Alexa West Toes the Line Between Dance and Labor

Choreographer Alexa West wants to see you work. “So much of dance is supposed to hide how hard it is,” she told me. “All the dancers I work with are interested in pushing themselves, so we play with making material that allows them—or doesn’t allow them—to do the dance successfully. The labor has to be shown.” 

In the past five years in New York, West’s uncanny, Rube Goldberg-esque dances have made her one of the stars of the city’s experimental dance scene. During a meeting over the winter at Pageant—an East Williamsburg space founded by West and four collaborators that’s considered a center of the New York performance scene—the artist reflected on the two-part premiere of her most ambitious work to date, Jawbreaker Part 1 & 2 (2025). “I’m feeling wonderful,” she said of the piece, which was developed over a long period and built on close relationships between her and the piece’s five dancers, who are Pageant regulars themselves. 

Following a work-in-progress phase at Movement Research, West showed Jawbreaker first at her space last October, then at Chinatown’s 99 Canal a month later. The piece is a near-perfect distillation of what makes West one of America’s most exciting choreographers: kinetic movement, a hypnotic soundtrack, and, crucially, props that serve as objects for the dancers to work against. West engaged set-dressing and props in her choreography from the start—an approach she’s refined over time, at the Martha Graham School, Cooper Union, and the sculpture department at Bard College’s Milton Avery School of the Arts. “What I’m coming to understand is, I’ve learned how to make dances from a sculptural approach in terms of material, scale, and time,” she said of her training. 

While previous dances such as 2023’s Occasion, Occasion, Occasion have incorporated tables and furniture, Jawbreaker makes use of a fabricated lamppost-like structure and a teal green plastic “room wrap” that covered the whole of both Pageant and 99 Canal. West described the room wrap—made and installed by the architecture and design firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero—as “claustrophobic” and “invasive to both an audience and a dancer.” Following a score drawn from sources as disparate as golden-age Hollywood musicals, YouTube compilations of drunk men, and improvisations taken from rehearsals, Jawbreaker’s dancers writhe, sweat, and jerk to the point of “exhaustion” amidst the expanse of green vinyl—a strenuous experience to both perform and to watch. 

After a presentation of Jawbreaker at the TONO Festival in Mexico in March, West and her collaborators at Pageant turned their attention to another arts institution back home: the Museum of Modern Art. As part of the museum’s Kravis Studio artist residency program, the group will stage a series of performances there during the month of August. Their challenge will be to translate the energy and experimentation at the heart of the Pageant program to MoMA and, for the first time in the cofounders’ four-year history, choreograph a piece together. “It’s a new thing for us, to take Pageant out of Pageant,” West said. Looking around at the humble one-room studio space, she laughed: “It’s going to be a little out-of-body—from this to MoMA.”