Words from our stop in Chicago with “In A Rhythm”
Last week we shared In A Rhythm at The Dance Center at Columbia College Chicago. Thanks to these writers for sharing their thoughts in these engaging reviews! Enjoy excerpts below…
Review: ‘In a Rhythm’: Choreographer Bebe Miller talks a lot, the music includes a Nelly hit — it’s a fascinating, atypical approach to dance
By Lauren Warnecke, Chicago Tribune, April 6, 2018
Photo by Robert Altman
In 1955, a 14-year-old African-American boy was kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi. His name was Emmett Till. Till’s mother insisted on a glass topped casket for his funeral. The story is especially significant here; Till was from Chicago, and his death is considered a catalyst that triggered the civil rights movement. New York-based choreographer Bebe Miller, whose company is performing at the Dance Center of Columbia College through Saturday, was a young girl at the time, but can recall the salient event and seeing a photo of the casket in Jet magazine.
I know this because she told me. Standing onstage for the Chicago premiere of Miller’s “In a Rhythm,” she talked about this memory and a trail of others that come alongside it. In truth, Miller’s words are as poignant as the dancing in “In a Rhythm.” Perhaps more so.
Controversy surrounding “Open Casket,” a painting of Till’s body, brought him into the news again last year. The painting, created by Dana Schutz, a white artist, brought up questions of artistic agency. Who is allowed to tell the stories of the civil rights movement?
Miller mentions some of this too, but “In a Rhythm” isn’t about Emmett Till. It’s about syntax — word choice. Writings by Gertrude Stein, Toni Morrison and David Foster Wallace inspired Miller to think about language and how specific cultures organize words.
We hear a tinkling sound as she talks. The single keystroke of a piano. Miller checks in to ask if we hear it too. This note is part of the musical score, a mishmash of genres and broken up by those piano notes. Miller looks amused with herself as she reads off the eclectic list of names, then reads off a passage about syntax from a failed grant application.
Bebe Miller and The Syntax of Movement
By Joanna Furnans, See Chicago Dance, April, 8, 2018
Photo by Robert Altman
The Bebe Miller Company performed “In a Rhythm” this weekend at the Dance Center of Columbia College and I can’t get it out of my mind.
The piece began casually, with the house lights still up when the dancers filed on to the white marley stage. Bebe Miller greeted the audience and introduced each of the dancers before “getting started.” Her voice was friendly and conversational but held the room with a certain command. She continued on, giving us an idea of what we were about to see, and the dancers behind her started to shift. They stayed in the same general positions, but the tone of their bodies sank deeply inward until they became supple statues in tableau. The effect of this shift was similar to adjusting the lens on a pair of binoculars; I zoomed in, got quiet, and started watching intently.
Miller sat down to outline the origins of her inquiry, describing an encounter with a powerful short story by David Foster Wallace—whose mention in performance always makes me cringe; brilliant as he may be, I’m not sure he would make it out of our current #metoo movement unscathed—, a fascination with Astrid Lorange’s approach to the writings of Gertrude Stein, and a re-visiting of Toni Morrison’s more poignant interviews, specifically a 1998 exchange with Charlie Rose (more on that later). For Miller, the synthesis of these three sources is syntax. In the program notes she writes “To me, all three writers capture diverse cultural relevancies through how they structure language: their syntax, and their precise tone, brings meaning.” This got her thinking about the syntax of movement and the ways in which meaning is derived from the activity and organization of bodies in context, space, and time.
Everything is Available, Everything is Here: A Review of In a Rhythm by Bebe Miller
By Alyssa Motter, Newcity Stage, April 6, 2018
Photo by Robert Altman
As part of its ongoing Process v. Product Festival, the Dance Center of Columbia College presents a new collection of dances by Bessie Award-winning choreographer Bebe Miller titled “In a Rhythm” April 5-7. Inspired in part by culturally relevant writers David Foster Wallace, Toni Morrison and Gertrude Stein, Miller navigates the undercurrents of adaptation and translation as she takes a deep look at the syntax of movement—the interplay of action and context in time and in space.
