The Village Voice reviews Bebe Miller Company

The Village Voice
Published: November 18, 2008
By: Deborah Jowitt

Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Bebe Miller has been making mysterious dances since the mid 1980s. Their beauty is soul-deep. It resides in dancers’ bones, muscles, and sinews—sometimes blurry, sometimes startlingly clear. Her new Necessary Beauty probes memories—not just real memories, like those that taped voices deliver sporadically, but the process of remembering itself.

Maya Ciarrocchi’s videos illuminate this theme. Images projected on two large standing screens gradually swim into focus. A rippling, gray surface turns out to be sparkling lake water. A mass of clouds sharpens into an Albert Bierstadt landscape, whose tiny, distant waterfall begins to flow; eventually, the painting acquires a frame and later, diminished, hangs on a gallery wall. Albert Mathias’s live electronic score also plays with clarity and obscurity, and Michael Mazzola’s lighting pricks brilliance out of darkness in myriad ways.

Surrounding the white floor are black areas where the performers may rest, or sit and watch. Now a professor at Ohio State University, Miller develops her pieces over time, through intermittent company sessions and much long-distance communication. Maybe that’s why Angie Hauser, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Kristina Isabelle, Cynthia Oliver, Yen-Fang Yu, and Miller herself seem so profoundly invested in the movement and so watchful of one another. Their bodies function like repositories for thoughts and fleeting impressions. A pose may trigger another hoarded memory and generate a gesture.

The women’s dancing is often a portrait of uncertainty, of swift changes of mind, of thoughts forgotten a second after they begin. Intentions war gently within their limbs, sometimes occasioning fumbles and falls. At the beginning of Necessary Beauty, Hermesdorf performs a long, challenging solo, her hips, knees, and elbows collapsing with uncanny silkiness. In the final moments, Hauser moves amid a storm of thoughts and feelings; they fasten onto her face, body, and limbs and glance off. She’s dancing a flickering lifetime; it’s as if someone has spliced together frames taken at random from a score of home movies and projected them into her nervous system.

At one point, a filmed door on one screen opens slightly. We see a crowded room. Then, a beach. That’s what happens in dreams. It’s rare that a choreographer leads us through such cracks of existence.