Standing in SculptureCenter’s basement one Thursday afternoon in August, I was delighted to be squished by the crowd present to see a performance by Alexa West. Even in the month that many in the New York art world write off as “sleepy” or “when everyone is on vacation,” people were turning out in numbers for contemporary dance.
The popularity of West’s work reflects its balance of precision and open-endedness: she deliberately layers multiple choreographic, musical, and visual references in her performances to maximize their accessibility. Even when she was a sculpture student in Bard’s MFA program, she scattered printed images and costumes around her studio to provoke conversations. This multi-hyphenate ethos carries over to Pageant, the East Williamsburg space West co-founded with Sharleen Chidiac, Lili Dekker, Jade Manns, and Owen Prum in 2022 to give emerging artists a platform to present new performances.
West’s performance at SculptureCenter, which was developed in situ during a month-long residency, was the culmination of a busy summer: she presented Gossip at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in June and A lounge, a lobby at Lomex Gallery in July. In the conversation below, she reflects on the process of making three new pieces back-to-back, how flexible spaces can incubate new movement styles, and what’s coming up at Pageant.
Dylan Sherman (Rail): I’d love to start by asking you about your experiences working in museums and galleries this summer. How did you approach these three projects?
Alexa West: I planned the summer so that I could set the same dance material on three separate performance spaces—each with different casts, themes, and sensibilities.
At the Aldrich, I was commissioned to respond to an exhibition of paintings by Loie Hollowell that occupied multiple galleries in the museum. Two dancers were illuminated by a spotlight as they moved through the galleries and wore these velvet jumpsuits that invited multiple associations: Are they mob bosses? Are they Olympic athletes? Are they in the 1980s? And so on. The lighting and the costumes made all this drama, which was really effective to differentiate the dancers from both the audience members and the artworks in the museum.
At Lomex, we were in a much smaller, windowless gallery in Tribeca where we installed a set with lighting and a full sound PA set up. We put in linoleum tiles, a couch you might find in a waiting room, and a glass-and-metal cocktail table to connect these more commercially understood materials with dance movements. That work dealt more with stillness than any piece I’ve done in a long time, but simply because we had to isolate certain movements in order for other things to stand out in the small space.
Rail: So you had those two performances in June and July and then you came to SculptureCenter, which started with a residency in the galleries and ended with four performances. How was the experience of workshopping material in this new space?
West: The dancers and I were working in the basement, which has several long concrete hallways and a small gallery space next to an elevator. Rehearsal started when we walked into the basement on July 1 and continued for the next six weeks. It was a dream creating the work on site, even though the concrete was hard on our bodies. The dancers and I were working there three to four days a week and our rehearsals were open to the public. There was some confusion and funny questions from museum visitors, especially when we were in the warm-up portion of the rehearsal and it didn’t look like much. One visitor asked if we were exercising. But we had some really exciting experiences too. We got in the swing of putting on in-progress snippet performances every day for our mock audiences, and that was an exciting way to build a work and see it activated by an audience’s attention.
Rail: It sounds like space really influenced each performance, but in a different way.
West: Yeah. I would say at the Aldrich, we were centered in the space, at Lomex, we made the space—or rather the setting—and at SculptureCenter, the space super-informed the work’s creation. And I’ve always been inspired by flexible spaces where you can add more information than in a rigid dance setting. I’m somewhat against a neutral stance of presentation in the black box. I think that’s perhaps something understood in my practice now and the reason why I’m being invited to present performances in less conventional spaces. So when SculptureCenter reached out about the basement, I couldn’t say no.
Rail: You were like, “Absolutely, let’s go.”
West: There was so much architectural information down there. And I think that is a large part of Pageant’s world too. People are making strong decisions around the space and not just leaving the environment neutral to focus attention on the content of the dance itself.
Rail: Thinking more about your relationship to traditional theaters or black box spaces, have you ever made work in a traditional theater?
West: I was about to say—not that anyone has ever given me the chance. [Laughter] I don’t know if a lot of choreographers working in museums had the goal of doing so, and I wonder if it came about by necessity or opportunity. When I was younger and considering the kind of work I wanted to make, I was drawn toward dance artists like Maria Hassabi and Kim Brandt, who make work in hyper-stylized spaces, usually visual art institutions. And maybe I’m part of the first generation of dancers to have that as a goal.
Rail: That also makes me think of your background, which is not just in dance. You have a BFA from Cooper Union and an MFA from Bard, both in visual arts. How have your visual arts training and dance practice informed each other along the way?
West: When I was in these undergrad and graduate programs, I was drawn to sculpture as a way to address scale, material, and space in performance—which reflects how I’m interested in applying the logic of visual art forms to dance rather than producing objects.
