Dancer Alexandra Beller!
Modern Dancer Finds Her Space In A Narrow World
By Marina Wolf
From Radiance
Winter 2000
 lexandra Beller follows the same schedule as the thousands of
other professional dancers in New York City. On top of moonlighting—large-size
modeling and therapeutic massage—to pay the bills, Alexandra puts in
hours of rehearsal each week, along with dance classes and other physical
training. She has been studying her craft since she was ten, and, at the
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, holds a position in the top strata
of the modern dance world.
 Yet when the twenty-six-year-old dancer
steps on stage, she is singled out by both audiences and dance critics,
who invariably end up evaluating more than her dancing. “One night at
one of our post performance discussions, this woman started going on and
on about how amazing it was to see someone like me on stage,” says
Alexandra. “She was sweet, but it really struck me in the wrong way. I’ve
got two arms and I’ve got two legs and a spine and a brain and eighteen
years of dance training, so why wouldn’t I be able to do everything that
these other dancers are doing?” Her voice rises in obvious irritation.
“Why wouldn’t I? Because of thirty pounds? Gimme a break!”
Alexandra’s conversations with me about
her life in dance are full of such emotion-laden anecdotes, and Alexandra
seems relieved to be sharing them with a sympathetic audience.
 As a
large dancer, Alexandra is working against the dance world’s vision of
itself. That vision is narrow, in every sense of the word, and is tied to
the image of the lithe, willowy sylph who has populated the ballet world
for centuries. This ideal figure, which only rarely occurs in nature, took
up residence in later dance genres as well, and remains a crucial point of
aesthetics in the minds of critics, choreographers, and audiences even of
modern dance.
Because modern dance was founded as a sort
of antiballet, it has slightly more forgiving physical standards and has
become a creative venue for dancers who, for various reasons, don’t fit
the image required of professional ballerinas. However, most modern
troupes still want performers with the whip-thin look that dance inherited
from ballet. Fortunately, Alexandra found the one modern company that
embraces diversity.
 nder Jones’s direction, first with his partner Arnie Zane,
and then on his own after Zane died in 1988, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane
Dance Company has developed a reputation for staging some of the most
iconoclastic and interesting works in modern dance. Jones’s work ranges
from stark, moving meditations on death and sex to grandiose epics set to
classical music. But he is also known for choosing physically distinctive
dancers—tall, short, or stocky—qualities that are not generally sought
after in dance. In the early 1990s he had already recruited a tall, fat
man for the company. But, as everybody knows, weight looks different on
different heights, so when Jones selected the short, voluptuous Beller in
1995, she became the new focus of attention in this group of what she
occasionally, jokingly calls “freaks.”
 Alexandra
has been in that position from the first day she danced. Always a “big
girl,” she thrived in modern dance classes. Eventually, though, she had
to acquire some ballet training—all professional dancers study some
ballet for posture and muscle strength—and at age thirteen, she
auditioned for and was accepted into advanced classes at an eminent New
York ballet school, where traditional balletic standards pervaded and
prevailed all the way up to the front office. Alexandra recalls her first
day. “I walked into the office, and the administrator said, ‘You’re
not supposed to be here, this is not the right place for you.’ And I
said, ‘But I auditioned and I got into this class.’ ‘Well, we’ll
fix it, there’s obviously been some mistake, you’re not supposed to be
here.’ And that was my introduction to the school.” Alexandra laughs
ruefully. “I ended up with a teacher who was a little bit more
ambivalent about the ‘rules,’ and so she wasn’t mean to me. But
other teachers in the school were pretty cruel.”
With the support of her mother, who was a
dancer until an injury ended her own dancing, Alexandra powered through
her classes and eventually attended the University of Michigan to receive
a B.F.A. in dance. After graduation she did what any obsessed young dancer
does: she headed off to the unforgiving arena of New York City, where she
landed parts with a number of small troupes. But it wasn’t until she
joined Bill T. Jones’s company that Alexandra had to deal with
near-constant public comment about her body. She recalls being shocked by
how freely reviewers and audiences discussed her weight. “I always
thought this was a very private thing, that people thought what they
thought, but nobody talked about it.”
Alexandra pulls out some clips, which she
reads to me in the monotone of someone who has clearly read them more than
once. She asks that the more gratuitous name-calling and flip wordplay not
be reprinted here. Suffice it to say that all of the reviews went on at
great length about the artistic or political significance of Alexandra’s
weight. One notable review heaped on the praise, but still harped on
Alexandra’s figure:
“Jones has always been addicted to
unusual physical types. Everyone in the company looks picked for body as
well as for soul and technique. In the new solo, “Blue Phrase,”
Alexandra Beller comes into her own, showing that modern dance is actually
enriched by diverse anatomies. Beller is short and luxuriantly endowed.
