Women in the Arts: An Interview with Bebe for the NEA
This quarter’s National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) newsletter, Women in the Arts: Galvanizing, Encouraging, Inspiring, features an interview with Bebe Miller from Paulette Beete!
How Do I Not Stop Myself?
By Paulette Beete, NEA Arts Magazine
Bebe Miller | ‘Necessary Beauty’ | Photo: Julieta Cervantes
Bebe Miller started her eponymous dance company in 1985. Since then she has created more than 50 dance works for the company and expanded her choreographic vocabulary to include digital media, text, theater, and other narrative elements. With features at Jacob’s Pillow, the Walker Art Center, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and other national and international venues, Miller has cemented her reputation as one of dance’s foremost innovators. Her singular vision has garnered her a U.S. Artists Ford Fellowship, a Doris Duke Artist Award, four NEA Choreographers Fellowships, and many other awards. She also had a long tenure as the Distinguished Professor of Dance at Ohio State University, and most recently, she’s expanded her repertoire to include fostering artist-driven convenings around the topic of archiving and documenting dance works.
As Miller notes in her mission statement, “I’ve always been interested in the space between people, how telling, how specific, and how dynamic it can be.” While her work is intimately concerned with the body, she is less concerned with the gender of a particular body than with its “awkward grace.” Still, one can’t help but look at a work like the NEA-supported Necessary Beauty, with its multigenerational cast of female dancers, and not get a powerful sense that by ignoring the limitations of gender, Miller has in fact broken through them. She herself admitted when we spoke with her that her unwillingness to be confined by or even look at the borders of gender and race have made her a role model for a younger generation of dancers and choreographers. In her own voice, here is Miller on the body, her legacy, and why the most important question she asks herself is, “How do I not stop myself?”
BUILDING AN IDENTITY OF HER OWN
I can’t take away my femaleness. I’m regarded as such, as part of what it is that I do or who I am. But I feel like that’s not the only thing that I am. The same thing with being a black woman. That’s just part of this whole structure and identity that I’ve put together, some of it more handed to me than others. In the dance field, clearly there are more male choreographers, who are getting more money, who are in the public eye. Whether that should be me [in their position] has not occurred to me. That really has not been my interest.