The MFA program at Bard impacted my practice because I went into it not being able to really explain what I was doing. So I tried to make work that brought in many more access points for non-dance people to grab onto, because I wanted to be able to talk to other artists in other mediums about dance. In my studio, I’d print out lots of reference images, make maquettes, and hang up costumes to show people, sort of using the same logic of process and assemblage that visual artists use. So then I was able to talk about my work with a painter or a poet or a sculptor or whomever.
Especially when you apply modalities of performance art to dance, visual art people get excited because they feel like they can finally connect to this. For example, if you put someone doing an abstract set of motions in an American flag costume (like in Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A with Flags [1970]), they’re like, there’s some meaning I can grab onto, even though I don’t know this history that the dancers have. So I think I’ve really had a generous time exploring how all those choices—both dance and performance rooted—can be made together in a clear environment that doesn’t prioritize one over the other.
Rail: You bringing in everyday references to your performances that audience members can instantly relate to reminds me of what people have written about your work. Like for the Lomex show, Leah Newman wrote that your work “signals a return to postmodern dance and heralds a new epoch in contemporary dance.”
And it also makes me think of how the work you’re doing at Pageant fits into the broader history of modern and contemporary dance in New York. I want to read a quote from “Split City”—an essay by David Velasco that’s in the Sarah Michelson book from MoMA’s Modern Dance series—which really helped me think about how Pageant fits into this lineage:
Simply put, the scrappy, young, unsubsidized dance maker moving to New York City in 2017, the kind who might once have constituted the “downtown” scene, will not move to Greenwich Village or SoHo or TriBeCa or even the East Village or the Lower East Side or anywhere in Lower Manhattan. She will move to Bedford-Stuyvesant or Bushwick or Sunset Park in Brooklyn, or Ridgewood or Sunnyside in Queens, or Jersey City, across the Hudson.
West: Wow, really calling out all of us. When was that written?
Rail: Seven years ago. When I read that, I was pretty taken aback, because it’s still so on the nose today. And you’re someone who’s lived in Ridgewood for six years and runs this space in East Williamsburg, so I’m wondering how you think about yourself in this lineage of space in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and so forth?
West: It’s impossible to say anyone isn’t working out of these lineages if you’re making dance work in New York. But I also don’t think Pageant exists in a way that’s very original. It’s not trying to reinvent the wheel. And I wish it wasn’t special and everyone was doing it. And I hope other people do it. But I think it’s just a necessity right now. The way that having a career as a downtown dance-maker—with some air quotes around it—exists currently is you don’t have many options of places to show, and a large part of dance-making happens up against a deadline. So giving people an option to have that deadline is what’s resulting in a lot of new work coming out of Pageant right now.
Rail: So Pageant doesn’t feel original in the sense that dance-makers have always made do and found alternative spaces?
West: Yeah. Everyone says it reminds them of SoHo lofts from the seventies, eighties, and nineties. I’m like, sounds great. I wish they still existed in that way.
Rail: In the New York Times piece on Pageant by Gia Kourlas, she said that the work that you present there has “an aesthetic of the everyday—at least as it manifests itself in this part of Brooklyn, where people embrace sparkle and skin.” Do you agree with that aesthetic connection?
West: I think it’s more of the post-internet advent of compiling different mediums than something that’s Brooklyn-specific. Some people involved with Pageant overlap with fashion, music, and visual arts, and we’ve all witnessed the influence of music videos and other forms of online culture. It’s interesting to hear other people talk about the aesthetic of Pageant, because we’re just inviting artists in and we don’t know anything preemptive about the content of their show. We see it for the first time during the tech rehearsal, and whatever lays out is whatever lays out.
And what comes out is often self-reflexive. Certain elements, like bright colors and movable walls, are in our vocabulary now, and people want to contribute to it. There were a couple of shows this year where I was like, “Wow, I’m really seeing the history of Pageant in these shows at Pageant.”
Rail: Even after just two and a half years of having the space! And I noticed that you don’t have marketing text for the performances.
West: No, no, no, no. Everywhere else in the city is like, give us a two-hundred–word description of your work. And I’m like, “I don’t know what it’s about. I haven’t made it yet.” So if someone wants to write about their show, we will share it in their show promotion. If they don’t want to write anything, we don’t.
Rail: Totally. What shows at Pageant have you enjoyed recently? And what’s coming up that you’re looking forward to?
West: Right now we’re seeing an exciting trend where artists have been working on their shows for a year. These are some long-form shows and I imagine they’re going to sell out instantly. We’re also going to get a little bit more intergenerational by bringing in more people who have been showing in New York for a long time. I’m looking forward to seeing works in November and December by Cayleen Del Rosario and Amelia Heintzelman. They’re both brilliant artists who are part of the community and are presenting their second shows at Pageant. I’m curious to see how they approach the space the second time around.
And then our lease is up in April 2025, so we’re trying to figure out a more sustainable future for ourselves as organizers and those who work at Pageant. I’m optimistic we’ll figure out a way to make it work. We’re such fans of the “downtown” dance community and we’re excited to be contributing.