This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:09] Alan Seales: Okay. Do you need to be plugged in?

[0:11] Heather Vickery: I am plugged in.

[0:12] Alan Seales: No, do you need to be plugged in?

[0:14] Heather Vickery: I am plugged in.

[0:15] Alan Seales: To what?

[0:16] Heather Vickery: It's a silly thing I do with my kids. When they just are feeling kind of low, I go and I put my head. I don't touch them because I'm not allowed to touch my children without permission, which is fine. You shouldn't touch anybody without permission. But they're like, don't touch me. Anyway, I get really close and I go, I'm plugging you in. And then they laugh and then their energy pops up a little bit. I feel like you need to be plugged in, Alan. I'm plugging you in. I just go focus, focus, focus, focus.

[0:46] Alan Seales: Hey folks. Welcome to Was It Chance, the podcast about focusing, plugging in, and embracing opportunity about taking intentional risks for your creative life. I'm Heather Vickery.

[1:01] Alan Seales: And I'm figuring out how to plug in. I'm Alan Seales. Heather and I started off as two perfect strangers. The listener gets to listen to the physical. They get to listen and talk to people who put themselves on risky paths to creative success.

[1:19] Heather Vickery: You like how I switched that up?

[1:20] Alan Seales: You need a nap.

[1:22] Heather Vickery: I do need a nap.

[1:23] Alan Seales: Yeah. But we're not gonna do that for our awesome guest today.

[1:26] Heather Vickery: You're gonna pump it up, baby. Pump it up like pump you up.

[1:31] Alan Seales: No, that was SNL, right? Wasn't that, uh, yeah.

[1:34] Heather Vickery: Hans and Franz.

[1:34] Alan Seales: Hans and Franz, pump you up.

[1:38] Heather Vickery: That's right. That's right. I love it. I love it. I love it. Quick. Oh, ask her the shoop question.

[1:45] Alan Seales: Oh, okay. Okay. Secret guest who we haven't introduced yet. What song lyric comes to mind after you hear the word shoop?

[1:54] Alexandra Beller: Uh, shoop. Shoop it.

[1:56] Alan Seales: Yeah. I feel like that's the correct answer.

[1:59] Heather Vickery: Yeah. We, uh, we, this is a back-to-back interview day, which we don't do very often, but we interviewed, uh, Jennifer Shoop, who's an author, and that episode has already come out by the time they're listening to this one. Uh, and her last name is Shoop, and we had a whole conversation about what song that inspires. Because there are options, actually.

[2:11] Alexandra Beller: No, there aren't.

[2:20] Heather Vickery: You are good, Gen Xer.

[2:22] Alan Seales: I agree. If it's not Salt-N-Pepa, it doesn't count.

[2:25] Heather Vickery: Yeah. That's right. That is right. Well, so in the last 30 minutes, since I've last spoken to you, what did you do?

[2:32] Alan Seales: I know. The banter feels a little bit more of a stretch when we just spent two hours talking.

[2:37] Heather Vickery: No. I got some goldfish. I ate goldfish.

[2:41] Alan Seales: You got, you ate food. That's good.

[2:43] Heather Vickery: We're gonna have to air these episodes back to back so that people understand the banter.

[2:47] Alan Seales: I can do an editor's note at the end of the last one and be like, we referenced this.

[2:52] Heather Vickery: It's the beginning of next, so make sure you listen to him back to back.

[2:55] Alan Seales: All of Alan's snacking.

[2:57] Heather Vickery: Yeah. Well, I'm not snacking anymore. I'm good. All I got is my fought.

[3:01] Alan Seales: You haven't eaten yet?

[3:02] Heather Vickery: Not a word.

[3:03] Alan Seales: Not a, not a word.

[3:04] Heather Vickery: Not a word.

[3:04] Heather Vickery: I haven't eaten a word or a bite. I actually have eaten several words. Words, words. I posted two blog posts.

[3:06] Alan Seales: You haven't eaten a word?

[3:09] Alan Seales: So yeah. Like in the last 30 minutes you did?

[3:11] Heather Vickery: No, since I got up and started my date today.

[3:14] Alan Seales: Oh, about, uh, joy.

[3:18] Heather Vickery: What are you doing? It's fascinating. Being a joy warrior and I have programs all about joy. Like, right. So as a profession, I'm a transformation coach. And I help people go from pressure-filled lives to pleasurable ones with more ease.

[3:29] Alan Seales: But why? Why are you, why? Why do you want to? Why does it matter?

[3:32] Heather Vickery: Well, because you want to feel good. You want to feel good in your life. You want to be more joyful.

[3:36] Alan Seales: Sure.

[3:36] Heather Vickery: And it's shocking to me that I have literally like two straight months' worth of content about how joy is a skill. Like the best skill you've got to.

[3:45] Alan Seales: Oh, yeah. I mean, like interpreting situations, reacting to situations is something you can practice.

[3:55] Heather Vickery: Yeah. And so, like being joyful about things, of course, along the same lines is something.

[3:59] Alan Seales: Yeah, absolutely. And getting to do this with you makes me feel joy.

[4:03] Heather Vickery: Yeah, it is right. I love, I am joyed too. Well. Whoop. I heard a whoop.

[4:08] Alan Seales: Hoodet. Let's see. So I think. Do you guys want to know what my mom called about?

[4:14] Heather Vickery: What?

[4:15] Alan Seales: At the end of the last episode.

[4:16] Heather Vickery: Oh, right. My mom broke through my do not disturb.

[4:19] Alan Seales: No, there's a little, there's a little family drama. I shouldn't get into it, but she called to share family drama.

[4:25] Heather Vickery: Spill that tea.

[4:26] Alan Seales: I can't spill the tea. What if somebody listens? Anyway, teenagers and college kids that aren't mine for a chance for a change, which is nice.

