what comes after happy

Alexandra Beller is a genius. From her work with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane company to her solo performance piece us in which she dances with the American flag to her Drama Desk–nominated movement work on Bedlam Theatre’s adaptation of Sense & Sensibility, she is a true original of the American theatre. I first experienced her work on a program at the Merce Cunningham studio where she and another dancer ate bags of potato chips while speaking the lines of Chekhov’s Mashas. (They were waiting for a train.) 

I had never seen anything quite like it, and I made up my mind then and there that I was going to dance for her. THIS was what I wanted to do as a dancer. I started taking her class at Dancespace, and eventually she invited me to join a piece she was making called Moving Men or Telling Left from Right. She then asked me to be in her dance-theatre piece what comes after happy, about the American obsession with pursuing that state of being. 

After a long developmental process, we premiered the show at Abrons Arts Center in 2009 and subsequently toured to festivals in Poland and Russia. I’ll never forget the moment on the stage of the Pushkin Theatre in St. Petersburg when I dropped my underwear for the finale of the show and the audience audibly gasped. When the festival director came backstage afterwards, his first words to Alexandra were, “Sasha, Sasha. The naked nudity, it was very shocking!”

Premiere: May 2009 

Venue: Abrons Art Center

Choreography and direction: Alexandra Beller

Dancers: Tim Cusack

Toni Melaas

  Milvia Pacheco Salvatierra

  Edward Rice

  Jenna Riegel