Inner moves Alexandra Beller is character-driven BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Since her debut in the Bill T. Jones/ Arnie Zane Company in 1995, Alexandra Beller has turned heads, not just for her powerful and vibrant dancing but for her "plus-size" as a dancer. That American obsession with perfection in body type, especially for women, is the driving force behind a piece called "Diet Coke Can Save Your Life" that will be presented this weekend by the Rhode Island College Dance Company in a program of new dance works by two New York-based choreographers and three local choreographers.

Beller left the Jones/Zane Company in 2001 to devote more time to her own work, which has been appreciated for its strong feminist statements, its insightful emotional content, and its satiric and poignant humor. In a 2002 presentation of several of her dances, Beller’s material ranged from articles in women’s magazines about the duties of a wife to her husband to Chekhov’s two Masha characters to "50 Ways to Find a Mate." But in that same year, she made "Why Things Fall," which grew out of musings on September 11, 2001. And she’s currently working on an evening-length piece, "You Are Here," half of which will be performed in mid-March in New York.

But for the commission in Providence, Beller took her original Diet Coke piece as a model and completely remade it with the seven RIC dancers. She began by asking them to write down five words to describe their bodies, then three words to describe each of those words (for a total of 15), and then three words for each of those 15, for a total of 45 words. Then she asked them to pick eight of those words and find a gesture for each.

"I also had them write a list of everybody that they blamed for anything in their life," Beller explained in a recent phone conversation from her Manhattan apartment. "I had them do this exercise which takes each gesture of blame and turns it into a release-based gesture, so they end up with these release phrases that are all different from each other. Then I interwove them — for example, ‘you learn that tiny chunk of hers’; ‘do that tiny chunk in unison’; ‘you guys wait until she does that.’ And I created a section out of those release phrases. So a lot of the material was generated by the dancers themselves, initiated by me but ultimately created by them."

The sound collage behind the movement in "Diet Coke Can Save Your Life" was put together by Beller and RIC alum Alberto Dennis from tapes they made of late-night TV commercials on female-targeted stations such as Oxygen and Lifetime. Phrases such as "lose 10 pounds in two days," "tighten your abs," and "you, too, can have buns of steel" were "crazy, horrible, awful stuff," in Beller’s words, but also "fabulous text." They added some ambient music from composer Robert Poss, the Miss America theme song (ball gowns made of Diet Coke cans are a highlight of this piece), and a tune by the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

"Basically, I used this collage to dissect and represent how insidious the agenda is," noted Beller. "How they get to you without your permission, really, by the music you listen to or the commercials that are on in between the sections of your program."

As for the movement itself, Beller gravitates toward "task-based movement," such as the two exercises she gave the RIC dancers.

"I like assigning a task of myself or of the performers and to have myself or them accomplish the task," she emphasized. "I find that gets both an evisceral and a realistic sense of movement which incorporates the life of the performer as well as the body into the piece."

In the seven seasons that she toured with Bill T. Jones, she never tired of watching him create and edit his movement — "he’s quite definitely a genius." In the four years that she’s been putting her own dances out to the public, she’s learned firsthand how hard that can be.

"There’s always a point directly in the middle of the work where I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, I have no idea where the piece is going, I have no talent," Beller reflected. "It used to throw me into a tailspin, and now I’ve just embraced it. I say, ‘OK, here comes the dark space,’ and I’ve learned how to actually mine that for a lot of inspiration."

Other perspectives about shaping a dance piece have also evolved for Beller: "I definitely feel less tied to a linear narrative than I used to but much more tied to a linear sense of character. It’s now important to me to have a strong sense of character, but the story can be a little bit more random in terms of time and space and events."

Beller’s "Diet Coke Can Change Your Life" will be joined on the RIC program by a new work by local choreographer Paula Hunter, "A Day Abroad," a response to the December tsunami; hip-hop dances by local choreographer Jackie Henderson, from Newport’s Off the Curb, and by Gabriel "Kwikstep" Dionisio, half of the husband-and-wife (Anita "Rokafella" Garcia) team of New York City’s Kwikstep; and "Shifting Inside Some Other Place," a new piece by RIC professor Melody Ruffin Ward.

The Rhode Island College Dance Company will perform March 3 through 5 at 8 p.m. and on March 6 at 2 p.m. at the Auditorium in Roberts Hall, 600 Mount Pleasant Ave., Providence. Admission is $10. Call (401) 456-8144.