[4:34] Heather Vickery: What's it just? Um a little drama filled. My mom loves to call with the drama.

[4:39] Alan Seales: That's the worst when it's other people's kids.

[4:42] Heather Vickery: No, I'm fucking glad it's not my kids this time. Jesus.

[4:45] Alan Seales: Well, now because like I don't know. Maybe as me as like a fixer and somebody who was like, Oh, I'm gonna go and do stuff about that problem, like having other people's kids. I'm like, I can't do anything.

[4:55] Heather Vickery: Okay, well, so this is interesting as a fixer. You're what if it's not your job to fix everything?

[5:02] Alan Seales: What does not compute, huh?

[5:07] Heather Vickery: What if it's not your job?

[5:08] Alan Seales: I actually just did a blog post in a live show about that. Like it's deciding that you don't have to be responsible for everything all the time.

[5:18] Heather Vickery: You know what that leads to? More joy.

[5:22] Alan Seales: Yeah, yeah.

[5:24] Heather Vickery: I don't, I used to be able to get excited about the drama. And those of you who love a good cat talk and gossip talk, I feel you, but that was a drain on me emotionally. And so I'm no longer fun for my mom to call with the drama because I'm always like, I don't really want to talk shit about people. I don't really, I that's not fun for me. How about we not worry about what everybody's doing all the time?

[5:49] Alan Seales: So it was so important that she called multiple times enough to break through your do not disturb when it actually had nothing to do with anything you had to deal with.

[5:58] Heather Vickery: Oh, that's correct. Yeah, she just wanted to tell me about this situation and can you believe? Can you believe that happened? I was like, actually, yes.

[6:08] Alan Seales: Wow. Wow.

[6:09] Heather Vickery: Anyway. Anyway. Alan.

[6:11] Alan Seales: Yeah.

[6:12] Heather Vickery: Who's joining us today?

[6:14] Alan Seales: We have the wonderfully patient.

[6:18] Heather Vickery: Very patient.

[6:19] Alan Seales: She's been patient, but she's got good music taste. Alexandra Beller. She's choreographed at Lincoln Center here in New York City. She's taught at Princeton and spent seven years performing with one of the most celebrated dance companies in the world. But what she will tell you is that none of that was the real work.

[6:33] Heather Vickery: What?

[6:38] Alan Seales: The real work is learning to listen to your body, your instincts, your creative signals most of us have been trained to ignore.

[6:45] Heather Vickery: Wow, I sense a theme here.

[6:47] Alan Seales: She's a choreographer, a somatic guide, and the kind of teacher who would genuinely change how you think about risk. Alexandra Beller, thanks for waiting and welcome to Was It Chance.

[6:57] Alexandra Beller: Thank you. I thought you have thoughts about the gossip chain. When you think about what thinking about what you do, and I love what you do, and it's very in line with what I do. Except we do it for different audiences. What are your thoughts on the gossip chain and on caring about everybody else's business?

[7:17] Alexandra Beller: Well, uh in general, in the aggregate, I feel like it's fairly useless. Um, you know, I do think occasionally like the vent is real. Sure. And um, you know, sometimes like I will admit that my partner and I watch some reality TV.

[7:40] Heather Vickery: Hey, I'm down with that. No judgment on that.

[7:43] Alexandra Beller: You know, often the way we do it is like I'm holding the remote and I'm constantly just pausing and pausing and pausing and going, you know what she's really trying to say, I think. And you know, like that was so passive aggressive because you know what she wants is a compliment, and she's da-da-da-da, you know. So we're like analyzing their behavior with each other.

[8:01] Heather Vickery: And so I do think like there's some version of talking about things that are not about you that can be useful for you to sort sort of contextualize and orient like what you do.

[8:12] Alexandra Beller: Yeah, but that's, you know, not what gossip usually is.

[8:16] Heather Vickery: No, I agree with that, and it's a way to relate or to see yourself from a different perspective or to have an unexpected conversation.

[8:22] Alexandra Beller: Yeah, I agree with that. But it sounds like the way you handled it, which is just not giving it oxygen, which is the way I'm trying to handle the patriarchy now.

[8:30] Heather Vickery: Oh my god.

[8:32] Alexandra Beller: Is really the way people that deeply I feel that so deeply. You know, I think like we're coming out of this pendular swing where we were trying to like break down the things that we didn't like, which is really just using, you know, the master's tools.

[8:45] Heather Vickery: Exactly.

[8:47] Alexandra Beller: And instead, this idea of just ignoring them and not giving them oxygen and not responding to them.

[8:54] Heather Vickery: I wish the press would pick up what you're putting down.

[8:59] Alexandra Beller: I wish the press would smell what you're stepping in.

[9:03] Heather Vickery: Yeah, I oh, I like, I like all of that. Um and also I'm gonna give you this idea and I expect you to run with it. Um start a new podcast called Reality Therapy, where you just break down all of it's a rewatch podcast.

[9:18] Alexandra Beller: I know a guy who can help you produce it.

[9:22] Heather Vickery: It's a rewatch podcast where you go through all the popular reality shows and be like, this is what they should have done, slash could have done slash really meant.

[9:31] Alexandra Beller: Mm-hmm.

[9:31] Heather Vickery: I oh I have a fantasy about them actually like bringing a really good therapist onto like Love Island or Love is Blind or something, you know, where they're really like a really high quality, nuanced therapist.

[9:46] Alexandra Beller: Esther Perel.

[9:47] Heather Vickery: Calling yeah, and calling people out on their shit.

[9:49] Alexandra Beller: Yeah.

[9:50] Heather Vickery: Can you imagine?

[9:53] Alexandra Beller: Love is blind with Esther Perel.

[9:55] Heather Vickery: Yeah, Babarmate, Esther Burrell, like, yeah. I want, I want somebody to like high level.

