Dance and Music Reviews : Miller Offers ‘Some Golden States’ at Cast Theatre

In his new solo “Some Golden States,” performance artist Tim Miller becomes a modern myth-maker, stitching together autobiography and cultural archetypes into a powerful achievement.

The subject of the hour-long work, seen Sunday at the Cast Theatre in Hollywood, is the loss of and effort to recapture Eden, or a least as much of it as may be possible at this stage of his--and our--history.

“I don’t know if there is a place like that,” he says at one point, “But I’m trying to find it anyway.”

But the cost of finding it is enormous. And in the face of the story that unfolds, Miller’s final pledge of affirmation and commitment proved deeply inspiring.

Combining movement, music, slide projections and spoken texts, the work began with the 1987 Whittier earthquake--Miller’s hometown--and the naked Miller lying face-down and shaking spastically. It ended with the loss of a close friend to AIDS and “a big fat lesson about the vulnerability of life.” Throughout, Miller’s homosexuality both propelled and illuminated his quest.

Accompanying slides from Dore’s engravings for Dante’s “Inferno” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost” began the process of accumulating allusions that always made this more than a personal odyssey from back yard vegetable garden to San Francisco and New York, and various stages of self-discovery and maturity along the way.

Miller announced sections of the work as if writing an 18th-Century picaresque novel: “In Which the Youthful Tim Prepares to Leave His Home for the First Time. . . .” But also delimiting sections--extending them expressively--was a recurring kind of abstract circle dance, with strangely self-punishing gestures and frantic shoveling motions.

Miller’s finely honed, intense performance style was much in evidence. But this is not to say that everything worked. His adoption of the inarticulate-young-man persona could become tedious and wearing, his demands of attention grating, and the piece seemed to take a while to get going, although meaning and momentum accelerated toward the end.

In fact, the explosion of primal pain after the death of his friend powerfully brought together many of the central images--the earthquakes and gardens--and led to the catharsis, his and ours, of gentle moralizing in his retelling the sword of Damocles story.

With the specter of AIDS over him, like Damocles with the sword poised above his head, Miller nevertheless chooses to root himself in life, to stay where he is and continue his work.

“I will plant myself in the world,” he repeated to bring the work to a a quiet but powerful end.