Dance : Celeste Miller: Route 66 Connects at Highways

Autobiography used to be the exclusive province of books. Now there’s performance art. And Celeste Miller, who appeared over the weekend at Highways, ranks high on the list of practitioners in this fascinating confessional genre.

Indeed, whenever the dancing monologuist wends her way through Los Angeles, we get another facet of the ceaselessly energetic persona.

This time “Vision on 66: Go, Dad, Go” yielded a female Garrison Keillor spinning out reveries of a family trip on the WPA-built Route 66 where Nat (King) Cole and others got their kicks.

“Are we there yet, dad? Why does the moon follow the car, dad?” become the script’s leitmotifs, complemented by muscular dance gesture and particularized mime, that led to poignant self-revelation.

As Miller recalls pulling off the road for a shabby motel with graying sheets and thin chenille spread and the sound of driveway gravel crunching under the car’s tires, she summons a poetically sad image: a child’s hero of a dad who ignores the “mom” rules, a lost dad, a dead dad.

Beyond that, her enthusiasm for athe famous highway’s lore and history, meticulously researched and then adapted into an often-comic, always-spirited narrative, heighten one’s appreciation of Americana.

Miller is not to be counted among performance solipsists--she always forges pictures larger than herself, pictures that touch a universal humanity, pictures that do more than rail at the injustices perpetrated by society. A genuine treasure.