A PRIVATE LIFE RESHAPED INTO PERFORMANCE

Midway through his 1982 dance-based performance piece “Postwar,” Tim Miller frantically distributed photocopies of his birth certificate to the audience--as if pleading for his right to exist and as if the document somehow guaranteed him a secure future.

More than anything else in his innovative, internationally recognized body of work, this moment seems emblematic of Miller’s mission and contribution as an artist: making an intense autobiographical perspective become as central to dance drama as it has long been to literature, motion pictures and the legitimate theater.

This perspective not only brings to dance a new kind of immediacy--what Miller calls “the more direct response”--it also personalizes such unwieldy if not overwhelming subjects as The Bomb, sexual identity, the factionalism of our political process and the role of traditional American values in shaping our view of ourselves. As Miller spelled out in chanted wordplay for “Democracy in America” (1984), history becomes his story.

In the Los Angeles area--where he grew up and trained as a dancer before leaving for New York in 1978--Miller has presented three works. “Postwar” (about adolescent identity crises brought on by the military buildup during his childhood) was imported by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. “Democracy in America” (about the confusions and responsibilities of political action) turned up on the “Explorations” series and, last summer, the first draft of “Buddy Systems” (about his early homosexual experiences in Hollywood) graced the “Dance Park” festival.

On Saturday, a full-evening version of “Buddy Systems” (which now incorporates a depiction of Miller’s life over the last three years with writer/English teacher/co-performer Douglas Sadownick) will open at the Cast-at-the-Circle Theatre in Hollywood for a three-week run. It raises again the classic questions of how life influences art--and vice versa--that have confronted Miller throughout his career and also prompts some new ones about risk and responsibility.

Miller acknowledges that autobiographical performance art is “a form with many antecedents but no coherent tradition, a convention that’s emerging intuitively like the ‘I’ voice did in New Journalism. We’re sort of making it up as we go along.

“If you’re viewing your life as material, which I’ve consistently and almost exclusively done in my work for eight years, there’s an energy that is generated, a point of view put forward, sensations offered, a certain kind of authority defined that is completely different from that of a well-written character or an exciting ensemble theater piece or a fine corps of dancers,” he declares.

“For me, the agenda of the form is to present my body, my life--with all the pitfalls which that entails but without the much greater artifice of theatrical tradition.”

Until Miller’s generation, even the most personal ballet and modern dance creations nearly always distilled the choreographers’ feelings and experiences through myth, fiction or pure movement design. And Miller, too, once had ambitions to serve the formal post-modern dance aesthetic of Merce Cunningham: “seeing things as action, space, time and gesture,” as he describes it.

However, influenced by the multimedia work of Spalding Gray, Robert Wilson and others, he began developing a custom-fit performance style that fused elements from post-modern choreography with those found in the obsessional, European dance-theater idiom. “My pieces definitely begin as an idea,” he says, “but dance is the motor. For me, the creative process is much more linked to movement improvisation, working with objects--all sorts of physical activity--than to theater.”

Punctuated by kaleidoscopic video and slide-screen imagery, strident music and sound effects and passages of disjointed speech, Miller’s autobiographical pieces are too expressionist in style to be mistaken for documentary accounts. “It’s such arrogance to think you could possibly make an accurate expression of something that you’re as wildly subjective about as your own past,” he comments scornfully. “It never interested me to try.”

At one point in “Buddy Systems,” he makes the issue explicit by critiquing his own representation of an experience: “No, it’s not that way; it’s not exactly how it happened. That feeling was not exactly like that . . . .”

More difficult to accept or to explain: the extreme contrast between the dauntingly self-possessed and voluble 27-year-old Tim Miller of today and the pent-up, inarticulate Tim Miller seen in “Postwar,” “Democracy in America” and the 1985 “Buddy Systems.” Even Sadownick--Miller’s lover and non-dancing coperformer in “Buddy Systems”--forthrightly says, “I have no conception that he is the person on stage. . . .”

“I take it as given,” Miller answers, “that any performer who presents himself is presenting some kind of exaggerated, skewed or postured persona. But it isn’t like acting a character in a play. The difference is that the persona is coming from personal responses, memories and preconceptions about oneself.”

“It’s analogous to the way silent film comedians created personae. Chaplin, my favorite artist of the century, was always pretentious, urbane--his personality was a pill. But he created this Tramp character and the Tramp is always Chaplin to me, definitely an autobiographical figure: a facet of him.”

“Buddy Systems” grew out of Miller’s desire to make a more intimate piece than the large-scale “Democracy in America” and was largely prompted by his return to Hollywood, a place where his teen-age search for what his persona in the work calls “true love, real sex and worldly experience” left him alternately degraded and exalted. Making the piece also coincided, Miller explains, with a major change in his life: “the first coherent period of being with another person in a love relationship.”

