Choreographer Alexandra Beller, whose milkdreams was seen as part of La MaMa Moves! in 2015, is choreographing Assembled Identity by Purva Bedi, Kristin Marting, and Mariana Newhard now playing at HERE through May 19, 2018. Assembled Identity is about twin sisters who discover they are actually clones. The piece uses original and found text, live cinematography, and contemporary music, and delves into racial ambiguity, the science of identity formation, and questions who has the authority to define it.
For tickets and info about Assembled Identity: CLICK HERE
La MaMa Moves! 2015 may have ended, but the press keeps coming. Maura Donohue talked to Alexandra Beller about milkdreams which played The Ellen Stewart Theatre from June 11th through the 21st, 2015:
"I knew pretty early on that, done well, the work could offer a sense of transcending traditional time and space values. I always felt extremely blessed out, as if my nervous system had been reset, after watching a run. I was aware that I was asking people to view with fewer expectations, and to slow down some of their habitual ways of responding and defining what they see. Part of my goal was to create a environment in which people could really SEE the miracle of the body as it is, as we all are, rather than the pyrotechnics of what a few of us can do."
Alexandra Beller spoke with Erin Carlisle Norton, Artistic Director of the NYC-based contemporary dance company The Moving Architects for her "Movers and Shapers" semimonthly podcast. Beller talks about her childhood, career and the making of milkdreams! To download and listen: CLICK HERE
La MaMa presents milkdreams by Alexandra Beller/Dances part of La MaMa Moves! 2015 Dance Festival June 11 - 21, 2015 Thursday - Saturday at 8pm; Sunday at 4pm The Ellen Stewart Theatre 66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue) New York, NY 10003 Tickets: $25 adults; $20 students/seniors; ten tickets priced at $10 each are available for every performance - pre- sale only! 10@$10 Tickets are SOLD OUT for the run. Regular priced tickets still available. For Tickets & Info: CLICK HERE
La MaMa presents milkdreams by Alexandra Beller/Dances part of La MaMa Moves! 2015 Dance Festival June 11 - 21, 2015 Thursday - Saturday at 8pm; Sunday at 4pm The Ellen Stewart Theatre 66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue) New York, NY 10003 Tickets: $25 adults; $20 students/seniors; ten tickets priced at $10 each are available for every performance - pre- sale only! For Tickets & Info: CLICK HERE
Alexandra Beller is coming to LaMaMa next week for the world premiere of milkdreams as a part of La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival!
milkdreamsstrips the performers of their veneers of ego, agenda, and shame, laying bare their need, their contentment, and the authenticity of their present moment. Both the process of creating the work, and the work itself, attempt to sift from the body the habits, inhibitions, and presentations of the trained dancer, and to recover a physicality motivated entirely by sensation, desire, joy, curiosity, and, ultimately, love.
The performance was inspired by a rehearsal with Alexandra's 14 month old baby, Ivo, who turned out to be a great improviser! The video of the rehearsal went viral on social media with over 1 billion views. The buzz garnered international interviews for Alexandra, her dancers, and her baby and inspired two international documentary films.
Watch the video:
"I think many of us spend a good part of our lives searching for meaning. Some of us turn to religion, or science, some to parenthood, or yoga. I turned to Art. I searched for meaning in art for a long time, and I found it, but I also felt frustrated by the process of trying to connect to something larger than myself through something so self-involved. Then I had kids, and in watching them, I felt like I understood something about what exists beyond what we know, or think we know, something about what binds us, and something about desire. I started to learn the dances of my children, in the hope that it would bring me closer to what it feels like to be a human with no stories, no critiques, no formulas, no delusions, no denials, no successes or failures, no ego.
The result is a new evening-length work for four remarkable dancers called milkdreams."
- Alexandra Beller
The cast of milkdreams became nostalgic during the evolution of the performance and have offered up their own baby photos and childhood memories to share with audiences:
Alexandra Beller
"I was very fierce about my stuffed animals. They were absolutely REAL to me. I used to put their mouths to my ear and I really believed I knew what they were saying. As an only child, I had a good deal of time to myself, and I enjoyed long conversations with each of them. They had distinct personalities (based on appearance, I am sure), and I had specific relationships with them. One I would go to with problems. One I would go to when I wanted to sing a song. One was for gossip.
One day, a "friend" (pretty mean girl, though) came over and told me that my animals were saying bad things about me. I grabbed them and talked to them and explained to her that she'd misunderstood them. "No," she said, "I can hear them right now, yelling about how much they don't like you. I kicked her out of my house on the spot. That was the end of our friendship. Nobody tells me my imagination is hearing things wrong."
Simon Thomas - Train
"I grew up in the mountains. Rivers and streams everywhere. In the summer we used to play a game called "river walking" at some of our favorite swimming holes. To river walk one grabs hold of a large stone, almost too heavy to lift, and then walks from the shore into the river. The weight of the stone holds you to the bottom so you can walk along and not float up. Sometimes we made it a competition to see who could go farthest or hold their breath longest. But the best times were when I would go by myself and it wasn't a race and you could just be calm and still at the bottom of the river with your toes in the sand, looking up through the water at the world above, so easily turned on its head."
