DANCE REVIEW : Bebe Miller and Company at Japan America

Bebe Miller’s dances are something like expert detective stories--with clues about people’s motives accumulating in surprising incidents until essential truths about them stand revealed.

Part of the generation of postmodern choreographers who fuse a minimalist sense of movement process with the expressive priorities of European dance-theater, Miller probes the ambiguities of human nature without resorting to linear narrative. Instead, she creates motion-structures in which her characters give themselves away.

In her 1986 solo “Heart, Heart”--the oldest work on her four-part program at the Japan America Theatre on Friday--Miller defined character purely through dynamic contrasts, developing a “conversation” between two people symbolized by adjacent chairs. The accompanying texts centered on family relationships--and you could indeed see the links and overlap between the jabbing, percussive dancing that portrayed one person and the more liquid, circular vocabulary adopted for the other.

Densely layered with images and counterpoint, two excerpts from Miller’s 1987 full-evening work “The Hell Dances” depicted cycles of engulfing sexual need and tense, stifled rejection. In “This Room Has No Windows and I Can’t Find You Anywhere,” Miller brilliantly repudiated all the stale truisms about “masculine” and “feminine” dancing, with Elizabeth Caron, Nikki Castro and herself sometimes moving in short, hot, assaultive bursts, while Scott Smith, Earnie Stevenson and Jeremy Weichsel often moved in a more sustained, modulated and even intuitive style. The women did a lion’s share of lifting, the men submitted passively to being manipulated--and same-sex partnering was given absolute parity. Welcome to the ‘90s.

“The Habit of Attraction” simultaneously examined two stormy love relationships, suggesting why one broke apart and one cohered, but focusing most of all on the electric interplay between participants: high-risk partnering of devastating intensity.

If “The Hell Dances” investigated character, Miller’s new “Thick Sleep” dealt with personality: the fidgety, idiosyncratic mannerisms that conceal basic drives. Deliberately fragmentary and hyperkinetic, but also frequently (to its cost) condescending about its characters, it traced a process of growing conformity to both a dress code and a shared movement idiom and then showed a return to nervous individuality.

Although the expansive group dances did convey an exhilarating liberation-in-togetherness, the skirted, sleeveless unisex vests designed by Amy Downs proved a curiously drab uniform for transcending personal foibles.

However, the jazz score by Lenny Pickett perfectly reflected (or inspired) the multiplicity of viewpoints in the dancing, as well as the jittery attacks. Miller obviously likes accompaniment with as many components as her eclectic choreography, but--unlike C. Hyams-Hart in “The Hell Dances” and Hearn Gadbois in “Heart, Heart”--Pickett commands creative resources as exciting and sophisticated as her own.