Alexandra Beller/Dances is an ensemble of highly skilled dancer/actors working on the edge between dance and theater. Rich with personal revelations, performances attempt to move, stimulate, impassion and incite the audience. Ripe with metaphor, abstracted narrative and controversial ideas, the dances traffic through the dangerous territory of homophobia, sexism, and emotional isolationism.

The company seeks to intersect distinctions between races, nationalities, sexual orientations and political affiliations through a series of artistic collisions. The creations are a truly unique hybrid form, where speaking and moving are essential forces in the creation of meaning. Dances often pay homage to great writers and fertile landscapes of words are often used to create a sense of place, time and relationship.

Movement is a key to the startling, idiosyncratic and mysterious information that resides in the body. The process is highly collaborative and focuses on bringing as many artistic models to the table as possible in an attempt to create original imagery, sound and structure. Humor, irony, satire and pathos are interchangeable in the drive towards meaning. Education, performance, discussion and community involvement are all pathways taken towards audience and community partnerships.

Artist Statement

I am committed to revealing myself: as a woman, an artist, and an American. I make art because I want to find out where I mesh with and where I challenge my community. I use the creative process to develop compassion for that which is foreign to me. I want my work to trigger memory, emotion and heightened awareness through images that are electric, disarming and provocative. As a member of a sometimes-oppressed gender, an oppressive race, and a country that has exhibited questionable human values, I am fascinated by issues of morality, compassion, greed, manipulation, victim-hood, power, and absolution. The work traffics through the dangerous territory of homophobia, sexism and emotional isolationism.

My form of Dance Theater is truly a democratic use of movement and words, a series of artistic collisions where bodies, words, objects and sound function as characters in a human narrative. I believe that creation should be an act of survival. I invite the performers to go to their own danger, where they speak because they are personally compelled to reveal themselves, move because words cannot express the depth of their meaning. Their stories, intimate and unique, will hopefully etch a picture of our shared space.