The Brave New World of Bebe Miller : With an emphasis on context, the Bessie Award-winning choreographer takes an unusual departure from form in her latest work

No one has ever accused Bebe Miller of making dances that are too clear.

A two-time Bessie Award-winner, Miller is drawn to the colorful ambiguities of psychology, and her dances have typically sketched the clarity (or confusion) of her inner life rather than addressing themselves to any distinct narratives.

But now Miller, who danced with the neo-Tharpian Nina Weiner for six years before diving into the radically minimalist work of choreographer Dana Reitz for a year, seems to be cautiously edging her way towards greater social consciousness in her work. Context--social and political--is becoming increasingly important to her.

Miller’s company appears at Royce Hall, UCLA, Friday and Saturday--her second local engagement in two years. The company also returns to San Diego on Feb. 2 and 3, performing in the Educational Cultural Complex, sponsored by Sushi Gallery. Among the pieces scheduled: “Rain,” a solo that recently surprised audiences in New York with what seemed obvious symbolism--colors that added up to nothing less than the African liberation flag (red, black, green).

A lithe, black women with layers of dreadlocks, Miller wore a gown of crimson velvet and danced on a large patch of farm-fresh green sod. To anyone who had followed the choreographer’s recent work, it seemed an unusual departure.

Oddly, the 39-year-old Miller, a native New Yorker who went to college in Indiana and then to Ohio State for her graduate dance degree, claims she was unaware of the symbolism until she first performed the piece. “The red and green were quite conscious color decisions,” she says, “but the red, green and black ?

“It wasn’t till I had done it a few times that I realized it. I was dealing with textures more than colors: The opulence of velvet--so rich, so imperialistic--versus the depth and necessity of earth, soil, grass.

“I can’t dissociate myself from a Third World point of view, because it’s me. But the piece is much more than just a Marcus Garvey piece--although, interestingly enough, I am making a Marcus Garvey wall-hanging as we speak. While there is some of that in there, it’s limiting because the piece is really about this particular black woman’s return to earth.

“And not just this particular woman. I mean, I was thinking about the globe as a whole more than about me finding my roots. It’s more of a prayer or a shout for more people than me to say, ‘ C’mon folks, roll in the grass!’ ”

Instead of showing couples engaged in physical metaphors of hand-to-hand combat as in “The Hell Dances,” Miller has recently started making dances that show the inner workings of different social interactions, as in her new group work “Allies,” in which Nikki Castro, one of the six dancers in the piece, appears to have been given unique power over the rest--who then scatter away like greased marbles.

“After ‘The Hell Dances,’ I thought we would kill each other,” Miller says with an exhausted sigh. “Emotionally, there was a sense that we were co-existing in a way that I couldn’t see anything brighter happening. And maybe nothing brighter does happen. It may have been a dead-end.”

I felt, ‘OK: We have man and we have woman, and they don’t get along. But we do get along; I think we figured it out. And that’s part of what ‘Allies’ is about. The world does continue. For some reason it seems there are more subtle reasons why we get along than why we really fight.

“But it’s really elusive. It’s survival but it’s different than the sense of surviving over your opponent. Why are they opponents at all? After all, we do take walks in the park together.”

With “Allies” (which she calls her glasnost piece), Miller feels she has finally found a way to expand the mechanics of her psychology out to the world. “Allies” is a real “turf piece,” she says. “It’s like looking at an active social mechanism from a number of different sides. . . . Everyone realizes that the continuity of a group depends on its inner balance, maybe even a reliance on each other, even though it’s not necessarily a comfortable place. If ‘The Hell Dances’ were about a sense of antagonism and drama, there’s a sense in ‘Allies’ of the greater good and the continuing of the social whole.”

However, for all the changes in Miller’s choreography, she still hesitates to leap into a world of direct symbolism. “Rain” came about, she says, “because I realized that all the intellectual exertion of ‘Allies’ wasn’t the answer I thought it would be. It was a surface, front-brained approach.

“There’s a sequence of events from ‘The Hell Dances,’ where we see the other, to ‘Allies,’ where we can see a plurality of others, to ‘Rain,’ which sort of goes back underground and says forget all that stuff: The answer is that there is an unknown that we can tap into.

“ ‘Rain’ isn’t only a black piece. So many choreographers prefer for their work to be referred to as black dance done by black choreographers about black subjects. And, although that wasn’t the case for me for a long time, it’s sort of changing now because people keep asking me about it, so a point is already being made. But in recognition of that point, my work can be used to expand on the genre and expand the reactions to it.

“What’s implied is going back to self. You’re not left with the fact of blackness but the fact of me. And I think that has to do with where I’m going, and I might be going there because of my blackness and my femaleness. But it’s a place everybody can go to.”