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Legendary choreographer Bebe Miller dances through her troupe’s history
Dancer, choreographer and Ohio State professor Bebe Miller is taking a step back through her own past. If you’re not already familiar with her work, there’s no better time to get caught up.
Miller has been the artistic director of the Bebe Miller Company since 1985 and is, as of April, part of the first crop of Doris Duke Artists. The prestigious prize from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation recognizes her exceptional creativity—-and comes with a cool $250,000.
Her newest piece, A History, premieres this month at the Wexner Center. A concurrent exhibition, Bebe Miller: Tracing History, is on view at the OSU Urban Arts Space, the university’s Downtown gallery.
“My toolbox is movement and physicality, and with it I try to take a reading of who we are as people,” she explains.
Miller is the creator of 40 original works, including the Bessie Award-winning Verge. The exhibit pulls from video, audio, sketches, clippings, diaries and sets to share her artistry and unveil the process behind it.
“Bebe is 150 percent about process,” curator Jerry Dannemiller says of the exhibition.
At a mid-July rehearsal for A History, this process looked to be intensely collaborative, open, exploratory, trusting and, at times, chatty. For example, when dancer Angie Hauser announced a problem was fixed, Miller, always curious, kindly asked, “How?”
The history being explored in the new dance piece is that of the Bebe Miller Company—-sort of. The raw material is the highly documented life of the group, yet the dance, Miller says, reveals something universal.
“If we are paying attention, it’s what we all do in life,” she says. “We ask how we got to this moment, how the echo of the past is with us in the present. I’m interested in how to share this—-not for the bang, but because life is really interesting and people working together is really interesting.”