[10:03] Alexandra Beller: I'm not high level. Only in my own.

[10:04] Heather Vickery: What about Heather and Alexandra?

[10:08] Alexandra Beller: That's we could do it.

[10:09] Heather Vickery: Right. Uh we are super aligned. I want to know all about what led you to the choreography work, but before we get there, I'm gonna dump the gun, which is apparently my theme for the day. Um, I want to know about your somatic work and how you got into that and when you realized it made a difference because I am just starting my somatic certification.

[10:34] Alexandra Beller: But I've been doing somatic work for several years. And now I want to teach it, and I believe if I want to teach it, then I need to be certified in it.

[10:41] Heather Vickery: So yeah.

[10:43] Alexandra Beller: Yeah, I mean, I would say that it's got a lot of roots in childhood, to be honest. And I spent a lot of my childhood on my own. So I had a lot of time with myself. And then I was, I think, naturally quite a high feeling kid. Um, but didn't have the thing that a lot of high feeling kids have is like resonance with other people and like feedback loops. And there was, you know, then it becomes something, and either, you know, I'm sometimes it's terrible because it gets shamed or, you know, um curtailed. Mine didn't get any airtime in a way. So I just spent a lot of time in my own bubble with a lot of feeling.

[11:31] Alexandra Beller: And so it was a lot of interoception and self-awareness and a lot of just traffic inside me. Um, I also have a neurodiverse brain, um, which I didn't know until I was in my 40s. Um, so I think all of those things together, and then I dedicated my life to movement and sensation in the body and bodily expression. And so just the combination of like all of this inner life and like high high sensation inside my body. Um, and then movement as a practice, that just became a Mobius band, alumnuscate a flow pattern for somatics.

[12:18] Heather Vickery: A Mobius band for I know exactly what you mean.

[12:24] Alexandra Beller: Yeah. Where the inner becomes the outer, right? So a Mobius band, which is like a, you know, three-dimensional infinity sign. If you have your hand on the outside of it without taking your finger off, you continue to trace it at some point you'll be on the inside of it without changing where your finger is at some point, you'll be on the outside of it again. So I use that as a metaphor for how like the inner and outer form what we call in law on alumnus gate.

[12:51] Heather Vickery: I love that.

[13:05] Alexandra Beller: Why don't you describe what you mean when you say somatic? Somatic is the conversation happening between your mind and your body and the attunement and free flow of that conversation.

[13:17] Alexandra Beller: More often than not, because we are so conditioned to privilege and valorize thought over feeling, sensing, or intuiting, the body does not get equal airtime, and so it also does not receive equal awareness from us. What we're aware of are our thoughts, which is what your mom's calling you about.

[13:44] Alan Seales: Correct.

[13:45] Alexandra Beller: And I am aware that it makes me feel tense inside when I listen.

[13:49] Alan Seales: Well, I'd be curious what feelings were prompting your mom to feel like she wanted to share that, you know, jealousy or insecurity or a fear or anger or frustration or helplessness, or like what's making you want to share this? What what's what's behind that?

[14:04] Alexandra Beller: And those feelings are what I'm really interested in. You know, like the thoughts that surround it, and I actually just got off a call with a client where this was like the main topic.

[14:16] Alexandra Beller: I kept trying to pull feeling, and there kept being a responsive story. And I was like, totally, totally agree with the story. What else? Where's that? What's that feeling? And where do you feel it in your mind? Why is that story important?

[14:35] Alan Seales: Right.

[14:35] Alexandra Beller: The story's true. Totally. I agree with you. Why do you have to tell me that story? Yeah, what what's important? Who's trying to tell me something else by telling me that story?

[14:44] Alexandra Beller: Who wants me to hear something that's not about the facts of the story? Somebody's trying to tell me something.

[14:52] Alan Seales: So when you push it back like that, hold the mirror up, is it normally received well or is it like, oh, not me?

[15:00] Alexandra Beller: You know, it depends on who I'm with and how big the feelings are. I definitely have a couple clients with whom I've got like a very, you know, some people would probably categorize as more of a woo-woo, but like very deep, like energetic connection and bond.

[15:21] Alexandra Beller: And I can sometimes feel things that are happening in another body in my body. And so sometimes what I do with clients where we have a lot of trust built up and a lot of, you know, kind of capital of connection, is I will talk from the place that I'm I will share the feelings that I'm feeling in my body that I think are resonating from their body.

[15:52] Alexandra Beller: And say something like, no, it feels like maybe I would if it were me, maybe I would feel like, and I'll let maybe a younger part talk as if it's from them. And I'm not saying like I think this is what you're feeling, but you know, I'd say, wow, I think it would have been really that would have really hurt my feelings.

[16:13] Alexandra Beller: And I think I would have, you know, wanted to say, like, I don't understand why you're talking to me, you know, and I will talk from the place that I think is trying to be heard, but it's not quite finding an outlet from their body, and I'll say, you know, could I could I pressure valve that from my body?

[16:32] Alexandra Beller: And almost invariably when they hear it out in the room with real feeling, that part feels quite heard, and there's usually a deep response to that.

[16:48] Alan Seales: I 100% agree. And you better phrased what I've been doing my entire podcast career with saying with telling my own version of the vulnerable story I want to hear from them.

[17:04] Alexandra Beller: How often though is that lead and I and I love it too. I'm just gonna play devil's advocate. Is it leading the witness?

[17:10] Alexandra Beller: So through I do parts work and this was a challenge for me. Also, separate certification. But when I was getting ICF in international coaching federation certified, they're like, you just have to guide them to come out with their own answers.

[17:26] Alexandra Beller: You can't give them the answers. Except I also like you, Alexandra, I also often I know the answer. Like I really know it and I feel it. And I'm gonna be like, but I just want to tell you what's wrong.

