Anatomy of Art: Intuitive Creative Breakthroughs (Part 2) | Alexandra Beller

FOR EPISODE LINKS & MORE INFO VISIT: https://samhorton.co/blog/ep71

***Even though this is part 2 of my conversation with Alexandra Beller- you can listen to both episodes separately and in any order***

What if your body held the key to creative liberation? In Part 2 of our powerful conversation, Alexandra Beller takes us deeper into how movement can become a portal to truth, transformation, and raw, honest art-making.

🌿 LISTEN TO PART 2 IF YOU WANT TO:

1. Discover how disrupting habits can bypass creative blocks and unlock soul-level expression
2. Learn why trusting your physical instincts leads to more authentic and resonant art
3. Explore how movement and art connect us to deeper truths, especially when words fall short

💡 KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Embodied creativity bypasses the mind and unlocks intuitive truth
• Letting go of “good” art opens the door to honest, healing expression
• Your body is a wise guide, especially when words and logic fall short
• Movement can be a spiritual practice that reveals hidden layers of your creative voice
• Trusting yourself in the moment is a radical act of creative empowerment

FOR EPISODE LINKS & MORE INFO VISIT: https://samhorton.co/blog/ep71

🥰 Download your free Guided Ritual: Activate Your Creative Soul Power
Feel like you need a reset button for your soul? This beautiful 15-minute experience blends gentle reflection with intentional creativity to help you reconnect with your inner wisdom and awaken your soul-led spark.

✨ Grab it now at https://samhorton.co/guided-ritual

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and background
• 1:52 Why disrupting creative habits is so important for creative growth
• 6:19 Building the creative risk muscle for expansion
• 7:46 Exploring the creative sweet spot between art as mastery and art as therapy
• 17:13 Finding value in art that is not monetary
• 21:55 How to step into your creative power
• 24:31 Connect with Alexandra Beller

Transcript

YT Part 2

​[00:00:00]

This episode is part two of my powerful conversation with Alexandra Beller. Listen to one or both of these episodes. They both contain gold in their own right. Alexandra Beller is a celebrated choreographer, director and educator with over 25 years of experience in dance theater and the creative process known for her clarity, rigor, and deep care.

Alexandra brings profound insight. into the messy, beautiful journey of art making, and in this episode specifically, we explore how dismantling unconscious habits can expand your creative range. Why surprise and risk are essential for growth, and how reconnecting to your inner metrics is the key [00:01:00] to opening up the world of intuitive soul led creativity.

So I've seen also you,mentioned this concept of dismantling creative habits, why do you think that is so important?

Yeah, and I think I wanna just caveat it by saying habits are also very useful and they're even useful for creativity. So, you know, I. I might eat the same thing every day for lunch and it'll help me write my book because I'm not thinking about what I'm having for lunch. Like that's a habit that I'm using at the service of my creativity.

you might find that you write. you, you do your very best writing at a certain time of the day. So that habit might be something that increases your sense of safety. Mm-hmm. Familiarity and, groundedness. It's when our habits become completely unacknowledged and unexamined that they start to limit our choices.

So, you know, if I have a habit. That [00:02:00] I always start a movement phrase from a certain body part. All my movement phrases are gonna start to look at least initiate from the same place. They're gonna have a similarity to them. If I want to counter that similarity, I'm gonna have to notice. You often begin with a mid limb gesture.

Your elbow or your knee often starts a movement phrase. Why don't you shake it up and try to begin with, not even a limb, but like your tailbone, something completely axial, right, or the crown of your head or something nuanced like the space between your first and second toe and see what happens. So surprise.

Is, we may say necessity is the mother invention. I think surprise is often the mother of invention too. Mm-hmm. So putting ourselves in positions where we are surprised and that creativity kicks into place because of surprise, I think is really useful. If we tend to do something the same way all the time, that becomes the baseline, then we're gonna make it smaller from [00:03:00] there.

