What is everyone saying about “The Making Room”?
The Making Room has inspired numerous thoughtful pieces of writing since its premiere. Scroll down to read excerpts from The New York Times, ArtsJournal and more.
BEBE MILLER AND SUSAN RETHORST RE-MAKE ROOM FOR CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN DANCE
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER, VILLAGE VOICE, FEBRUARY 23, 2018
Photographer- Robert Altman
Sitting beside me at New York Live Arts was a bewildered young man from Long Island, a student at Queensborough Community College who’d been assigned to review the concert by Bebe Miller and Susan Rethorst. He took a lot of notes, but confessed that he didn’t understand what he was seeing. My companion and I tried to reassure him, urged him to track how it made him feel, to notice exactly what was going on. He couldn’t have come to a better event; the whole focus of The Making Room is to explore and preserve the process of creating dance. Miller and Rethorst are engaged in an effort to clarify their creative processes, to document how ideas and images make it from the private recesses of their minds to the broad landscapes of the stage. They’ve been talking and “convening” around the country since late 2015; Miller’s In a Rhythm dazzled viewers in Columbus, Ohio last fall, and did it again the other night in Chelsea.
While both of these artists began their long careers in this city, they’ve spent decades elsewhere. Miller recently retired as a Distinguished Professor of Dance from the Ohio State University, commuting between Columbus and Seattle; Rethorst has lived and worked in Amsterdam and Philadelphia. But it’s the members of Miller’s ensemble who demonstrate the geographic spread of terrific dance intelligences; her dancers (Michelle Boulé, Christal Brown, Sarah Gamblin, Angie Hauser, Bronwen MacArthur, Trebien Pollard) live, teach, choreograph, and perform all over the U.S. and abroad.
At New York Live Arts, they occasionally spread rolls of gray and white carpet, runway-style, onto the dance floor; other carpet scraps serve as ponchos. The movers are fleet and flexible, their bodies faster than thought, feinting in all directions, sometimes genuflecting on the white floor. Snippets of sound course through the piece. What kept grabbing me was the chorus of “Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko-Bop,” repurposed from Little Anthony and the Imperials into Nelly’s “Country Grammar.” Black artists, both onstage and off, have a strong hand in this work: Toni Morrison challenges Charlie Rose, two black dancers (Pollard and Brown) get down in a slow drag. Miller, suddenly garbed in bright chartreuse, reminds us that “my reason for dancing is because of what it feels like.”
MAKING THINGS TOGETHER
BY DEBORAH JOWITT, ARTSJOURNAL, FEBRUARY 25, 2018
The Bebe Miller Company and Susan Rethorst share their processes and a program at New York Live Arts.
Photographer- Robert Altman
The Making Room isn’t a dance, it’s a project devised by Bebe Miller that she and fellow choreographer Susan Rethorst have been working on for over a year via conversations both virtual and actual, plus convenings and rehearsals with their collaborating dancers wherever they could find space and time. A website (the makingroom.org) includes text, images, and video documentation of the process. The project has resulted in two works—Rethorst’s Stealing from Myself and Miller’s In a Rhythm—shown, along with video installations by Lily Skove and Ellen Maynard, at New York Live Arts this past week.
These dances have made me think about the term “making room” beyond its significance as a room in which things get made. It resonates with getting rid of what you no longer need in order to create a space in which new ideas can flourish. That thought in turn makes me ponder lost and found ideas in relation to cleaning out your closet or attic. You discover something you’d almost forgotten you had; maybe you give it away or toss it; maybe you ponder it, refurbish it, and give it new life.
“Excavate” was a word applied to the process in a thought-provoking essay, “Bebe Miller and Susan Rethorst: Archiving the Disappearing Dance.” Its author, choreographer, dancer, teacher, writer Meredith Bove saw the project develop at various stages. I hadn’t read the essay before the NYLA performance, although it was included in the press kit and can also be found at http://thinkingdance.net/. I came to the works bearing only my partial knowledge of these two dancemakers, who first met in the 1970s.
Rethorst’s name for her dance is apt. In Stealing from Myself, Gabrielle Revlock and Gregory Holt replay moments from earlier works by Rethorst as well as showing movements and gestures that developed during the process of working together with the choreographer. The two inhabit a white-floored space, possessing only two chairs and several books. At times, Stan Pressner’s lighting colors it boldly, and Danny Elfman’s recorded score creates emphases, whether sharp or dreamy. Revlock and Holt, wearing brightly colored and patterned clothing, appear neither as lovers nor as adversaries (although he does drag her by the legs three times, leaving her briefly inert). Instead they present themselves as colleagues—sizing each other up and collaborating, each facilitating whatever the other seems to be planning
GETTING INTO THE ROOM WITH 2 CHOREOGRAPHERS
BY BRIAN SEIBERT, THE NEW YORK TIMES, FEBRUARY 27, 2018
Photographer- Robert Altman
They may take years to make, but works of experimental dance are usually performed just a few times. That huge temporal imbalance seems like a problem, yet if you listen to many choreographers and dancers, you get the sense that just scheduling more performances wouldn’t solve everything. These artists often imply that the process, not the product, is the most valuable part of their work — at least to them. Performances, by these lights, are more like peepholes.
Is there a way to widen the aperture? This appears to be the goal of the “The Making Room,” a project led by the veteran choreographer Bebe Miller. At New York Live Arts last week, she and her esteemed colleague Susan Rethorst each presented a new piece on a shared program. So far, so ordinary. But Ms. Miller’s company also unveiled a website — themakingroom.org — that gives the public access to more of the making.
The access we get isn’t equal. Over the course of two years, the two choreographers operated largely independently, and the text and video clips on the website offer much less of Ms. Rethorst’s process than that of Ms. Miller, whose company organized the project. We see bits of Ms. Miller’s rehearsals and in-progress showings, source material and improvisations, experiments that yield discoveries or don’t, and lots of stuff (including dancers) that didn’t make it into the performed piece.
Clicking around, you can get a decent feel for what Ms. Miller and her dancers do with their time, and for the collective exploration that matters to them. That’s much less true of the pages devoted to Ms. Rethorst. But the project has a third element: three occasions on which the choreographers met and compared notes. And here Ms. Rethorst’s participation is crucial.
As she demonstrated in her 2012 book “A Choreographic Mind,” Ms. Rethorst is uncommonly skilled at articulating how her kind of choreographer thinks. She’s a straight talker, too. She’s the one, on the website, who suggests that all this exposure of process might be more interesting to the participants than to audience members.