According to Miller, “In a Rhythm” was an experiment in process from the onset. Over the course of two years, she and her collaborators engaged in a series of roaming creative sessions that involved convening with her dynamic cast in the studio to generate movement and derive meanings that evolved alongside the piece. Through this practice, Miller developed a rich kinetic language with organically interwoven thematic elements surrounding race, art and identity in today’s complex cultural landscape.
Throughout the piece, filled with subtle focus, rhythms and gestures, Miller eloquently interjects ideas and stories that provide direct access to her intent and create real time context for the dance to occur within. The overarching sequence of events is carefully arranged to build meaning over time as one section unfolds into the next. In perhaps one of the most poignant moments, dancer Michelle Boulé performs a solo to Donny Hathaway’s “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know” as the rest of the cast, including Miller, witnesses her expressive delivery. The vulnerable strength Boulé channeled through her body was striking in juxtaposition to rigid bolts of felt fabric used to create scenic contrast and depth on stage.
Review: Bebe Miller Company at The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago
By Maddie Kodat, Sixty Inches from Center, April 10, 2018
Photo by Robert Altman
In a Rhythm begins with storytelling, a storytelling which gradually darkens into theater: Bebe Miller steps out onto the stage with her dancers, and begins a short narrative about hearing an audiobook of a David Foster Wallace story. As she continues talking, the lights dim and the bodies around her begin to move – a pleasing, calm split to the viewer’s attention. After all, the David Foster Wallace story, as Miller informs us, “is not a part of this dance.” Soon a single piano note chimes in, and the narrative is subsumed by the familiar structures of concert dance. But they are not so familiar here.
Miller is explicitly interested in the choreographic potentials of syntax: in her words, “how we collide with meaning through the juxtaposed dynamics of action and context, in time and space.” Her work, however, doesn’t merely follow through with this curiosity – it explodes it with a rare breed of infectious joy and sharpness. In this world, the casual release-based grace of postmodern movement is immediately followed by jagged, awkward weight sharing; a reverent silence is punctured by snippets of funk music. The dancers unroll a felt runway with various parts of their body, then shuffle on the fabric to trouble its path. Other pieces of felt are thrown on as costume pieces and then discarded. They form dance circles, stand in contraposto chorus lines, run victory laps, and shove laptops into each other’s faces. They are all ravishing movers, including Miller herself, who joins in on the dancing towards the end of the piece.
The Golden Mean
By Michael J. Kramer, Culture Rover, April 9, 2018
Photo by Robert Altman
Despite its title, In a Rhythm found choreographer Bebe Miller perhaps most curious about getting a little out of sync—or maybe, better said, not worrying if there was a tight thematic groove or not in her evening-length work. After all, there can be rhythm too in the stutter step and the out of phase, the loosely linked and the seemingly incongruent, the jarring collision and the off-kilter combination. Possibly better and realer rhythms. Weird angles make for interesting shapes. Through-lines emerge from the most unlikely conjunctions and associations. We humans are made to articulate. We connect and correlate. And with just a little bit of structure, we can also live with plenty of incoherence, carrying on just fine when the dots don’t quite connect. We walk on guilded splinters, find ways to navigate mysteries. We grasp that there may be no deeper significance to the basic fact of being, but we usually like to spin things together anyway into tales and narratives. Nonetheless, they don’t have to add up perfectly. And there are times when the amorphous multiplicity of meaning is the most precise perception of all.
The challenge that Miller sets up for herself, her dancers, and her audience is how to discern that rhythm beyond the rhythm of conventional tempos, shapes, and forms. For there’s a good argument to make that this formlessness is the most elemental rhythm of all. The question becomes how to choreograph and dance through these more irregular, lurking pulsations. What shape do you use to explore shapelessness, what structures have room for serendipities, what kinds of “syntaxes,” as Miller calls them, can allow for expansively receiving all that life brings your way? How do you access the indeterminacies therein and cogently stage a more relaxed approach to the dynamic between the meaningful and meaningless? Do you have to tighten up and attend more closely to the chaos or do you just relax into the mess of possibilities? Can we see many meanings float by without demanding that they stand still or do we need to freeze-frame them into singularities?
