Artistic Practice: Bebe Miller
My artist of inquiry will be Bebe Miller, and specifically looking at her next project, HISTORY. I’m interested in the ways that Bebe, through her choreography, attempts to unveil or excavate the process of dance making, translating her experience and the experiences of the company into a physical language, as well as a record of thought. HISTORY reveals the interpersonal subtext over the last decade that drives her company’s particular style of dance making. Inevitably, in performance, it then connects an audience to their own experience of imagining/working/growing with those they share time with.
Bebe Miller is part of the generation of postmodern choreographers who fuse a minimalist sense of movement and process with the expressive qualities of European dance-theater. She’s often said that her work is not “of ‘THE BLACK EXPERIENCE’ but rather “of a black experience.” And it’s exactly those contrasting elements in her work: American vs. European, street vs. studio, contact improv vs. the pointed toe, a certain mystery to her work vs. a willingness to overshare about her process, and her unfailingly restless sense of exploration that is intriguing. I’ll investigate through gender, racial, and historical lense, looking at texts like Susan Manning, bell hooks, and Brenda Dixon Gottschild, among others.
http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/history
