Bebe Miller is no stranger to Maine and the Bates Dance Festival. She first visited the state at the age of six, as a camper at the Bearnstow arts retreat in Mount Vernon, where her mother was working. Miller is now a director there. She first performed at the Bates Festival in the summer of 1988, when her star was just beginning to ascend. She has returned several times since, including this year, now firmly established as a major force in the art of dance.
In a recent interview at Bates, Miller smiled easily as she looked back on a career full of highlights and honors, but was equally animated talking about her current work, “Landing/Place,” which will preview this weekend. She continues to read, think and explore. “What you’re curious about is all you have,” she said. “In another life, I might have been a scientist.”
Instead, Miller became a dancer, not because of an insatiable need to perform, but because she got a job. Her introduction to dance, studying with Murray Louis at the Henry Street Settlement in the Lower East Side of New York City, had given her a solid start in the abstract shapes and physicality of the Nikolais/Louis technique. (Such a foundation was unlike the Afro-Caribbean dance style that attracted many other African American choreographers, such as Alvin Ailey.)
Later in college, dance became a sideline – art was Miller’s major. But a student performance in front of modern dance icon Merce Cunningham provided her with words that helped define her life and her work: “He said, ‘If you find yourself moving in one direction, try something else.'” She changed, getting her master’s degree in dance at Ohio State. A brief stint with the Nina Wiener Dancers gave her time to explore her own choreographic muse. In 1985, she broke out to form her own company.
Miller quickly gained a solid reputation for her ability to explore honest emotion through dynamic movement. The Bebe Miller Company has enthralled audiences worldwide with the athleticism and emotional risk-taking of its dancers. The New York Times said, “Her movement is filled with a spirit that clings to the audience even after she and her dancers have left the stage.”
During the past two decades, Miller’s work has earned her an American Choreographer Award and two New York Dance and Performance Awards (Bessies), as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. But the accolade that means the most to her came this past April, when she was honored as a Master of African American Choreography at the Kennedy Center. Now at the age of 54, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice for the African American experience.
It was a long way from Lewiston to Eritrea, North Africa, for Miller, but the journey sparked her newest piece. Six years ago, a conference of African nationals and the African diaspora met to share stories, poems and dance. The daughter of one of the organizers had been to the Bates Dance Festival, and suggested that Miller be invited. Miller went, and was intrigued by the confluence of different cultures and languages all trying to interact. “It’s like magic,” she said, “being in another person’s environment. We’re better off, if we can allow difference around us.” Her explorations of those differences are the substance of “Landing/Place.” The performance this weekend will be a rare opportunity to view a work-in-progress by a major choreographer, just before its formal world premiere at the University of Maryland in September.
“Landing/Place” has pulled together many talented people for three years of collaboration. At home back at Ohio State, now as a full professor of dance, Miller has been exploring the use of computer technology in theater, hoping it will provide “new vibrancy to the field.” This new work will include lighting design by Michael Mazzola, dramaturgy by Talvin Wilks, computer animation by Vita Berezina-Blackburn, video projections by Maya Ciarrocchi, and a live performance on computer by composer Albert Mathias. Her dancers (Kathleen Fisher, Angie Fisher, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Darrell Jones, and David Thomson) come together periodically from across the country for intensive three-week choreography sessions. This weekend, they will let us examine their discoveries so far.
As for Bebe Miller, the journey is the most important part. “I make work as a documentation of a process, and what’s left over is the piece.”
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