[17:37] Alexandra Beller: Well, and you know, I think I am quite careful not to phrase it as like, I think what's happening is this, or I think you're feeling that. I you know, I always frame it as like, yeah, I I wanna I don't know. If it were me, I think I might feel like, and because I'm not speaking usually from an adult voice, I'm letting like a kid voice come out, and I'm just saying this is how I would feel, and I'm letting one of my younger parts actually do the talking, like, and they are actually doing the talking.

[18:08] Alan Seales: Yeah, right.

[18:09] Alexandra Beller: It's like one of my younger parts is like hearing one of their younger parts, I think, and is like, oh, I think I wouldn't like that. And I, you know, I'm letting an eight-year-old do the narrating for me.

[18:25] Alexandra Beller: But when they hear it said out loud, I think some of that one of their parts inside is like, yeah, that's it. That's what that's it. Huh. That's it.

[18:36] Alan Seales: And then sometimes we can have a conversation that starts from that place.

[18:40] Alexandra Beller: We're gonna take a quick break. Stay tuned for more of the episode.

[18:45] Alan Seales: And now we're back.

[18:47] Alan Seales: So obviously you've learned a lot about yourself and your communication and your therapy style now as a seasoned individual. As a younger person, did you originally just go down the path of dancing? Is that originally you just what you wanted to do?

[19:05] Alexandra Beller: Oh yeah. I mean, when I was I went to college in order to just pull my technique together so that I could come back to New York and dance for Madonna and Paula Abdul and Janet Jackson. Like that's all I wanted to do. A hundred percent.

[19:20] Alexandra Beller: Then I got went to college and got weird, you know. You know, as a woke people are wont to do, us woke over educated folks. But yes, I wanted to dance, and I'm not gonna say just, but yes, I wanted to dance.

[19:34] Alexandra Beller: I was lucky enough to get into this amazing dance company that I traveled the world with for seven years, and so I got to perform a ton and got to dance a ton and it was amazing.

[19:48] Alexandra Beller: And then I also felt like something else wanted to happen that wasn't about somebody else's language, somebody else's vocabulary, using somebody else's, you know, I'm gonna say words in air quotes, movement words, right?

[20:00] Alexandra Beller: Language. Sometimes words, words, text. I was like, oh, I got something I need to say too. So that's when choreography started to come in for me.

[20:10] Alexandra Beller: And I left the company for a whole web of reasons, but one of them was I really felt like I had something to say that was my own that wasn't only about my interpretation of somebody else's idea, but like I had an idea, and I noticed myself in rehearsals being like, oh, we could nope. That's not my job now. Stay in your life.

[20:33] Alexandra Beller: Well, we should nope, nope, nope. Okay, you need to get into a room by yourself. So that's when choreography really came in, and it was one of the factors for me wanting to leave the company.

[20:44] Alexandra Beller: And I was also almost 30, and I had never really I hadn't had a real romantic love relationship since college because touring was such a challenging thing, and I'm like an introvert and a deep water person, and just takes me time to really build those connections, and I just was never home long enough to feel like I got flow with anybody.

[21:08] Alexandra Beller: And I was really ready for that moment where like your work happens best in resonant relationship, romantic sexual relationship, you know, not just not friendship and I really wanted that so that was one of the reasons I left.

[21:08] Alexandra Beller: I was also, yeah, I just really wanted to create myself.

[21:08] Alan Seales: What does that mean though? Dive into that create yourself. I love that term though.

[21:08] Alexandra Beller: Being an interpreter of somebody else's brilliance is amazing and it's a gift, but it also requires that you, you know, silo maybe exile, but put away parts of yourself, voices that you have, explorations that you want to have because you're prioritizing somebody else's vision.

[21:08] Alexandra Beller: And it's beautiful and it's a gift to do it and I'm super happy I did it and I was ready to have that feedback be about myself.

[22:18] Alan Seales: So then I'm trying to think I'm putting the math together here. So college you did you went out touring for seven years. So it's like right at the end of your 20s early 30s right like you're that you said all this happen.

[22:29] Alexandra Beller: I got into that company when I was 23 and I left just before my 30th birthday.

[22:35] Alan Seales: Right. So what I'm getting at is I you know thinking back I'm 45 now so thinking back on my multiple decades that 30 30 is exactly when I was like, okay, I went out and did a bunch of shit that I know I didn't like now in my 20s.

[22:51] Alan Seales: So now I gotta narrow it down. And in my 30s, we're gonna find out what I really start to like and focus on that and dig dig into that and become, you know, more, I guess, reliable and responsive, is that the right word?

[23:07] Alexandra Beller: More you?

[23:08] Alan Seales: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[23:09] Alexandra Beller: Well, yeah, you said create yourself. I'm gonna think about that all day long.

[23:14] Alan Seales: What does it mean to create ourselves?

[23:17] Alexandra Beller: That's what you blog post tomorrow.

[23:19] Alan Seales: It very well could be Monday's blog post.

[23:21] Alexandra Beller: Yeah.

[23:21] Alan Seales: I mean, I'll give you credit, Alexandra. Don't worry.

[23:24] Alexandra Beller: This concept of and I and do you think I know what I think. Do you think we're sort of always creating ourselves?

[23:33] Alexandra Beller: I think we're always becoming.

[23:34] Alan Seales: Yeah.

[23:35] Alexandra Beller: I think creation is an intentional act.

[23:39] Alexandra Beller: And so for me that feels different. For sure, we're always becoming.

[23:45] Alexandra Beller: And allowing the world to move and shape and change us and allowing ourselves to not only tolerate but catalyze and leverage the unknown.

[24:06] Alexandra Beller: But doing it consciously, intentionally with craft artfully, that feels like a different thing to me.