So if we. Let's say we have a hundred choices about something like which direction somebody enters from and how big the sphe, et cetera. Right? We have a hundred choices and we habitually use eight of them. So that becomes our palette. The other, the other 92 are gone, so now we have eight. But out of those eight habitual choices, I'm gonna use three of 'em.

Mm-hmm. In this piece. So now I'm only using three out of a hundred choices. And because those other 92 are off my plate, they're not even in my vision. Yeah, so they're really unavailable. Those three choices are gonna start to feel a little dull probably. Yeah. And then suddenly I'm gonna be like, oh, I do the same thing all the time.

I always, my work always looks the same, or, you know, I always write in the same cadence, or I always use the same, uh, you know, ideas for my assignments for my students. I wanna shake things up. How do I do it? Okay. Well, let's look at your habits and let's shake up just one. [00:04:00] And sometimes that is, I'm gonna write in a different room in my house, or I'm going to eat something different for lunch.

Maybe it is that, because doing that is gonna shake up my usual, or maybe it's, you know, something more specific to my creative process. Mm-hmm. But allowing myself to be unconscious of my habits. Narrows and narrows and narrows the container of my choice making. Mm-hmm. Until I really have very few choices available.

Mm-hmm. I get on and off my bicycle with the same leg all the time, and I made a conscious choice, like, oh, I wanna try to shake that up. I wanna try to get on my bicycle with my other leg. Literally fell over in the street. And I'm a decent biker, but I'm like holding my bike with the opposite side. I'm standing on the opposite side.

I'm trying to weight shift to the, you know, I'm gonna say quote unquote, wrong leg. And I, my leverage was off, my physics was off my, the engineering of my body just could not meet the moment. And I was like, wow, [00:05:00] I've done it the same way so often the other choice has. Atrophied completely. Mm. So now I have to practice this new way every day for a month.

I'm not allowed to get on my bike the usual way. See if this can become available to me. Again, that doesn't mean I always have to use the the less comfortable way, but it means I have it available as a choice. But that's intentionally pushing yourself because there is an argument to say also that there's no reason there's no boredom or frustration in getting on the bike the other way.

Do you know what I mean? Just keep doing it how you've been doing it. But then when it comes to the creative process, what I'm getting as you're explaining this, is comes back to risk again. Right? It's, it's. It's building up that risk muscle so that you don't get too comfortable in it, because when you get comfortable within your creative practice, you do get bored and you do get frustrated.

Yeah. because it's, you know, I believe that it's actually a mirror for our personal growth and our spiritual expansion, you know, so. [00:06:00] When we look at creativity that way, that our creative practice is just a mirror for our growth as a human being, then we have to take risks. We have to step into that, you know?

Yeah. otherwise it loses its meaning and its purpose. Yeah. And even though the bike thing might seem trivial, like yeah, you can keep getting. Bike the same way I could, but I literally don't have the option to do it another way. So when I would take my bike from a certain kind of bike stand, I'd have to like wheel it around to face a different direction so that I could get on it on the quote unquote right side.

So there was a frustration then. Yeah. And it limited my options, and I didn't like that feeling of like, well, you can't do it if you want to. Yeah. Like, now, I may choose forever more to get on it, you know, using my left leg as my standing leg. But I wanna know that I can do what I want, when I want to. I want that freedom.

I, I love that, you know, it's a determination in you. I can really feel that. I recently did a podcast episode on, [00:07:00] finding the creative sweet spot. And it's this idea that there's this place that's actually like an elevated place,between. Art mastery and art as therapy. Yeah. So, you know, the concept that we can use art to both heal and nurture ourselves and also stretch and grow and take these risks, right?

So do you believe that kind of creative sweet spot exists for people, you know, where they can be a master and they can also be in this zone where the outcome doesn't really matter? 

 It's so interesting that you bring this up because I just finished on Friday, a one week summer intensive, which I do every year and every year as I'm developing it, I take stock of what's happening, at least around me in my world, uh, and my world.

