Mentorship

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, aesthetic, 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, bias, 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. I work in a number of different ways, and am open to others. These things can often be combined in clever ways, depending on the particular needs of the client.

Interested in mentorship with Alexandra? Reach out!

beller.alexandra@gmail.com

Choreographic Mentorship

Choreographic Mentorship can take place at any stage (or all stages) of the creative process, from brainstorming to tech rehearsal. It can be anywhere from a one-off session to a support system that spans the life of a creative process. It can include coming into rehearsals (live or virtual), watching video footage, brainstorming, working dramaturgically on text, order, design elements. It focuses on questions, both from the artist to me and vice versa. I aim to keep opinions at bay, focusing instead on what the artist is trying to do, zooming out to help the artist reflect on a more contextual view, or homing in on details to see if the materials are meeting the goals of the work. We focus on creating ways to create, rather than making every piece through similar tasks and structures. How does the creation of a process create a new piece? We attempt to dismantle givens and expectations and negotiate with the inner critic in ways that create more spaciousness in rehearsal and the creative process.

Private Movement and Bartenieff Fundamentals 

We work together on your goals, whether they are physical (rehab from an injury, discovery more efficient biomechanics, master a piece of choreography, find ease in the body), spiritual (more grounding, more yielding, more flow in life), or both (heads up, it’s always both…). These sessions are 60-90 minutes, and can be remote or in my space in Crown Heights Brooklyn. I cannot believe how well they transfer over a video call, something I never thought possible until I was forced to do it, and found out they are just as potent.

Pedagogical Mentorship

Pedagogical Mentorship is for teachers at any stage of their teaching life. I have worked with dancers wanting to start a first class and tenured professors wanting to shake up their process, get out of a rut, or address things like decolonizing their curriculum, dealing with departmental politics, and responding to student feedback. We can work on multiple facets of the art of pedagogy including:

• Imagining, or re-imagining student outcomes, assessments, grading rubrics

• Letting go of well-worn exercises, syllabi, reading materials and replacing them with a new set of strategies or materials that meet the moment

• Auditing the syllabus or lesson plans for learning arcs, and progressive learning through the semester, year, academic journey

• Scanning the syllabus or lesson plans for places to release old power dynamics especially around race, gender, and sexuality

• Considering cycles of exertion and recuperation, and how to find resilience inside the act of ongoing teaching

Pedagogical Mentorship can range from a one-off (usually 2 hour) session to tackle a single issue, to an ongoing support system to work week by week as a form of pedagogical supervision, along a therapeutic supervision model.

Writing Mentorship

In a Writing Mentorship, we can look at professional written materials (artist statement, mission statement, project description, grant application, grad school application), academic writing (essays, journal submissions, proposals, research papers), as well as artistic writing (writing for a stage or film work, book writing, creative writing). While sessions start with one on one work, writing mentorships can also progress to ongoing editing/notes/feedback that can be more asynchronous exchanges through an online document. They are meant to help you produce writing that speaks for you in a personal, authentic way, letting go of grant-speak, art-speak, even academia-speak, in favor of words that mean something to you, speak your truth, and give the audience a visceral, immediate context for your ideas.

Artistic Mentorship

This is a broader mentorship than Choreographic Mentorship, meaning we will discuss, and sometimes go through exercises, to check in with your goals, values, desires for your artistic life and process, and consider new ways of creating, thinking, making, presenting. We often will break down previously designed “goals” into their parts to discover where you might find some of the outcome from those goals NOW, even as you pursue the goals themselves (like, financial security, community, developing a collaboration, etc). A mix of Choreographic Mentorship and Life Mentorship, this work helps you shed inconsistencies about your artistic practice, illuminating where your artistic desires are not being fully met by your life choices.

Life Mentorship

I don’t use the term “coaching” for anything I do. I think it implies a hierarchy, as if I have answers you don’t have. I don’t. I have listening skills and empathy, and I have an ability to widen and focus the lens so that we can look at various aspects of your life within different fields of context. In this work, we will listen to the priorities you are trying to enact, whether or not you are currently doing that. This is not a model of a broken human. It is a model of deep listening and then lots of critical analysis to figure out how to actualize the desires that arise.

Rates

I value my work at $150 an hour, and offer a sliding scale of $150-$90 to accommodate folx for whom that is out of their personal range. 

“Alexandra is a very dedicated, passionate and caring mentor and teacher that pours her heart and soul into everything she does. She is very good at checking her own biases and seeing the unique individual that is in front of her, bringing out the best in them rather than trying to make them fit into a template.”

-Odelia Shargian, mentorship client 2018-present (student of Anatomy of Choice, Praxispace, Summer Intensive)

It is a refreshing (and mind blowing) experience to be guided by Alexandra in creating without judgement, but not without decision making. Her articulations around choice have helped me create with more ease, depth and joy, as well as both receive and give artistic feedback in a more generous and generative manner. Alexandra champions the work and prioritizes the artist. She values the artist’s perspective over her own and is incredibly skilled at navigating the delicate balance involved in one on one mentorship between providing support and sharing wisdom.

-Sophie Allen (live and remote student of BF, Mindflock, Summer Intensive, Immediate Dances, Praxispace)

“By bringing the language of Laban and the physical principles of Bartenieff Fundamentals into the rehearsal room, Alexandra cultivates a generous, collaborative, and artistically rigorous space. She empowers performer-collaborators to dive deeply into the physicality of their persona to make meaningful choices, regardless of their movement experience or the nature of the piece.  Her use of Laban and Bartenieff brings an enhanced sense of clarity, accessibility and focus to the work, both physically and intellectually.”

-Myah Shein, Choreographer and Director (student of Anatomy of Choice, Mindflock, Summer Intensive, Embodied Meaning, and AD for Alexandra on numerous projects, including “Make Thick My Blood”)

“Learning Laban’s Effort Theory from Alexandra Beller has profoundly changed my practice as a director and educator. Sharing the language of Laban with my staff, performers, and students has provided the tools to create safe, artistic, educational, and collaborative environments. Before learning this language, I often struggled with how to empower, rather than manipulate, performers into the choices that best serve the production. Sharing the language of Laban provides everyone in the room with the tools to communicate succinctly and clearly about the qualities of the work, separated from the performer. This not only ensures a safe and non-violent atmosphere but also empowers artists with the tools to communicate effectively in future collaborative spaces.”

-Megan Doyle, Director of Theatre, 92nd St Y (mentorship client 2017-present, student of Anatomy of Choice, Mindflock, Immediate Dances, Embodied Meaning)

Interested in mentorship with Alexandra? Reach out!

beller.alexandra@gmail.com