Bebe Miller’s Psychology of Making Dance

Upstage, a dancer pours herself down the front of her partner, molded to his body--then barrel-rolls off his back. Meanwhile another couple move in a counterpoint tug-of-war, and later collapse in a heap on the floor.

In these duets from “Habit of Attraction,” New York choreographer Bebe Miller mines a vein of post-modernism that lies somewhere between psychodrama and formal dance-making.

Formerly a dancer with Nina Wiener’s company, Miller, 37, choreographs duets that are like torch songs in action. Her “Hell Dances” feature partnering whose tango-like tensions and aggressive yielding movement style play out sexual dramas of rejection and abandonment, struggle and reconciliation.

Two of the “Hell Dances,” “Habit of Attraction” and “This Room Has No Windows and I Can’t Find You Anywhere,” along with the solo “Heart, Heart” and a new work, “Thick Sleep,” will be performed by Miller, a Bessie Award winner, and her six dancers in their Los Angeles debut tonight at the Japan America Theatre.

Partnering is where Miller reveals her choreographic intent--conveying dramatic interactions and emotion without overt theatrical gestures and allowing the expressive content to emerge directly from the physicality of the movement.

According to Miller, partnering is part physical intuition, part body mechanics. “With partnering, there’s a certain trust I have to have from the dancers. Because you can’t say specifically, ‘OK now you’re going to put your head here.’ You say, ‘Take this phrase material, Nikki--and Scott, you interfere in some way.’

“It’s their physical insight I direct, rather than setting steps. Most of the time I feel like I am just trying to let them go . . . and keep from falling over at the same time,” says Miller, making a gesture like trying to hold back an avalanche.

Despite the open-endedness of the process, Miller’s method in the rehearsal studio is hardly a “group grope.” “I’m glad that I put Nikki (Castro) and Scott (Smith) together because of his facility with Contact (improvisation), and her facility with taking chances and just being a particular kind of live wire,” Miller says. “Different pairings would have come up with a whole other piece.

“In a way it comes down to physics, to body physics. There are only a certain number of principles involved. You can slide that way. You go up and down. It’s the arranging of that and your awareness of that arrangement that make a movement phrase what it is. It’s where the emotion comes from.”

She describes the choreographic process as a matter of knowing how to generate and transmit movement material: “How to get a certain level of invention in the body and how to quantify movement quality and dynamics.” Finding a way to describe small adjustments in dynamics is a large part of making a specific movement quality legible. Getting it across to the dancers is a complicated business, according to Miller.

“I like to play around with the exact moment in a juxtaposition when one dynamic changes into another. And how that change is a body change as well as a mental change. To sense that planar difference, I try to make a very linear description of what those things are so that somebody can follow them. I am a pretty idiosyncratic dancer. But it does me no good if I can’t get anybody else to do it.”

“Thick Sleep,” a new piece with a saxophone score by Lenny Pickett, is concerned not with partnering, but with the notion of character. In a maze of eccentric activity overlaid with commedia dell’arte imagery, the characters in “Thick Sleep” suggest circus troupe performers, somnambulists or wastrels engaged in idiosyncratic miming gestures.

“The idea of character was very releasing . . . and scary,” Miller says. “You have to depend on an inner image of the character. This is very specific theater. What kind of physical language are these people speaking?”