Kristina Isabelle in Bebe Miller's Necessary Beauty. Photo by Yi-Chun.
The veteran dancer-choreographer Bebe Miller used to be a household name in downtown dance. I remember her for two qualities: the ferocity of her performing—she was a wild, thrillingly unpredictable woman when she was dancing—and, later, for the choreography of a couple of pieces I saw that, with understanding and tenderness, focused on the humane aspects of the human race.
I thought that Miller had somehow faded from the local scene since, a victim—like so many good if not great artists—of underappreciation, but I was dead wrong. She’s been based at Ohio State University, teaching and making new work under very favorable conditions and touring like mad. She has been able to continue—indeed to amplify—her preferred tactic of collaboration with other artists (musicians, wordsmiths, videographers, and the like), now employing the most up-to-date means.
So why is her Necessary Beauties, shown at New York’s Dance Theater Workshop November 11–15, fresh from its premiere at Ohio’s eminent Wexner Center, such a disappointment? Its cast couldn’t be better: five distinctive women rich in their diversity of age, ethnicity, body type and temperament, and dancing style, with Miller herself making a shadowy sixth, dancing just now and then, often on the duskily lighted edges of the stage space. Her physical fervor is muted, but every move she makes is still riveting and as original in its impulse as if it came from a place with no name.
I think the reason for my tepid response to the work was that during more than half of its 80 minutes, I couldn’t figure out what it was “about.” The piece had so many clues to specific themes and such a blatant disregard of meaningful architecture that it adamantly refused to be accepted as abstract. Take, for instance, the background grainy black and white video of a firmly shut door in an unadorned corridor that finally, finally opens a crack, only to reveal an equally unfathomable sight—blurred, if colored, glimpses of people aimlessly moving a little, with their backs to the camera. You say to yourself, “O.K., the reluctantly opening door is the door to one’s psyche, and you’ve got to interpret the contents of your own inner being through close examination and intuition.” But when, after what seems forever, the glimpses still reveal nothing, what is one to make of the subsequent, perfectly clear shots of (1) a child running alone along a beach, then (2) heavy auto traffic on a rainy night?
Throughout, the dancing itself was so loose, its vocabulary so vague, the result had an improvisatory air. When I did latch onto something you might call subject matter (the voice-overs helped even if the dancing couldn’t), I thought the material verged on the maudlin. For instance, a daughter and a mother have a cozy wallow in recalling the details of their long relationship, with its inevitable ups and downs, a few hurts retained, more of them responding to the participants’ capacity for love and forgiveness. But there’s no serious or striking drama in the stuff, nothing to which a therapist or social worker, say, would give an instant of attention. A Sophocles or a Racine in the audience might have whispered to his companion, “Long warm-up. Marvelous women. When d’ya think the show’s gonna start?”
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