SIMON began dancing at Middlebury College, transitioning from an extensive background in competitive cross country skiing to graduate with a BA in Dance and Architectural Studies in 2009. Since then he has had the pleasure of working with Tiffany Rhynard/Big Action Performance Ensemble, Satya Roosens, Attack Theatre, Alexandra Beller/Dances, Megan Bascom and Dancers, Tiffany Mills and Company, Rosie Herrera Dance Theater, Red Dirt Dance, band|Portier, David Dorfman Dance, Pavel Zustiak|palissimo and most recently with the 2013 Bessie-winning "Then She Fell" by Third Rail Projects. He is the co-founder of The Space We Make.
Lea Fulton
"I picked up the Korean national anthem and could sing it pretty well while I was there. Seoul locals thought it was pretty funny to see a blond kiddo in traditional Korean dress."
LEA is a performance artist from San Diego, CA, now based in Brooklyn. She is a collaborator in The Space We Make, a performance collective of musicians and dancers who perform immersive work in non-traditional spaces. She is also a member of MotleyDance. She has worked with Faye Driscoll, Christine Suarez, Deborah Karp, and Laura Peterson. She creates her own work under the name The Motor Room and can be found studying Body-Mind Centering and Movement Therapy with an emphasis in Trauma Studies with Martha Eddy of the Center for Kinesthetic Education. She is excited to be working on her third experiment with Alexandra Beller/Dances.
Edward Rice
"One of my earliest memories is from when I was 4 years old. My family and I were on a vacation in Hawaii. We have many amazing pictures from that trip, but the only memory I have is of taking the flower leis we got as we left the plane into the the refrigerator at our hotel room. I just think it is hilarious that four year old me was so struck by that moment."
EDWARD, originally from Chicago holds a B.S. and an M.F.A in Dance Performance from Illinois State University and the University of Iowa, respectively. In 2012 he started working with Third Rail Projects on the critically acclaimed and 2013 Bessie Award winning Then She Fell. He has performed with Jennifer Kayle + Company, The Brian Brooks Moving Company, Stone Depot Dance Lab, Jody Oberfelder Dance Projects, Amber Sloan, Elizabeth Dishman, Laura Peterson Choreography, Benn Rasmussen's Ardent August, Christopher Williams (Wolf-in-Skins), Heidi Henderson's Elephant Jane, Alexandra Beller/Dances, and Punchdrunk's Sleep No More, NYC. Currently he is a Producer of ROVE and is the Business Manager for Third Rail Projects.
Carly Berrett Plagianakos
"My mother shared her love of dance, nature, and magic with me from a very early age. One night when I was very young, I had been outside and was enchanted by a full moon. I ran into my house to find my mother. I said, "Mom come outside. Come watch me dance to the light of the moon!" My mother patiently obeyed my request and watched my little body try to capture the magic of the moon!"
CARLYis a performer, writer, and multi media dance-maker. She hails from Salt Lake City, Utah and holds an MFA from the University of Utah and a BA from Brigham Young University. The insatiable urge to perform carried Carly to New York City, where she has experienced magic, heartache, and transformation through the art forms of dance and theater. Carly currently performs two leading roles in the Bessie Award-Winning interactive dance theater work “Then She Fell,” by Third Rail Projects. She also performs as a company member in Alexandra Beller/Dances. Carly has created dance film works independently and for various New York City Dance and Theater Companies. She has had the pleasure of working with Gesel Mason, Doug Varone, Ching-I Chang, Alex|Xan: The Median Movement, Nico-Li, Stephen Koester, Paul Matteson, Jen Nugent, and Bill Evans. Carly has been a master teaching artist at Dance New Amsterdam, Gibney Dance 280, 92Y, University of Albany, University of Colorado, University of Maryland, and St. Olaf College. She was an assistant professor at the University of Utah Department of Modern Dance from 2007-2009. Carly also freelances as a grant writer for various art, education and dance non-profits in New York City and Brooklyn.
La MaMa Presents
milkdreams
Alexandra Beller/Dances
A World Premiere/Part of La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival
June 11 - June 21, 2015
Thursday-Saturday at 8pm, Sunday at 4pm
Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East 4th Street
New York, NY 10003
Tickets: $25 Adults; $20 Students/Seniors; ten tickets prices at $10 each available for every performance, pre-sale only - first come first served.
Alexandra Beller's milkdreams comes to La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre on June 11th as part of the 10th Annual La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. Alexandra took time out from rehearsals to answer our six questions about milkdreams, her approach to creating work and working at La MaMa! 1. milkdreams was created by translating the movement of your young children (14 months and 5 years) onto the bodies of adult dancers. Were there any challenges in this process which surprised you?