I mean like this country or this hemisphere, capitalism, patriarchy, et cetera, like bigger than my own life. But like what, what do I feel like people are going [00:08:00] through right now? What do I suspect that people, especially artists might need right now? So this year the theme was authentic bodies in a fractured World.

I think we're all, you know, going through a ton of disruption in our. Shared landscape, around a lot of things, including human rights. And, it is challenging to be authentic and be an artist in the middle of all of this disintegration. and one of the biggest things that happened during this week.

the last part of the day is a choreo lab or a choreographic laboratory. and I give people a lot of autonomy for how they wanna interact with me during that laboratory. And I've got prompts and scores and cues and exercises. I've got my brain and I'm like, look, you can, there's studio space. You can know what you wanna do.

Go and make something. Don't show it. Don't talk to anybody about it. That's your time. You can come to me in the beginning and say, I have no idea what I want. [00:09:00] I wanna be led. Can you be my choreography teacher? Give me an assignment. Come check in on me every half hour and anywhere in between. Right? So people have all different kinds of things that they.

That they want. And people come to me at different points in the laboratory and say, here's my wall, here's where I'm stuck. This is where I'm not feeling it. I need help. And this particular year, a lot of the prompts and suggestions I gave them are things that I might give a private client in more of a therapeutic setting.

Setting. Okay. Okay. So we started this discussion about the mythology that. Something is therapeutic. It's not quote unquote, real art. And what is the difference that we're talking about in this myth? And I do think it's prevalent, this feeling of like, oh, what you're doing is therapeutic. So you're not a real artist, artist, you're just using art for therapy.

Yeah. And I disagree with this. Mm-hmm. I think the best start [00:10:00] is therapeutic not only for the creator, but for the witness. And, I think that we can or cannot be concerned about the outcome as we're making it. That concern is not the, Modifier of real art. Mm-hmm. So I can say, I'm never gonna think about the audience.

I'm gonna be completely in process. I'm gonna be completely in the moment, totally present. I'm gonna make this thing that is changing me, healing me, moving, shifting me, and I want to see it out there in space functioning the way that it feels inside my body. I want what's out there to be a representation for this inner world.

I'm not worried about the audience, I'm not worried about. You know, the shape of it, but I want it to feel like it feels on the inside that's therapeutic. Yeah. Now we can make something that no one will ever see. That also doesn't mean it's not art, right? Like I could make, I could spend two years making an evening length work that I'm never gonna share with an audience.

I could sp [00:11:00] I could go into the studio five days a week for two hours a day and spend two years making a solo. That nobody ever sees. It could be one of the most beautiful, transcendental transformational pieces of art that's ever been created, and no one but me will ever see it. Mm-hmm. That doesn't make it not art.

Mm-hmm. So the audience doesn't define whether or not something's art. And our thought about the product doesn't define whether or not it's art. And not all art is therapeutic. But I don't think it's more artistic if it's not concerned with healing. I think for me, the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life have changed me.

Yeah, for the better. Is that therapeutic? I think so, yeah. Yeah, and I think, you know, like, obviously it's interesting to hear your perspective because, you know, if you think about like, you know, traditional art making as in on a canvas or whatever with paint and [00:12:00] blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, there's obviously a certain amount of skill that you need to build, which would be the same in dance, right?

There's a certain amount of skill that you need to build if you're gonna be a professional artist or a master, you know, in, in that field. Yeah, but that doesn't mean that you can't also have an art making practice, which is just for you, which no one else sees, which is just for healing. Or people can see it if you want, you know?

that comes from this place where we're not fixed on who we're gonna sell it to and whether it's gonna look like the last piece we did, where it's fixed much more on our own parameters that we wanna put around our own healing and our own, our own exploration, our own play, and our own. yeah. growth.

So, yeah, so I, I just find it really interesting to hear your perspective because obviously, you know, using dance it's exactly the same, but it's just, you know, different, a different approach because obviously there's, different art at play, so thank you. Yeah. And you know, that moment where you're, you write the letter of the email to [00:13:00] somebody and you say, you know, I'm never gonna send this, but I wanna get this off my chest.