[24:15] Alan Seales: Okay. I can get behind that.

[24:17] Alan Seales: Well, what is what is that for you, like your version of craft? Because it's it's dancing, it's creating, but then like why add in the somatic side and the and you know, all of the for lack of a better term, we'll say the woo-woo.

[24:30] Alexandra Beller: I put in air quotes here, right?

[24:32] Alexandra Beller: Um, what is creating for me? Is that the question?

[24:38] Alan Seales: What is it?

[24:39] Alexandra Beller: What is creating yourself mean to you?

[24:41] Alexandra Beller: Creating yourself. Listening. Listening deeper, tolerating uncertainty, staying with the moment, resisting too much fantasy or the side of goal setting that feels like it's not tolerating the unknown.

[25:07] Alexandra Beller: Dragging the past too close to me without being able, you know, like not creating enough distance between myself and the past that I can't have a conversation and a relationship with it because it's on top of me and directing me.

[25:26] Alan Seales: Relationship with the past.

[25:28] Alexandra Beller: Yeah. I mean, that's in line with the NLP work that I do, right? Is gaining that awareness, which I think you're totally on point, starts by recognizing something you're feeling somatically, and then what is that?

[25:43] Alexandra Beller: I need to understand that. So that's you're listening, right? And then through the subconscious reprogramming work, once we've identified it, I help people release it.

[25:53] Alexandra Beller: And I think you do that also in a different way. And that's what I love about getting to talk to people like you. There are a lot of ways.

[26:03] Heather Vickery: There are a lot of ways to tackle all of this. So you talk about choreography as a way of listening and dance as a way of listening. And I kind of would love to have you unpack that. And you said, and I'm not gonna quote it exactly, but I just it was another mic drop for me. Um, goal setting.

[26:24] Alexandra Beller: Say it again.

[26:24] Heather Vickery: Do you remember?

[26:25] Alexandra Beller: Oh, I can't say it again.

[26:26] Heather Vickery: You can't say it again.

[26:26] Alexandra Beller: I don't know.

[26:27] Heather Vickery: You channeled it.

[26:27] Alexandra Beller: I literally watched him channel it. Go goal setting as a way that prevents you from tolerating the unknown.

[26:36] Heather Vickery: That's it.

[26:37] Alexandra Beller: Yeah, goal setting, yes. I have a real romantic relationship with ambiguity, the unknown, uncertainty. I have a romantic relationship with. And it is totally understandable that a lot of people do not find it a romantic relationship and, you know, do a lot of work to build protections against because it is, you know, essentially tolerating mortality. Like the only thing that we know for sure is we're gonna die.

[27:20] Alexandra Beller: And everything else, I don't know. I don't know. I know things right this moment, but I don't know things about the future.

[27:27] Heather Vickery: I'm with you. I've never heard of it phrased that way as a romantic relationship, but I have a very intimate one. So same, um, with the willingness to surrender how and trusting the processes, and Alan and I, I've been supporting him on that space because he, uh, and most people, they have a goal, they have a plan, they have a vision, and they need to know exactly how they're gonna achieve it. And it's very difficult, I would say near on impossible to know that.

[27:56] Alexandra Beller: And so my work is in, I don't know, Alan. Are you still chanting your mantra that I gave you?

[28:02] Alan Seales: Which is what if everything works out perfectly?

[28:04] Alexandra Beller: When I get stressed.

[28:06] Alan Seales: Uh, and when I start to feel that bubbling up, I do say that now. Yeah, I really do.

[28:11] Alexandra Beller: So it's a similar concept, right? And that I really love that idea of a scheduled to-do list or goal list or whatever can often keep us from being creative.

[28:25] Alan Seales: Yeah.

[28:26] Alexandra Beller: Yeah. That's interesting. Sometimes we put creation on that list and it keeps us from being creative in the deeper way that creation is a real act of this conversation with the unknown, right? Invention is saying, I don't know. I don't know. Let's see. And I think that like we've really conflated, and of course, you know, it's partly like capitalism and patriarchy and grind culture and all of that, but we've really conflated goal with drive.

[28:57] Alexandra Beller: Because I've got a ton of drive, and I'm moving a hundred percent. But I don't really have goals. Like I have a book coming out this fall, and it's my first book, and I feel like it's got a ton of potential to have an impact. And sometimes people ask me, like, well, what are you hoping for? Where do you want to do? I have no idea. How could I know that? I don't know.

[29:19] Alexandra Beller: At the same time, I'm having tons of conversations with people about like, can I come read? Can I come to a workshop? I'd love to share this with you. Like I want to make things happen, but I don't know what the things are. I could, how could I know that? But that doesn't mean I don't have drive or I'm not trying to make movement.

[29:39] Heather Vickery: So you're just open to the chance that's gonna lead you to the next thing that feels good.

[29:44] Alexandra Beller: Yeah. And I think sometimes people mistake that for ambivalence or not caring or not doing or not trying. And I think they're really totally separate because directionality and drive are totally different, right? If you're in a vehicle, you have 360 degrees of possibility around you where you could go. How fast you go, how hard you push, whatever, that's a totally separate thing of where you point yourself.

[30:16] Heather Vickery: That's really interesting. Okay, okay, okay. So then dive into your book. Why write the book? Like, and I mean, you've got choreography as your language, as your words. Why use words as your words?

[30:34] Alexandra Beller: I mean, shockingly, you can't say everything that you want to say with the body. Um, yeah, I think the deepest things you say, you do say with the body. I think the most closest to the bone things you say, I think you do say with the body. And I think words are a way of translating that stuff, but it does require translation sometimes. Particularly because most people are not actually skilled because we cut them off from it at reading the body for truth, right? It gets in there, some part of them is registering it.