The biggest challenge in creating milkdreams was finding the balance between detailed analysis and meaning. Finding the authentic qualities of baby dancing requires an extremely deep and meticulous analysis. We must inhibit integration that we have spent a lifetime building, find ourselves in disequilibrium, engage in a fearlessness that is not natural. This requires an unbelievable attention to the details of each movement. We did this, but then somehow seemed to lose the meaning of why we were doing any of this. It required stepping back again to look at the gestalt of the piece and remembering that the disequilibrium was about allowing the audience to see us without any of the ways we try to control ourselves and our environment. It wasn't just about a hell bone/sitzbones connectivity; it was about being a human with no ability to control the world.
2. You mention that the work is for "five dancers of strikingly different physiques." Many dancers I have interviewed have mentioned a pressure to be of a certain body type. Have you or your collaborators encountered this? What drives you to feature physical heterogeneity in your work? There are actually now four dancers in the work. I make dances that are about my experience of being human in the big world, which is a place where you see a lot of difference; difference abounds to the point that it can no longer be considered "different," that there is no "norm." In my ideal company, no two people would look alike, and you would have a sense of the stage as a microcosm. But I also have fallen in love with these four people at this particular moment, and they are not as diverse as the world proper. While I am open and hopeful that the company will mirror the world, image is not my priority. So sometimes I find myself with a more heterogeneous company than others. I have battled the dance world my whole life for having a body type that is not considered appropriate for dance. I still battle the expectations daily, even as a choreographer and teacher off the main stage. It is an issue that I have resisted taking on, because it is not what I am making work about and I often feel that fighting it gives it more attention than it deserves. Yes, I believe anyone can dance, of any body type, with any number of limbs, with ability or disability, of any height, weight, race, training, nationality, etc. That seems obvious to me and I wonder why we are still discussing it. But, of course, not everyone is there, and for many people, it is still shocking to see a dancer who doesn't fit their physical expectations. Let's just say I acknowledge but don't accept that.
3. You also teach dance - Is there a particular age of student you especially enjoy instructing -or- find especially difficult to instruct?
I am really a teacher of adults. I admire greatly people who are skilled children's teachers, but it is not where either my passion or my talents lie. the things I am interested in are gleaned from years of questions about anatomy, morality, politics, sex, love, and fear. These are not things that mesh well with teaching other people's children... I love teaching both beginner and advanced adults, from college to older adults. The physical capability is not the quintessential thing for me. The openness to connecting meaning to movement is where my deep inquiry occurs, and I believe any curious, engaged adult can do that.
4. What was the process of collaborating with composer Robert Poss like? When did you introduce music into dance rehearsals and how much did one influence the creation of the other?
Robert Poss and I have worked together for 10 years. His ability to create a mood that affects me on a visceral level, and shifts my attention is very powerful. I created the dances in silence, as I almost always do (music is way to intense a motivator for me to use it right away). I found this old track he had made 10 years ago and started using it and, right away, it put us into a state that was immersive and fluid. He and I began working together to revise and adapt the score to the dance. So I would say that the score set the tone and then the dance drove the structure.
5. How did collaborating with Developmental Movement Experts change your approach to this piece? As a parent, did you gain any new insights into the developmental process of your children?
Without the scientific scaffolding, there was only so much that we could do in rehearsal to figure out what was happening in any one moment of disequilibrium. We could mimic and approach the movement, but working with BMC experts (Body Mind Centering) allowed us to get exponentially deeper and more authentic and more present with the material. Working with this material from my children has been transformative and very meaningful. There is always a rending, as a parent/artist, to the act of making work, and the act of not making work to parent, that can be very stinting and painful. This piece allowed me to create work while being involved with my children (even through the act of watching them over and over on video, and embodying their dances), and it gave me a special lens through which to watch them while we played in real life, that kept my artistic practice alive while I was parenting.
This piece has become as much a spiritual practice as an artistic one. It is the first work I've made where I don't feel any separation between my "artist" perspective, my female perspective, my mother perspective, my human perspective. There are no lenses for me in this work. It is central to all of me. Babies are as close to whatever we are not, whatever is before and after us, as we will get until we approach death. To get into the mind, the body of a baby, to develop understanding of what it feels like to BE them, has been an immensely spiritual activity.
6. What does working at La MaMa mean to you?
To have this work, which is so important to me, at la MaMa, which has been on an altar of creativity for such a long time, is empowering and inspiring. La MaMa, for me, represents exactly what this work is attempting: to build on history while constantly seeking a new way to communicate, to bridge relationships, to foster a future. Both La MaMa and this work are seeking a new artistic model, a new way to create, and a way to use the present to manifest a future. I feel so very lucky to be presenting this work in this space, with these incredible art-lovers at the helm. And on a personal note, to be at an institution run by a mother of small children feels like a great blessing. Here is the video that inspired the dance, over 1 billion views and counting:
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La MaMa presents milkdreams by Alexandra Beller/Dances part of La MaMa Moves! 2015 Dance Festival June 11 - 21, 2015 Thursday - Saturday at 8pm; Sunday at 4pm The Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue) New York, NY 10003 Tickets: $25 adults; $20 students/seniors; ten tickets priced at $10 each are available for every performance - pre- sale only! For Tickets & Info: CLICK HERE
