Dancing From Memory : Choreography: Two works by Bebe Miller to be presented Monday in Irvine are inspired by random recollections and by the music of rock guitar great Jimi Hendrix.

There’s that odd, sometimes disconcerting phenomenon when a memory suddenly surfaces, and, seemingly out of nowhere, a scene or part of one is vividly replayed: Mother smoothes out a linty blue blanket while making the bed; a car careens up the drive, crunching gravel beneath it; a champagne bottle crashes to the floor, spewing glass and aromatic liquid.

Modern-dance choreographer Bebe Miller turns her attention to such random recollections in a new work that will be performed Monday at Irvine Barclay Theatre during her company’s Orange County debut.

“We’re all made up of these flashes of memory that can come uncalled-for, have no order and are sometimes not complete,” Miller said recently. “But somehow they are what make us up as whole human beings.”

“In Mnemosyne’s House, Again and Again” is a work-in-progress to be unveiled next June as a full-evening piece. Miller’s 8-year-old New York-based troupe is the first of four nationally recognized companies to appear in the Feet First Contemporary Dance Series, presented by the Irvine theater and UC Irvine Cultural Events.

(Irvine Barclay President Douglas C. Rankin calls the series a “survey of the state of the art” of modern dance in America and said UCI dance professor Donald McKayle and other authorities were consulted in selecting participants. Those also include the Hubbard Street Dance Company, on Jan. 29; the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, on March 2; and the Joe Goode Performance Group, on May 7.)

The work, titled after Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, is something of a departure for Miller, who generally fills space with propulsive nonstop energy, flying bodies that tend to collide, everyday gestures and probing scenarios about relationships, whether involving two people or a whole community.

The new work, which is danced in street clothes, is more of a dance-theater piece, Miller said, pointing out that dancers at times stand immobile, in silence, as she explores “the line between dancing and not dancing.”

“The dancers go between being dancers and pedestrians,” she said in a telephone interview during a tour stop in Lincoln, Neb. “They’re playing with (questions of) when is standing still dancing, and when is standing still just standing still and watching something?”

But the work is no abstract movement study, she said.

“Because of the structure of the piece, you don’t watch us build a rapport or build a community; you see these flashes of imagery juxtaposed very abruptly against others . . . the dancers entering and exiting these states” of consciousness.

The overall effect is a visual metaphor for unconnected memories or fragments of memories that compose a unified totality, she said.

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

The inspiration for “In Mnemosyne’s House” came from artist Ann Hamilton’s work. Miller thought Hamilton’s sensual room-size installations filled with found objects were “incredibly evocative of a sense of place.”

“I felt she conjured up impressions of places I’d been before that seemed primordial, and for me, they weren’t really explained. But it didn’t matter what her context was; I was fascinated by how her arrangement of things could bring up that sense of incomplete memories. I envisioned playing around with a series of those bits of memory and trying to figure out what they all add up to.”

Visual art has been a longtime interest for Miller, who majored in art history as an undergraduate at Earlham College in Indiana.

“I like the idea of making things; I think that’s primary, and (choreography) is the form that that’s taking now. I like to see space changed by the presence of people moving in it.”

Miller, 42, a native New Yorker, earned a master’s degree in dance at Ohio State University, won two prestigious Bessie New York Dance and Performance Awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has been choreographing since 1978. She founded her company six years later, after dancing in the New York avant-garde troupes of Nina Weiner and Dana Reitz.

“Nina always encouraged us to use our own work, and I never was one of those dancers who was versatile enough to join (any company), so it always seemed if I was going to dance, I’d be making up my own movement,” she said.

Miller will dance here in “The Hendrix Project” (1991), performed to songs by Jimi Hendrix, among them his apocalyptic version of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

It’s not a commentary on the turbulent ‘60s, she said, but a visualization of the deceased guitarist’s music.

“Hendrix had an incredible sense of control over his instrument, (but he was) also out of control and just following the line of the sound,” she said. “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 presented “The Hendrix Project” in Los Angeles as part of last year’s “Black Choreographers Moving Towards the 21st Century.” The eight-day festival of panels and performances featured work by black choreographers exclusively, but its organizers avoided using the term black dance in favor of something less limiting. Miller takes a similar view.

Every work she makes “has something to do with me being black,” she said. That fact “never goes away; it doesn’t stay outside of the studio. If I don’t choose to point my finger at it and say, ‘This is what I’m talking about as a black woman here’; it doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

But both dances on Monday’s program explore more than that, she said.

“There are other things I’m interested in besides just telling my story and a lot of things that make me up. I do want people to know I am a black choreographer . . . and maybe (these works are) not what they expect from a black choreographer, but it seems like the whole point is to get beyond that.”

Bebe Miller Company , Monday , . , 8 p.m., at Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. $28. (714) 854-4646.