[31:10] Alexandra Beller: But in that real like, I gotcha, I see, okay, that made a difference to me. I understood that. Most people are not able to read the body like that. That's why we have the whole field that I practice, which is movement analysis. Yeah. Um, right, nonverbal communication, movement analysis. These are fields because this is not something that humans really know how to do in a conscious way.

[31:35] Alexandra Beller: Um, they would if we didn't value outside metrics from when the baby before the baby comes out, we're valuing outside metrics. We're really not asking people to first describe in detail what they notice, what they feel, what the cycle is, what's the phrasing of those feelings, what affects it, what doesn't affect it, what have they tried? You know, like we're not asking nearly enough of those questions. We're like, okay, I measured your fundus and you're this weight, and you're this temperature and you're this size, and you're, you know, the ultrasound says this, and those are all valuable. I'm not saying we should get rid of any of our equipment, but we've so overvalued those things that we don't raise children to value their inner metrics.

[32:18] Alexandra Beller: And so it crashes intuition as a modality. And do you know as the sixth sense? Do you think that was actually something I wanted to ask you about? Was this concept of living in the unknown? And you've been known to say that younger artists struggle with it. Is that a new problem?

[32:36] Alexandra Beller: Um, that's a good question. Um, I when I look at the field of art, dance and theater in particular, they're definitely, you know, there was this like long period of classicism, modernism, was a lot of um like fundamental frameworks and conservative, like grid-like philosophy. Um, but artists at this at the heart of it are always, I think, revolutionaries.

[33:09] Alexandra Beller: But then, you know, like the revolution becomes codified, and then people stay in that codification, and you need new revolutionaries, right? So that's why we have all these cycles of like modernism, post-modernism, post post-modernism experimentation, you know. And I do feel like it was easier to do that 40 years ago than it is now. And I don't know why I haven't analyzed it. I'm sure somebody's written a book on it.

[33:35] Alexandra Beller: And of course, like the access to everything that we have now, it changes it. The visibility that we have now changes the risk taking. Um, the amount of um critique and commentary and opinion that gets loaded weighed on an artist from the outside world through this, you know, accessibility, internet, social media, et cetera, is just a really different landscape to grow up in as an artist.

[34:08] Alexandra Beller: And um, it again valorizes outside metrics. You got your likes, you got your thing, you know. And of course, we used to use certain things, ticket sales, whatever. But I think a lot of it was still up to us as artists. Like, this is how I feel about the piece. I remember very well sitting in the theater of like a major premiere that I was doing of my own work, and it was dress rehearsal, and I was like the lights had just gone out at the end of the dress rehearsal.

[34:38] Alexandra Beller: That night was gonna be the first show. And I sat there in the dark and I was like, yeah, yeah, that was what I was trying to make. The New York Times hated it, they trashed it, you know, audience had positive and negative feelings. And of course, that stuff affected me, but I do remember that feeling of sitting there going, well, I don't know, whatever happens, that was what I was trying to make.

[35:02] Alexandra Beller: And I feel like the ability to have that kind of feeling in your body has diminished with all of this visibility and outside opinions and metrics and comments and likes. And you know, and you're just like, was it good? Was it any good? Was that what I was trying to make? Somebody tell me. And yeah, people do that. Somebody give me the information. We've outsourced almost everything.

[35:27] Alexandra Beller: So this was a long road back around to the question, which is why did I write this book? Is I would really love to participate in supporting artists and reclaiming some of that um trust, self-trust.

[35:44] Heather Vickery: And what tell what is the name of the book?

[35:47] Alexandra Beller: The Anatomy of Art.

[35:48] Heather Vickery: Okay. Because my notes tell me that you have two books that you're working on.

[35:52] Alexandra Beller: So I wasn't I do.

[35:54] Alexandra Beller: Okay. Um, yeah. So this one is my book, The Anatomy of Art. It really was about a 10-year process, off and on. But um, the last like two and a half years have been really hardcore. And then I co-authored another book called The Embodied Conductor, which is for music conductors about embodiment and somatics and being able to feel themselves as they conduct music.

[36:16] Heather Vickery: I love that, and I actually just was really funny. I'm an avid reader, and just the last two days I read a book of it was a rom-com, but it was totally this was this was the core story called Not Another Love Song, and it follows um two musicians, one is a violinist and one is a cello player, and they're the whole story is around how we perform better when we're not trying to show off when we're not trying to perform to a certain person, but we're just feeling this music or this art or this experience.

[36:54] Heather Vickery: It's really funny. It was actually a great book. I did not have, I thought it would be a fine book, but I really loved it. And the way that the that they used music and the feeling of music to tell the story, I thought was really clever. So I love that you're doing that.

[37:12] Alexandra Beller: Yeah. Um, I started working with composer conductors a few years ago. Um, and I was um quite surprised at how analytical and logical their framework often is, and that so much of what they work on is um theoretical, and that I do think all of them deeply crave this um, you know, sensual intimate relationship with music and meaning and feeling.

[37:49] Alexandra Beller: Um, and it feels far away for them sometimes, like their body, which was startling to me really to hear from them that they're like, yeah, I don't really like think about my body all that much. And like you're only doing something physical, like your entire communication is physical. You're not you're not feeling your body or spate the space around you or your breath or your weight. You're not feeling any of those things.

[38:16] Alexandra Beller: And they're like, no, I'm looking at the score and I'm looking at the musicians and I'm thinking. And I'm like, oh baby.

[38:23] Heather Vickery: What do you think about that, Alan? Because I can see your face. I can see the your gears clicking.

[38:30] Alan Seales: As a performer from that space, it doesn't you're you're right. Like there's a disconnect between using your whole body to play music or to express yourself that way. And I guess people sometimes people who do it, like they want to get to the next level, they want to get that edge, and they don't think about their body, and I think that's exactly where that limitation is. Because when you watch a world-class anything, there, their whole bodies moving around, and they're playing piano and their heads just moving all over the place, and like you, a violinist is like swaying all over the place, like they can't help it.