“The piece is for me the stations of the cross, as it were, of how I came to be with Douglas,” he says. “And, in a way, performing the piece with Douglas has elements of the marriage component. It is Douglas and I finding a way of being together, doing together--because on one level it’s practical: If you’re a performer, you tour, you travel, you’re gone and that’s not a tenable way of life for two people.”

Sadownick agrees: He says he became a performer to be with Miller. “I learned the only way to get close to Tim was to be able to discuss our relationship as artifact,” he reveals. “I even used to wonder if our intimacy was based on being public.” He now believes “the health of our life together is based on our being co-workers. There would be no relationship if we were not performing.”

To Sadownick, “Buddy Systems” is an expression of the New Monogamy that has been one response by the gay community to the ongoing AIDS crisis. It affirms, he states, “that we are a real couple together--that we are two men and we love each other and we take moral responsibility for that.”

Like his partner, Miller is sensitive to what he considers his responsibility as a gay spokesman if not role-model. He points out that “Buddy Systems” deliberately avoids being a “coming out” melodrama and that his relationship with Sadownick is presented without reference to societal attitudes--much less Supreme Court decisions.

But his outlook is hardly naive or sentimental; indeed he even pointedly adopts a common homophobic slur when explaining his need to make homosexuality central to his work. “When I hit New York, the art world felt very closeted,” he recalls angrily. “Most of the major artists were fags and none of them talked about it. That was very disturbing to me: I felt they weren’t doing their jobs.” To break this silence, he organized and performed in “Men Together,” a weeklong New York gay performance festival in 1980.

On this score, Sadownick credits Miller with inspiring his own forays into autobiographical revelation: essays on their life together and other subjects for the New York Native, a gay-oriented newspaper.

Off stage, the owlish, magnetic Miller and the sly, tousled Sadownick often seem like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn off on some grand voyage of discovery. And, indeed, they have become something of a cottage industry together: “Buddy Systems,” the Native articles, a recent 10-part interview series with them and other male couples in the Advocate (a national gay publication), and an interview taped for the upcoming Phil Donahue TV miniseries “The Human Animal” all refract many of the same incidents and emotional stresses in their lives.

But when Sadownick suggests that they sometimes confront their intimacy more fully in the articles, interviews and performances than in their private life, Miller reacts as if betrayed. “The piece is not one-hundredth as intimate as our life together,” he replies tensely.

“A sensitive issue in autobiographical performance work is the accusation that it is a replacement for life, that your actual life is bankrupt and has nothing to hold it--which is nonsense,” he emphasizes. “Someone who is unsympathetic to this kind of work could easily take Douglas’ statement and conclude from it ‘These two spoiled brats are foisting totally self-indulgent therapy on an unsuspecting public!’ ” Clearly, Miller doesn’t like the distinction between life and art to blur.

Sadownick counters that Miller’s artistic uses of their shared experience can be personally exploitive. For instance, Miller incorporates in his sound score for “Buddy Systems” phone messages that he and Sadownick left for each other during the early, troubled days of their relationship. Sadownick says he still feels “on the verge of a fight” when he hears them.

“Those phone messages come out of Tim not wanting to be my boyfriend,” he remembers with some bitterness. “Presumably he didn’t see the road to connection because I was an academic and a writer and he was an artist/warrior.

“When I hear them, right now, it rankles that those messages that were made in deep intimacy and even pain are used as a product. In a way it seems almost cheap.”

To the ultimate issue implied by Sadownick’s remarks, Miller quickly responds that “There’s no question to me now that life is more important than art--both my own life, my life with Douglas, my life in relation to my family, friends. I think I used to be much blither about drawing other people into the realm of my own supposed honesty. But not any longer.”

As illustration, he speaks about “Live Boys,” a piece he made in 1980 with artist John Bernd. It was a living-journal piece, he says, that made him skeptical about “how completely life could go into art” and made him resist thinking about making a piece like that again.

“That was literally a situation where two weeks after having met another man, I was already making a piece about being involved in a relationship,” he notes. “Two months later, we made another version of the piece about being in some kind of happy mode. Three months after that a version about having difficulties, and in another two months a version about it being over.

“I think with the most fragile part of our lives, that’s like walking across a freeway with a blindfold. That’s why I waited until Douglas and I, in a way, had earned the right to make a piece about ourselves.”

A final insight about dancing your life and living your dance from Tim Miller, based (as always) on his personal experience: “Before there’s a foundation in life, to build a foundation in press clippings is a very, very foolish thing to do.”