Bebe Miller
Columbus, OH
Choreographer Bebe Miller founded Bebe Miller Company in 1985. It has performed in more than 125 cities in nine countries, touring extensively nationwide and in Europe. Miller has choreographed more than 30 works for the company, including Tiny Sisters in the Enormous Land, Verge, and Rhythm Studies. Her commissions include The Oregon Ballet Theater, Liz Lerman Dance Company, and Dayton Contemporary Ballet. She has taught both abroad, and at numerous universities in the United States including: Ohio State, University of Illinois, New York University, University of Minnesota, Stanford, Virginia Commonwealth, UCLA and Portland State. Her grants and awards include three Bessie Awards, three fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Necessary Beauty
Bebe Miller’s vision of dance and performance resides in her faith in the moving body as a record of thought, experience, and beauty.
Artist BioNecessary Beauty is a series of short, self-contained dance works with visual projections. The music and video are entirely laptop-driven, allowing the pieces to tour easily; each five- to seven-minute dance can be performed individually, in a loop, or as part of a full-evening concert. All use Miller’s athletic, theatrical choreography to address elemental metaphors of beauty and truth. Necessary Beauty is also built with the team of design collaborators that worked on Landing/Place, Miller’s Bessie-award winning work of 2005. Video designer Maya Ciarrocchi and animator Vita Berezina-Blackburn have worked to combine video and animation in the same image, resulting in a slightly surreal take on rooms, landscapes, portraits and the like. Miller also uses rear-projection equipment for this new work, rather than the full-size scrims used in Landing/Place.