etches the performance space.

Make a drawing. This is the topographic pattern of your dance.

Use proximity as the ONLY tool you have to create relationship between the performers.

ABOUT ALEXANDRA BELLER

Alexandra Beller is Artistic Director of Alexandra Beller/Dances. She created the site PRAXISPACE in 2018 as a space for choreographers and makers to be in community with one another through discourse, studio sharing and online interaction. As a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company from 1995-2001, she performed in over 50 countries and throughout the U.S. In 2004-05 she helped to create “The Belle Epoch,” (Martha Clarke and Charles Mee). She was a 2-year Artist in Residence at HERE, and has also been an AIR at Dance New Amsterdam and DMAC. 

Alexandra’s choreography has been presented at and commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop, La MaMa, Institute for Contemporary Art (Boston), The Yard (Martha’s Vineyard), 92nd St. Y, Aaron Davis Hall, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s, Abron’s Art Center, Joyce SoHo, P.S. 122, WAX, HERE, The Connelly Theater, SUNY Purchase College, Dance New Amsterdam, Symphony Space, and Jacob’s Pillow and has been commissioned by companies in Arizona, Michigan, Texas, Korea, Hong Kong, Oslo, Cyprus, Maine, New York City, Florida, Boston, Rhode Island, New Jersey and elsewhere. Her company has toured to the Open Look Festival in St. Petersburg, Bytom Festival in Poland and throughout Michigan, Massachusetts and New York State, and received The Company Residency at The Yard in 2004 .

Alexandra co-created the Choreographic Investigation Course at Dance New Amsterdam, and curated the Modern Guest Artist Series at Dance New Amsterdam and the Contemporary Forms Series at Gibney Dance Center. She is on faculty at Gibney Dance Center, and Mark Morris Dance Center,  and frequently teaches Technique, Composition, Improvisation and other classes through her Company, and at Universities throughout the United States.

She was a visiting artist at APA, CCDC, and DanceArt in Hong Kong, D-Dance Festival in Korea, Den Nordsk Balletthoskole in Oslo, Henny Jurriens Stichting in Amsterdam, and Cyprus Summer Festival in Nicosia. She was a guest choreographer at numerous Universities throughout the US including University of Michigan, Rhode Island College, Princeton, The University of South Florida, MIT, Texas Woman’s University, Connecticut College, Texas Christian University, and Bates College, among others, and received an NCCI commission from Montclair State University in 2003/2004.

Film performance work includes “Romance and Cigarettes” by John Turturro. In 2000, she was also the subject of a series of photographs by Irving Penn, “Dancer,” which have toured internationally and are on permanent exhibition at Smithsonian Museum (DC) and Whitney Museum (NYC).

Beller frequently choreographs for Theatre productions including the critically acclaimed off-Broadway show “Bedlam’s Sense and Sensibility,” for which she was nominated for a Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreography, “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (Eric Tucker, director) for Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, “As You Like It” (GT Upchurch, director) for Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, “Chang (e)” (Suzi Takahashi, director) for HERE, “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage” (Rebecca Taichman, director), and movement coaching for Taylor Mac, Theatre Askew, Dael Orlandersmith, and others.

Essay and score package for university professors

$500 Package includes:

►A one year membership for you personally to access the full PRAXISPACE website including a connection to the greater PRAXISPACE community of professional dance and movement artists, reading materials and a video archive.

►12 Essay reflections written by Alexandra Beller intended to prompt creative thought and discussion.

►12 movement/dance Scores developed by Alexandra Beller to share as movement and compositional activities with your students.

Any questions? Email us!