Alexandra Beller

 

Photo Credit: The GingerB

 

About my art

I choreograph as a way of listening, attuned to the fragility of relationships, ecosystems, and the human body as it moves through time. As a choreographer working in theater, I use movement to reveal the forces beneath narrative: subtext, contradiction, and the uneasy coexistence of violence and empathy in our bodies. My process invites performers into deep authorship, where movement and language function as acts of agency, risk, and revelation. I am in sustained inquiry around our responsibility to one another, wrestling with power, identity, complicity, and repair. My work tracks the collisions between spoken and felt languages—bodies, objects, sounds, images, and the environments that contain and pressurize them. My work creates conditions where the unknown becomes familiar, inviting recognition, discomfort, and co-creation.

 

Photo Credit: Judith Stuart

About me:

I’m an artist, educator, and somatic guide working with movement as a way to access creative authority, embodied clarity, and deep personal voice. My work supports artists, teachers, activists, facilitators, and guides to strengthen their inner compass while leading, creating, and communicating. I’m fascinated by how decision-making lives in the body: how gesture holds belief, habit becomes pedagogy, and intuition is a fluent language. In a fractured world, where disembodiment, performance, and survival have shaped so many of our instincts, I ask what is possible when we move from internal attunement. I offer practical and poetic frameworks for noticing the inner and outer world with clarity, empathy, and unique vision. I help people articulate the systems themselves with more freedom, precision, and presence.
 
 

About my history

I’m a choreographer, director, and educator working at the intersection of dance, theater, and somatics. I was a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company from 1995–2001 and founded Alexandra Beller/Dances in 2002, creating more than forty dance-theater works across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. My theater credits include Off-Broadway productions of Sense and Sensibility (Folger Shakespeare, A.R.T., Portland Center Stage; Helen Hayes Award, Lortel nomination), How to Transcend a Happy Marriage (Lincoln Center Theater), and The Mad Ones, as well as regional work with Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, La MaMa, La Jolla Playhouse, Milwaukee Rep, and The Goodman Theatre. My directing credits include Macbeth (Theater Row) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (92Y).

I’ve taught at institutions including Barnard, SUNY Purchase, Rutgers, UC Santa Barbara, the University of Michigan, The New School, and Princeton University, where I taught for seven years. I currently serve on faculty at the Laban Institute for Movement Studies and Gibney Dance Center and teach internationally through residencies and master classes. My forthcoming books are The Embodied Conductor: A Somatic Approach with Laban and Bartenieff (Meredith Music, 2025) and The Anatomy of Art: Unlocking the Creative Process for Theater and Dance (Bloomsbury, 2026). I live in Brooklyn, where I produce workshops in creative process, theater, choreography, Laban Movement Analysis, and Bartenieff Fundamentals.

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