BEBE MILLER AND COMPANY
Miller works in what some now call the post-postmodern tradition–movement is tied, sometimes in obscure ways, to emotion but not to narrative. Other young choreographers also cited as practitioners of this art include Stephanie Skura and Stephen Petronio (both white) and Ralph Lemon (black). But Miller asks of her dancers a higher degree of precision than is common among these choreographers, so that the way a foot flicks or kneads the floor is not lost on us. Miller shows a greater interest in emotional issues than Skura, but her approach is more analytical than Lemon’s. Rather than try to produce emotion, she seems to trace with a delicate, thoughtful finger its formal lines, almost experimentally. If we do this, she seems to say, perhaps the feeling produced will be that.
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All three works on the Dance Center program are from 1989. Miller danced Rain, a curious solo featuring a large patch of sod. Rain appears to be a fertility dance–the dancer’s legs are often spread, and sometimes she peers between them as if wondering what she’s giving birth to. But oddly, she dances only rarely on the grass. Starting at a distance from it, she approaches the sod slowly, meticulously, and with undulating steps, places half her foot on it, then moves away again quickly. Later she runs hard and carelessly over the grass–but just once. Eventually she lies on it and rolls her face in it, but then she tumbles away. At the end only one foot remains on the sod, its bare sole turned toward us. Her contacts with this patch of nature are spare but laden.
Thick Sleep becomes more dramatic as it goes on, but the drama is obscure. Two dancers observing a third open their mouths in big Os–is it in horror, or wild amusement? A man shows two women something he’s carrying on the platter of his two palms; they collapse from the waist in disgust. People turn away from one another with that mysterious sense of shame we have in dreams, and antagonistic groups form in dreamland parodies of the rival gangs in West Side Story. The music signals a point of high drama, but the dancer who’s center stage seems to have forgotten why the moment is crucial. The audience is apt to feel too that we’re chasing after a meaning that just eludes us.
Miller’s false steps–for instance, a dancer drawing a finger coyly, tritely down another’s arm–are few. Her dancers–Elizabeth Caron, Nikki Castro, Renee Lemieux, Scott Smith, Earnie Stevenson, and Jeremy Weichsel–reiterate her blend of mercurial substance. They’re not her clones, but they’re of a companionable size, shape, and manner. Their sense of community and the sure touches of Miller’s choreography make you feel you’d like to have this strong, good-natured, levelheaded woman for a friend. But in lieu of that, go see her dances.
