Bebe Miller: It's all a Process
Making dance work as a collaborative process is a consistent theme throughout Bebe Miller’s career as both a dancer and a choreographer. Born in Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY in 1950 she represents a new generation of dancers and choreographers that, as Ishmael Houston-Jones writes in his 1982 presentation of ‘Parallels,’ “explore possibilities beyond the hegemony of mainstream concert dance traditions (black and white), which seemed to limit what African Americans could or should do.”
In an interview at New York Live Arts Miller said, “There really is only a process. There isn’t really a new work, but I gotta plan. I’m thinking about a play kinda thing working alongside another choreographer.”
She experiments with the dancer’s improvisations finding differences between dancer’s, their movements, and each dancer’s personality without the need to synchronize or become a representation of each other. In an interview with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Center Miller talks about some exercises she does in her workshop. She says, “If you just kinda suspend who’s predator and who’s prey for a second and allow these two different kinds of beings to be in proximity together, like can you put these two systems of behavior and personality together, next to each other, without it just [coming] to the Golden Mean between.”
Bebe Miller began studying dance with Murray Louis at the Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan's Lower East Side. In 1971 she graduated from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, with a degree in art. After finishing her graduate studies at Ohio State University she developed a uniquely persistent intensity in her improvisations that she characterizes as an interest in information and empathy that is stored in the body. Dance, in part, is a means of seeing a “document” of that information.
In 1984 she started the Bebe Miller Company that performs today. Miller is a leader in Post-Modern and experimental dance that infuses multiple visual, audio, image, and textual projections in her productions. She taught and mentored generations of dancers at Ohio State University from 2000 to 2017 until retiring as Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities. She was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Ursinus College in 2009, and has received many awards and grants for work such as the Creative Capital Award in the discipline of Performing Arts in 2006, the Doris Duke Artist award in 2012, four Bessie awards (1986 and 1987), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1988), and an American Choreographer Award (1988). She has collaborated with many well-known artists and inspired generations of choreographers around the world.
Bebe Miller’s dance company is more like a collective than an organization of dancers taking direction from a singular voice. Before beginning her own company in the mid-eighties Miller studied with Nina Weiner and other choreographers that made dance work collaboratively. For almost 50 years Bebe Miller’s company has been making work through this process that she likens more to a partnership of friends. She says, “There’s something about having a room of smart people, whether you’re just telling jokes or hanging out, that I’m interested in. I’m not that interested in my own point of view. Collision, interference between people: it feels collaborative, not combative, a deflecting of ideas back and forth.” She also talks about her collaborative process on the Bebe Miller Company website. She says, “I keep coming back to partnering because, since the beginning, the company has essentially been a partnership.”
Throughout the span of its dance making history, contact improvisation and partnering continue to infuse the work with new ideas and energy. In Nancy Small’s article written for the Las Angeles Times in 1989 Miller says, “With partnering, there’s a certain trust I have to have from the dancers. Because you can’t say specifically, ‘OK now you’re going to put your head here.’ You say, ‘Take this phrase material, Nikki--and Scott, you interfere in some way.’ More recently on the company’s website, Bebe Miller says...
“My sense is I have been lucky enough to gather people in a room, people that I can learn from, and then I watch, and play, and work with them for as long as I can. With partnered improvising, I am looking for dynamic vectors of approach, their approach to each other, as well as to an idea we are pursuing, figuring out the parameters of intentional and unintentional collisions. Timing is everything. Timing changes everything. This makes for an oddly inconclusive traffic pattern that’s interesting to me. It’s like they’re surviving these small mishaps for the sake of continuing forward, continuing onward.”
Most recently Bebe Miller Company explores relationships of contexts and events. Choreography is inspired by text and language. Miller reads her research with the movement of the body and the way it records experience in mind. The texts imbue the dance space with audio-recorded voice. Other digital media are projected in the performing space that create complex experiential relationships to the process of constructing meaning.
Today, Bebe Miller works primarily in collaboration with the dancers in her company as well as a broad range of artists using texts and language, sound and video, and networked and newer technologies. This interdisciplinary approach in collaboration with teachers, artists, dancers, and makers around the world invites audiences to become participants, to form new questions about how meaning is made in the body as an individual and how it may coalesce with other meanings and bodies. She is asking us to consider how a thing may exist in its own independent voice and power while also existing as a part of a whole body, a body that moves separately and together in time.