LETTING HENDRIX LEAD : Bebe Miller Says Her ‘60s-Sounding Project Is Really Just About Being in Step With the Guitarist’s Music

Expect to hear Jimi Hendrix’s screechy, twangy “Star-Spangled Banner” and his apocalyptic version of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” at Irvine Barclay Theatre Monday. But don’t expect to learn much about how choreographer Bebe Miller views the turbulent era those rock giants symbolize. And don’t expect nostalgia.

“The Hendrix Project,” which Miller created last year for her New York modern dance troupe, is performed to several Hendrix songs. But it’s no analysis of the rebellious ‘60s nor a trip down memory lane, she said recently. Rather, it’s a visualization of the deceased guitarist’s music.

“Hendrix had an incredible sense of control over his instrument,” Miller said, but he was “also out of control and just following the line of the sound. He was also on drugs, but that’s another story. I wanted to do that--get lost in (the sound) yet still be there--and it seemed like he was a very good guide into that place.”

Miller, whose insightful, propulsive work has drawn considerable attention in the past few years, founded her company in 1984. “The Hendrix Project” marks the company’s Orange County concert debut.

Miller, 42, will dance in the piece, which echoes Hendrix’s passionate and moody strains with characteristic Millerisms. Unleashing explosive energy, dancers hurtle themselves through space, onto the floor, or into one another, shift direction abruptly, and execute everyday movements, which in this case means staggering, trembling or writhing as if withdrawing from drugs.

The work, made for seven dancers, also explores the idea of community, another Miller hallmark. Above all, it’s about “following the course of the music,” she said, conceding nonetheless that the ‘60s evoked “a sense of people banding together” that she sought to convey.

“There’s this kind of human interest thing I’ve been dealing with for a while,” she said in a telephone interview during a national tour stop in Lincoln, Neb. Typically, “we relate to each other very consciously.”

Actually, the six lead dancers in the other piece she’ll present here will be more inwardly focused, said Miller, a 1988 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient who danced with New York avant-garde troupes led by Nina Weiner and Dana Reitz after earning a graduate degree in dance from Ohio State University.

“In Mnemosyne’s House, Again and Again” is about memory, specifically those sometimes disconcerting, often fragmentary memories that seem to streak across the mind, wholly unbidden, she said. The title refers to Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory. It’s a work-in-progress to be unveiled in finished form as a full-evening piece next June.

“Flashes of memory,” made visible by dancers in “flashes of imagery juxtaposed very abruptly against others,” can surface “uncalled for, have no order, and are sometimes not complete, but somehow they are what make us up as whole human beings,” she said.

Dancers may stand still in silence as she explores the line “between dancing and not dancing,” she said, adding, “I don’t think the piece leads up to a climax or has a beginning, middle and end, but is more like an ongoing journey of images or a quilt, (which has) a lot of intricate pieces that may not have a cohesive pattern, really, but somehow come back to the same whole.”

Miller said audiences may have difficulty accepting this less linear form, but she believes that works-in-progress have popular appeal.

“You’re not seeing a rehearsal; it’s a finished thing,” she said, “but I feel it’s a lot more fresh and closer to the source of inspiration.”

What: Bebe Miller Company, the first of four nationally recognized companies taking part in the Feet First Contemporary Dance Series, presented by the Irvine Barclay Theatre and UC Irvine Cultural Events.

When: Monday, Oct. 19, 8 p.m.

Where: Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine.

Whereabouts: On the UC Irvine campus, on Campus Road near University Drive, across from the Marketplace mall.

Wherewithal: $28.

Where to call: (714) 854-4646 or (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).