She’s a cross between a voluptuously fleshy Rubens woman and the squat
striking Cubist females of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon period. She
has a good stage face, open with well-defined features, framed by a mane
of auburn curls and the confident aura of someone convinced she looks just
right. ...When she dances you’re bowled over, because while her anatomy
leaves you to expect an earth goddess, weighty and rooted, she’s quick,
light and buoyant, with a mercurial liquidity in her joints. In this piece
she becomes one of the jazz world’s night creatures, a sultry, savvy
harborer of secrets that hide from the sun.”
lexandra’s silence after she recites this review speaks
volumes. On the one hand, this is one of her best reviews. On the other,
the review reads deep meaning into Alexandra’s figure. Alexandra’s
work has been written up by major dance magazines here and abroad, but the
coverage almost invariably focuses on her weight, not her dance. “A part
of me knows that it’s still a big deal. Because I’m the first woman of
an . . .” here she pauses, searching for a discreet word, “atypical
body type in a major modern dance company in this country. Of course I’m
breaking down barriers, and I’m doing it with my own body. But sometimes
it just kills me that these reviews have to talk about it. They always say
something positive about my dancing, and they usually frame however they’re
talking about my body in a generous light, too, but sometimes I just feel
like, Can you just talk about my dancing? That’s really what I’m here
for. I realize that I’ve taken on this other role because I have to,
because it comes with the package. But I didn’t really sign up to be the
poster girl.”
In the collective imagination, we suppose
that dancers are always self-confident creatures, comfortable enough in
their bodies to spend night after night on stage in skin-tight leotards.
But the neuroses of the dance world are intense and omnipresent, and no
dancer is exempt. “Just because I’m in this profession doesn’t mean
it’s not hard as hell every day to get into a leotard and look at myself
in the mirror. It doesn’t mean that it’s not hard every day. It
requires some fortitude, more than I think people realize, more than I
think my colleagues realize. They get so surprised when we have a costume
fitting and I’m feeling really edgy, because they forget that size is an
issue for me.”
However strongly Alexandra may feel about
her body, at least she’s in it, which is a significant shift from how
she used to feel. “I tried for a very long time to separate my body from
how I danced, and to say that I would dance how I danced no matter what my
body looked like,” says Alexandra. “But it’s really ridiculous to
say that. Nobody can say that. You dance how you dance because you’re in
your body. I have a voluptuous body, and I think the way I dance is very
voluptuous. There’s a certain voluptuousness to the way that I like to
live and to the way I respond to my environment and to the way that I
dance. I started realizing that my body size is part and parcel of what I
look like and who I am, and there’s a reason for that. It is a physical
manifestation of who I am and how I move and how I feel.”
Asked what she thinks her size brings to
her experience in dance, Alexandra answers slowly, a dancer who really is used to
expressing concepts more with
muscle and sinew than with words. “I feel very in touch with the weight
of my body, which gives me a real sense of being in the middle of my flow.
I don’t think it has to do with pounds, because I’ve seen a lot of
really thin dancers who have this quality, but I think that maybe my
weight has helped me. While dancing, I am really riding something that is
rooted or grounded.”
 he concept that weight could bring something positive to the
dance experience hasn’t gotten a lot of play in the dance community.
Even gravity itself seems to get a bad rap as dance instructors across the
land exhort their pupils to suck in their stomachs and step lightly across
the floor. But Alexandra is finding that weight can actually be a plus in
the mechanics of dance, at least as far as they are observed in Jones’s
company. “Bill talks all the time about weight as a physical sensation.
‘Feel the weight in this arm and then send the weight here, or feel your
weight drop here,’ he says. I would say that weight is the single most
important element that he plays with as a choreographer.”
Alexandra also finds shape a defining
feature in Jones’s choreography. “He does see me in a certain way. I
think he sees each of us in a certain way, to be fair,” says Alexandra.
“He typecasts us, in terms of movement and in terms of characters. He’s
sort of cast me as the femme fatale. He tends to think, Oh, that sexy
music is coming on, let’s give that to Alex.”
Alexandra accepts the casting, and
considers the diverse look and feel of the ten dancers to be a strength of
the company. But she admits to wanting more for herself. “I also would
like to get the more athletic parts.”
Eliminating the stereotypes on stage and
off will almost certainly take more time than Alexandra herself has. “I’ll
be long off the stage by the time that happens,” she says with a burst
of ironic laughter. She considers Jones’s company an anomaly in terms of
challenging the physical status quo, not a sign of change. “I think Bill
effected a change, rather than responding to one.” Any real changes in
the dance world will not be seen until a new generation of teachers, one
more knowledgeable about the beauty and joy of individual bodies, sets the
tone for a broader acceptance of differing bodies in dance.
Already Alexandra is able to count herself
in that generation of teachers. During the company’s annual hiatus, she
teaches preprofessional classes at Dance Space and The Movement Salon in
New York City, three to five days a week. The break, though not a vacation
by any means, has given her a fresh appreciation for being out of the
spotlight. “I know that my body is an element of the company. But my
body is really a political statement when I get on stage. And when I’m
teaching, it’s not. It’s just part of who I am.”
Teaching also gives her a chance to convey
some of her own ideas about dance. They’re radical in the context of the
way things currently are, but in the world of the way things should be,
her notions just make sense. “I’d like for the ideas of dance and the
feeling sense of dance and the expression of dance to take precedence over
the dominant aesthetic of dance,” says Alexandra. “And I’d like for
people to be encouraged to move. Everybody. Because I think everybody’s
a dancer.” ©
MARINA WOLF is a freelance writer based
in Northern California. As the Wide-Eyed Gourmet, she has written about
food for eleven newspapers across the country. As herself, she writes
about herbs, dancing, international travel, religion, size issues, and
anything else that strikes her fancy. She can be contacted at fullsun@sonic.net.
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