And so you write that letter and it's a therapeutic letter, but. Maybe you do send it and it changes your relationship, or maybe you turn it into a monologue for a play. The thing that came out of you, like it doesn't have to have a definite endpoint or purpose. It doesn't have to plan to do anything in the world for it to be either therapeutic or art.

Yeah. Like they can both do. They can both exist in anything we make. Yeah, absolutely. So how do you think that we keep joy in the creative process then? When we do have creative ambition and creative desires and we wanna kind of excel creatively, you know, how do we keep joy in the process? Yeah. I think separating a lot of those things from the creative process is essential.

Like, yeah, I am an artist by trade and I have two children, one of 'em about to go to college. I need money. Yeah. And I do [00:14:00] need certain things to have. Uh, financial success, right? Yes. And I can't just do whatever I want whenever I want it for the sake of myself, and that's beautiful to me. So I don't care about any other outcome, right?

But I do need to separate. I. Some of those pragmatic, needs from the creativity itself. I can't be thinking about those outcomes while I'm doing this anymore than, you know, on your first date with somebody, you know, you are gonna ask them where they wanna retire to, and that's gonna be your deal breaker or, you know mm-hmm.

Like some really particular things about your future, you know? Mm-hmm. Kind of. Cake flavor you want at your wedding? Oh, well, you're off the table. You know, we, we have to stay present with what we're feeling and sensing and noticing and deciding in our artistic process. And then a separate, thinking process is like, [00:15:00] what is happening in my career?

What kind of jobs will get me the security I need? Yeah. What is happening in the art market? What is selling and what's not selling? That doesn't mean that I'm going to decide to make the kind of thing that's selling when it's not. What I love. Yes, yes. it might mean I am gonna recognize that. As an artist, I'm not in vogue right now.

Uh, for whatever reason. Yeah. That doesn't mean I'm not making amazing art. It might mean, yeah. I think that my art needs to be for me for a while because it's not commercial. Yeah. And what I love making is not what's popular right now. Maybe it's what's gonna be popular in eight years. Maybe it's something that nobody's thought of yet.

Maybe I just have a different vibe. But, you know, recognizing that money and. Making what you really wanna make, don't always go together. Yeah. That may be part of it. And I do think this young. This generation that's [00:16:00] coming up right now, gen Z, gen Alpha, maybe like late millennials. There was this thing where I feel like they were trying to dismantle, some of the abusive patterns in various art worlds around value.

Meaning, um, a lot of dancers just got abused. They worked for free. They got. Taken advantage of. They didn't expect any kind of respect or, safety in their work environment. And you know, this younger generation has been trying to dismantle those practices. That's wonderful. In trying to dismantle them. I think they reattached, uh, money and value.

Mm-hmm. According to capitalist lines that I don't think is fully of service. So yeah, at an individual level, an artist, a dancer could say, I will not ever step into a room where I'm not getting paid. Yeah. And that is absolutely their prerogative. They can do that. [00:17:00] When we start to say, universally, if you are not getting paid for what you make, you are not a success.

That's where I think it we get into danger. Yeah. And I see young artists come to me and they're like, well, there's this project. It's this amazing person. She's such a genius. I just wanna be in the room with her. She made the most beautiful piece I think I've ever seen. She asked me to do this like research.

Process with her where we would rehearse for a couple months, but she doesn't really have any money. She's, willing to do it on my schedule. She'll bring snacks. She's a really loving, amazing person. But, I can't take the job because it's not paid, and I'll push back against it and say, you know, like, if that's how you feel unilaterally and that feels mm-hmm.

really truthful to you Absolutely do that. But are you just using money and success or money and value or money and respect I in, you know, like par in a way that that isn't truthful because it sounds like she values and respects you and that you're [00:18:00] getting. Paid a lot out of the yeah. Creative fodder and the experience and the relationship.