[39:10] Alexandra Beller: It's part of it, like that movement from your toes comes up into your fingers and plays the instrument.

[39:16] Alexandra Beller: It's actually funny, it's making me remember. So when I met you in Boston to see when playwrights kill, um, you're leading and I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember her name.

[39:25] Heather Vickery: You're leading, yes, Beth.

[39:28] Alexandra Beller: Thank you, Beth. Um, there was a moment, and it was a really funny scene, but she either forgot her line or flubbed her line. I don't know what it was. And I commented later, I was like, the way she handled that made the show even better.

[39:39] Heather Vickery: Oh, yeah.

[39:40] Alexandra Beller: But what you're describing, so what she did, she's she saw it, you could see in her face, like there's something was wrong. Um, but her character was so eccentric that it didn't matter. And she turned around, and as she was trying to figure out what she was doing, she started like shaking her arms and like shaking her body, and I think that's exactly what she was doing. She's like, Okay, okay, let's let me reconnect with my body on this moment. And it was really cool to see that in person, and I think that's what makes live art so special. And that's what makes the professionals the professional professionals. It's how you recover from mistakes because everyone's gonna make mistakes.

[40:15] Heather Vickery: Yeah.

[40:15] Alexandra Beller: Well, and talk about uh like romantic, intimate relationship with the unknown.

[40:19] Heather Vickery: Right.

[40:20] Alexandra Beller: She was like, let's go for it. Like, uh especially in comedy, comedy is so hard. Comedy is the hardest, I think one of the hardest types of performances, and it's math, and you have to figure out what that math is. So, you know, a setup plus joke equals punchline, you know, that's math, but what are the variables, right? And uh yeah, to see that in real life, I totally get that.

[40:45] Heather Vickery: But we're gonna take a quick break. Stay tuned for more of the episode.

[40:49] Alexandra Beller: And now we're back. Anyway, so um, along all these lines, you've done many different things, and it sounds like you know, you've always chosen uh where you want to go and what you want to do next and added on and added these skill sets, which is wonderful. But ultimately, what is your relationship with failure?

[41:07] Alexandra Beller: And I might just like go back one step and say, I don't know that I actually have chosen what I want to do next. I've often found myself walking on the path of like, oh, I think this is what's interesting to me, or it seems like this is what's starting to become available to me or happen. Um, I mean, failure is like species level creativity, like uh the way our you know, neurons work, like you, you know, a synapse fires something and it's not landing somewhere that creates an effect that we want, so we fire it somewhere else, and it's not you know, like a baby's trying to learn how to grasp a pen or a toy or something, and they're like, that doesn't work, that doesn't work. Each one of those tries is a new try at a synapse, and then they find one and it's like, oh, that they try it again, oh that okay, boom, boom, boom, okay, now that's how I hold a pen. And then they don't have to think about it because it physically changes your brain. But the failure is the model for how we learn and grow and create.

[42:13] Alexandra Beller: So, you know, I'm not saying like I'm just unequivocally in love with failure. It just feels so good to me all the time. And you know, there's also a difference between what feels like failure and what feels like rejection. And then, you know, what am I categorizing as failure? And is it failure with myself, or I failed somebody else, or I failed to achieve something that I had was a fantasy for me? Like it's a failure is a complicated word. And I might turn it around to ask you to break down like what do you mean by failure?

[42:49] Heather Vickery: Don't throw this at me. This is not fair.

[42:50] Alexandra Beller: No, but I think I the reason that I like that you said that is because we don't define it, because we want our guests to define like that's the point is we want to hear how does this resonate for these wonderful creatives that we've brought onto this show to talk about the intentional risks they take and how does this inform you? And I completely really love the way you said that. First of all, we all know it's the learning process. Almost everybody says that, right? Like, I know, I know we learn from our mistakes and blah, blah, blah. And it's all true. Um, but how does it make you feel? And when you bring in, but well, who am I failing? What am I failing? How much weight or pressure have I put on this particular thing that I now think failed?

Why do I think it failed? But we put that back on you. I love that because we want to hear it from your perspective, and everybody's perspective is different. And that's why we get to ask that question. Alan gets that's Alan's question. Alan gets to ask that question every single episode because every human being has a different response to it. And it's and defines it differently.

[43:57] Alexandra Beller: Yeah. Well, I guess then I would say my definition is um some version of something that I hoped for, whether that was like who I hoped I'd be, how I hoped I'd show up, what I hoped the effect would be, doesn't happen. And that could be like, and certainly plenty of times that hope was outsized or misguided or like built on some uh, you know, aspirational idea that could never have happened for any human being, like nobody has enough space or bandwidth to do the thing I hoped I'd do, which was like be some like idealized version of a mother and you know also do this and also do that, and also and in what amount of hours with what amount of energy was I gonna do that, and also somehow, you know, fix the political landscape and be of service and you know, like, oh, I failed, right?

And I am um, fortunately, unfortunately, whatever, I've got a lot of um, a lot of passion for invention, and I've got a lot of ideas, more ideas than I will ever be able to pursue in a lifetime, even if I could magically fix all the parts of my brain that feel like they don't, you know, service my productivity. I think we both know a lot about that. But even if I could fix that, and even if I were like the absolutely, you know, optimized I don't believe in any of that, right? But like even if somehow magically I were just like my brain were optimized, my body, energy, hormones were optimized towards maximum productivity, I could never do all the fulfill all the ideas because they the ideas give me new ideas, right? I've got three books in my head.

