Dancing Over the Color Line : Bebe Miller’s company is a reflection of her: thoughtful, personal, intense.

In “Yard Dance,” one of her newest dances, Bebe Miller is a strong focal presence, yet she is mostly off to the side, never fully joining forces with the quartet of dancers who respond with vigorous, rhythmic, heavy-footed explosions of movement to a mix of vintage James Brown and contemporary South African music.

Her role within this piece could be compared to her distinctive position within the New York dance scene, in which she has maintained a company for over a decade. Her work has never exemplified any obvious trend of the moment or grabbed attention in a showy manner. Hers has been a consistently thoughtful, personal, quietly intense choreographic presence, exploring and questioning on its own uncompromising terms.

“Yard Dance,” which will have its West Coast premiere when Miller’s nine-member company performs this week at the Luckman Theatre--part of the Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century event--also reflects who Miller is in other ways. It was inspired by two working visits to South Africa, and it includes her own text recalling experiences and issues from those trips. Inevitably, her isolated presence as the lone black dancer in the piece raises issues of racial identity.

In much the same way that Miller isn’t associated with any particular dance trend or movement, she also doesn’t fit neatly under the label “black choreographer.” Her company has always been racially mixed and her choreography has reflected a wide range of interests and concerns. But she also recognizes that her dancing and the dances she makes for others are intricately connected with who she is and how she is perceived.

Discussing her latest dances while relaxing backstage at the Joyce Theatre, where her company recently performed for a week, Miller, 45, weighed her words carefully and spoke earnestly. “I’m very aware, in all these pieces, of the levels of race and culture, and where my place is as an African American within that. Racial identity will never not be an issue for me, but I demand the right to place it at whatever level in my life that I choose. I am celebrating my heritage as an African American, which is an inclusive one. I know that there are questions about being a woman of color leading a company that’s mostly white. Where does that fit in? It’s a very complex, loaded issue, and I think that in all of these pieces I am aware of ambiguities.”

Her musical choices--which have recently included Jimi Hendrix’s works (for her acclaimed 1991 piece “The Hendrix Project”), Faure’s Requiem and songs by the gospel group the Five Blind Boys (which brush up against each other in Miller’s 1994 “Heaven + Earth”) and a score by Seattle-based pianist-songwriter Robin Holcomb (for “Tiny Sisters” [1995])--emphasize Miller’s cultural questioning and her openness to diverse influences.

The music that inspired her just-premiered “Blessed,” also on schedule for the Black Choreographers event, represents an especially intriguing choice. “Blessed” is set to six soaring a cappella gospel songs composed and performed by an Australian group, the Cafe of the Gate of Salvation. Miller was introduced to the Sydney-based ensemble’s recordings through a friend while she was in Australia last year.

“These are white Australians singing African American inspired gospel songs. Apparently the music director, Tony Backhouse, put up a sign 10 years ago asking for people who were interested in singing music derived from that tradition,” explains Miller, who found herself listening to the music daily and deciding it could be the springboard for a new dance. She was intrigued by “that whole mix and layering of cultures.”

The resulting dance “is less an exploration of my own spirituality, but rather works on a level that I hear in the music, which takes us to that gospel place where most of us have never been. I grew up Episcopalian, so we sang Episcopal hymns, not gospel. I feel that ‘Blessed’ is an openly joyous piece, and the music has a lot to do with that.”

Home for Miller was a housing project in Brooklyn, in a mostly black neighborhood. She spent many of her summers, however, at a camp in rural Maine, where her mother worked as a nurse. “My mother, for her own reasons, took my sister and me to dance classes, music lessons, Carnegie Hall--a lot of extracurricular activity that was not found where we were growing up. At some point, I followed more in the direction of what my mother set out for me, while my sister made a point of picking up African dance and African culture. But we both came from that same place of widening our view.”

Miller went on to get her master’s degree in dance from Ohio State University, which she recalls as “a very theoretical dance place for me.” At Ohio State, she hooked up with choreographer Nina Wiener, a former Twyla Tharp dancer. Miller danced in Wiener’s company until the need to investigate and develop her own style led her to establish a troupe in 1985.

That style includes her fascination with contact improvisation, the process of allowing dancers’ bodies to spontaneously interact. She’s interested, Miller says, in the “weight and flow and dynamics” generated by that process. And that makes the dancers an important part of creating the choreography. Their “creative insights and energies are part of each work,” Miller notes in her Joyce Theater program.

In selecting her dancers, she cites “availability of personality” as an important factor. “Some people look at the line a dancer is making and some look at the story they’re telling. I’m trying to look at how that story comes out through their line. I look for who works well together, especially for partnering, which is something I love to feature in my work. For that, I’m there more as a guide than as a designer, so getting people who have that facility is real important to me.”

In 1994, Miller and her dancers were invited to perform in Johannesburg, and she gained insight into the South African dance scene when she spent part of that year creating a work for the PACT Dance Company there. She has since returned to South Africa, setting another of her works on PACT, a mixed-race company, and also working with Jazzart Dance Theatre in Cape Town. Miller has also organized a U.S./South Africa dance exchange. Dancers from Jazzart Dance Theatre, for example, will be coming to New York to work with Miller’s company during its upcoming residency at New York University.

Miller was struck by “the whole completely astounding political mix of what’s going on in South Africa. I definitely felt more hopeful in South Africa for moving beyond just an issue of black and white. They are willing and eager to make a new mix, which I find incredibly positive. While there is some hostility there, it’s nowhere near as polarized as here.

“There is contemporary dance there--mostly by whites--and because of the cultural boycotts, there was a lot they didn’t get [to see]. I think on the level of companies, it’s not going to be easy for a while, as they try to figure out who merits what, for what reasons. There’s a lot of redressing of imbalances, righting of wrongs.”

The hopefulness as well as the challenges have found their way into “Yard Dance.”

“My presence in that group polarizes it right away,” Miller observes of the piece. “But the biggest impression I came back with from South Africa is an openness to that difference as well as the sense of ‘OK, let’s move on from there.’ ”

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“BLACK CHOREOGRAPHERS MOVING TOWARD THE 21ST CENTURY,” the Bebe Miller Company Luckman Theatre, Cal State Los Angeles, 5151 University Drive. Dates: Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m. Prices: $12-$20. Phone: (213) 343-6610.