You learn something too. Yeah. It's an equal energy exchange. That's what that is, right? Yeah. An equal energy exchange. Yeah. Mm. And I think in breaking down some of the abusive patterns, we have absorbed a different kind of abusive pattern out of capitalism. Mm. I think it's quite a personal decision, how money and value wanna interact in your art life and in your career.

And I'm, I'm not advocating for any particular mathematical equation around money and value, but I do think there are many ways to be valued and respected that are not related to money. Yeah. We used to feel like that as artists, but it got us into an abusive cycle or poverty. Yeah. Yeah. And taking. That money.

Putting that money back into the equation as the only arbiter of value has created something else that I think is [00:19:00] unhealthy for us. So I think we have to develop our own thinking and, you know, algorithm and narrative around how we want money, value, respect to function in our creative process. Yeah.

There's, you know, there's also an argument to say that the art that you wanna make right now, because obviously we're evolving as artists and as creatives, we are evolving. So there's an argument to say that the art that you're making right now is, you know, it's important for you, but more on a personal level and that you are able to.

make money or serve others, by going back in time almost to a different part of your own creative journey. And, you know, sharing that, you know, even if you're not embodying that specifically yourself right now, there's, there's gold still there, right? Because it's part of your journey and you have expertise and knowledge that you can share with others from an earlier part of your journey.

Does that make sense? Yeah. And not making money through your art doesn't mean you're not an artist. Yeah. It doesn't make it, and [00:20:00] people will be contemptuous about this from the outside and say, oh, so it's a hobby. You're not paying your utilities with your art. You're not paying your rent with your art, then you're not an artist.

You're a hobbyist. No, I'm an artist. Art. And money are two separate different things. Things. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, you are free to say that is my definition of being an artist. I have to make my full living with my art. And if I don't, yeah, I feel like I'm not an artist. That's up to you. But I definitely would push back on somebody from the outside saying that about my life.

Yes. Absolutely. So for all the women out there who want to step more fully into their creative power, what powerful message or question would you like to leave them with today? There is a science behind intuition, and intuition is the engine of creativity, and the science is turning it inward towards our inner [00:21:00] metrics.

So how does, does, where does this hit me? Where in my body do I feel that? When do I feel like that's it? That's right. That's the angle of the couch. That's the color I want my wall to be. That's the amount of salt. That's perfect in this pot of soup. Listening to those inner metrics and starting to value them in the same way that we value these outer metrics, I think is one of the most important steps we can take to regain our intuition.

And once our intuition comes in. Creativity follows suit. Mm. Because we feel these inner desires wants. I wanna put these two things together. I wanna see what that would look like. I wonder what if, that those are things that our intuition starts to speak and then we create from that place. But we have devalued the inner metrics and we value the microscope and the scale and the ruler and the [00:22:00] recipe.

And we don't value the five senses. Yeah. And the interoception. So when my breath is shallow, or my heart is racing, or my skin feels clammy, what's going on? Starting to listen to those inner metrics. Is animating the framework, the science behind intuition. Intuition is not a magical intangible thing that we just have or we don't have.

It can be cultivated and we can make daily choices. Saying what we see, what we love, what we notice, what we taste, what would work better than this? What doesn't feel good about this? What shift do I wanna make? And just starting to notice how our body experiences our life. Mm-hmm. And starting to value the metrics that we get from inside as much as those we get from [00:23:00] outside starts to.

Shift intuition and creativity to the forefront. Love that. So beautifully put. Love it. So how can people get to know you better, Alexandra, and get a real feel for the work that you're doing? I have a pretty comprehensive website that's got lots of freebies. It's got, writing and videos and, uh, free classes on it.

So I would say just going to my website, alexandra beller dances.org. it'll come up if you just Google my name. it is probably the best way to start interacting and you can also contact me there and I send out lots of snippets of writing and, uh, invitation towards creativity. Excellent. Thank you so much for chatting with me today.

I loved our conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much. 

​[00:24:00]