[45:44] Alexandra Beller: So there's built into my life a sense of like you won't you won't get it done. You're not going to get it done. And so there is a kind of texture of failure that I am in conversation with all the time. Like I'm always not doing a thousand things as I'm doing the thing I'm doing. As I'm on this podcast, I'm not doing five things that are in not even the back of my mind, really the front of my mind, talking to me all the time. And I'm failing those things. And um, so I guess my definition is like in some way I had a hope of how I would arrive or what I would do or what would come of it. And that thing didn't happen. And I feel sad about it.

[46:30] Heather Vickery: And that's okay.

[46:33] Alexandra Beller: Yeah.

[46:33] Heather Vickery: Yeah.

[46:37] Alexandra Beller: I let myself sit in the sadness. I think it's really important to sit in all your feelings and work through them.

[46:44] Heather Vickery: Some of them are really stinky to sit in.

[46:47] Alexandra Beller: Yeah.

[46:48] Heather Vickery: Oh, big time.

[46:49] Alexandra Beller: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[46:50] Heather Vickery: I think this is so cool. I think you're really cool. And I love to see how um similar work is so different. And also I do I think, Alexandra, that people like all of us, the three of us in the room, and most of the people we have on the show are part of what's going to heal us collectively if we can run the course. And so much of what you said about embracing the unknown and sort of surrendering the outcome and you being flexible with that is part of it. So thank you for being here. I want to know when is The Anatomy of Art supposed to come out and how can people find it and find you and follow you and connect with you?

[47:28] Alexandra Beller: My website is a pretty robust hub. So AlexandraBellerDances.org is um where you can find a lot of things and classes and ways to contact me and uh a link to the website for my book. The Anatomy of Art comes out through Bloomsbury on September 17th. So um soon-ish, but you know, available now to pre-order. And um there's a lot of excerpts, et cetera, on the website.

[48:00] Heather Vickery: Awesome.

[48:01] Alexandra Beller: Yeah, cool.

[48:02] Heather Vickery: Thank you so much for being here.

[48:04] Alexandra Beller: Yeah, thank you for having me.

[48:05] Heather Vickery: Thank you so much. This has been an awesome chat.

[48:09] Alan Seales: I love what she said at the end. I mean, I joked about throwing back the failure question on me, but like, what does that mean? Right. Everybody's got the perfect definition. And what I really loved was how you defined it for everybody listening. Because I've never sat down to think about it like that before. Like what How did I define it? You were like, uh, you know, we want to know what it means, what everyone on this uh podcast, what everyone's interpretation of it is, what it means to them, how they sit with it, how they how they, you know, basically, because everybody experiences failure differently and can and classifies failure differently. So she was like, well, there, yeah, what do you mean by question?

[48:55] Heather Vickery: Yeah.

[48:55] Alan Seales: Because we don't learn without failing. I mean, I think that's the only reason the question works week after week after week. True. Because it's always unique, it's always a different perspective. And when I'm working with clients and I ask open-ended questions like that, and they say, um, well, what do you mean by that question? And I say, What do you think I mean? Like that's it's important for people to figure out what their own answer is to that instead of kind of like Alexandra said, checking off that box, giving people what they want, performing to a result instead of embodying whatever shows up for you.

[49:30] Heather Vickery: Right.

[49:30] Alan Seales: Yeah. I thought it was a very I really cool conversation. I'm glad people like her are out here doing this work. As an only child, I was really fascinated. If it had been a different show, like we'd been back on the Bray Files, which is my old solo show. I would have dug in on that childhood stuff a little bit more because I get that. And when you don't have anywhere for your thoughts and feelings and and banter to go, and you're you know, you know how we in the car you have the recycle air button.

[50:01] Heather Vickery: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[50:01] Alan Seales: Where you don't get the outside air, you just you're almost like recycling your own stuff. Never so challenging. I've never put that into perspective.

[50:10] Heather Vickery: Yeah, I've always had my brother to like vent to if like mom and dad are being annoying or whoever.

[50:17] Alan Seales: My kids play together when both of when my wife and I don't want to give them attention.

[50:22] Heather Vickery: Yeah, like you've always got something to be an only child, yeah.

[50:24] Alan Seales: You've got to like it was me and my Barbies.

[50:28] Heather Vickery: You and your Barbies.

[50:28] Alan Seales: But seriously, it's why I had to create like whole backstories for them before I could play with them because there had to be an outlet somewhere.

[50:34] Heather Vickery: Yeah, you've told me before that like you created backstories, a whole character arcs for your Barbie.

[50:39] Alan Seales: And then we could play and then we can play. All right. So this Barbie is attending hive and getting on a PhD. It was like they were actors because they'd play a different role every time I wanted to play.

[50:49] Heather Vickery: Oh, I love it.

[50:50] Alan Seales: Same Barbie, different role.

[50:51] Heather Vickery: That's cute.

[50:52] Alan Seales: Yeah.

[50:52] Heather Vickery: That's cute.

[50:53] Alan Seales: Well, hey, Alan. If folks are into this, they love the show. What should they do?

[50:57] Alan Seales: They should leave five stars. Tell a friend. Leave a rating. Leave a review. We like to read them. It makes our little serotonin bursts happen.

[51:04] Heather Vickery: It does.

[51:06] Alan Seales: Uh dopamine. Where can they?

[51:09] Heather Vickery: Mainline dopamine. Um on Instagram, what's a chance podcast? Was it chance podcast at gmail.com. Uh you're on Substack. Um, you've got your book well. Um, all of that is in the show notes. Uh TikTok. Um LinkedIn.

[51:27] Alan Seales: LinkedIn.

[51:27] Heather Vickery: Yeah. We're everywhere, man. You can find us everywhere. Share the episodes with other people, please. It means a lot. We put a lot of love into it. But uh yeah, thanks. Thanks for coming to hang out, folks. You've been listening to Was It Chance, the podcast about embracing opportunity and taking intentional risk for your creative life. I'm Heather Vickery.