To technique, she adds tech

WHEN it comes to embracing technology and its potential to expand the limits of her art form, contemporary choreographer Bebe Miller describes herself as a “new nerd.”

“I’m kind of a latecomer -- well, not that late,” jokes the 55-year-old Miller, whose multimedia dance piece, “Landing/Place,” will have its West Coast premiere Wednesday at downtown’s REDCAT at Walt Disney Hall -- a space that, acknowledges REDCAT executive director Mark Murphy, is always eager to present interdisciplinary and high-tech performances.

“I’m really enjoying having access to the set of tools,” Miller says from Ohio, where she’s been exploring motion-capture animation -- the technique used to turn actor Andy Serkis into the animated Gollum character in “The Lord of the Rings” movie trilogy. “And my feeling is that in L.A., we’re going to have an audience that is pretty well versed in a lot of this work and might be interested in our take on it.”

In “Landing/Place,” Miller freely mixes animation and video, projected onto scrims, with live dancers moving on the stage to music performed on laptop and slide guitar by Albert Mathias. The creative team for this evening-length dance piece also includes digital animators Vita Berezina-Blackburn and Brian Windsor as well as video/media artists Marlon Barrios Solano, Maya Ciarrocchi, Robbie Shaw and James Wood.

Miller’s entree into such new-nerd experimentation came through her position as a dance professor at Ohio State University, whose Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design helped develop “Landing/Place.”

Miller formed the Bebe Miller Dance Company in 1985 after dancing in the New York troupes of Nina Weiner and Dana Reitz. For most of her career, Miller toured with her company when not rehearsing or performing in New York City. Then, five years ago, she was offered a professorship at Ohio State, where she had earned her master’s degree. Now she teaches for five months a year, free for the remainder of the year to assemble a troupe of dancers and go on tour.

Although there is no full-time dance company, Miller tends to hire dancers she has worked with before, “so I feel it is the continuity that makes it more of a company than a ‘project,’ ” she says.

She does not perform in “Landing/Place,” but she does still dance. “Right now I’m just interested in making work by being outside of it, so I can see it,” she says. “And if I sound testy about it, it’s because I just had a review that said: ‘55 and no longer dancing ...’ ”

The perks of academia

MILLER has mixed feelings about leaving New York City for Ohio but has come to enjoy the combination of affordable housing and the freedom to make dances without the constant pressure to tour new work to pay dancers’ salaries and company operating expenses. In the case of “Landing/Place,” the security of her university post allowed her to take three years to develop the piece, which she says is loosely inspired by a sense of other-ness she felt during a 1999 visit to Eritrea, in Africa. During her company’s last appearance in Los Angeles in 1996 -- at Luckman Theatre as part of the Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century event -- Miller’s company performed “Yard Dance,” inspired by a trip to South Africa and the differences between the reality of the region’s racial politics and what the American viewer sees on CNN.

Access to new technology also came with the academic job. “The reason I got into technology was because I could,” Miller says. “Here at Ohio State, they have a motion-capture lab that costs $13,000 a week to operate. I was able to use it in-kind and to get college grants to pay for the animator and artists’ residencies. And because I was new to Ohio, bringing a professional company there, there was lots of fortuitous funding happening.” Besides university sources, the mile-long list of supporters includes the National Endowment for the Arts, the Doris Duke Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ohio Arts Council, Altria Group Inc. and the New York State Council on the Arts.

“The video is pretty straightforward, but we worked really hard with the motion-capture not to just leave it in the form of the body but to take certain humanistic movement and apply that in unexpected ways,” Miller says. “Maybe there’s a way of seeing something else besides the body acting out that carries some sense of human movement.

“For example, one dancer turns into a flock of birds. There is another group that become sort of cloud figures, like Michelin men, bouncing all over. At the same time, the live performers are doing the same kind of action but not specifically the same thing.”

Suzanne Carbonneau, a dance critic, historian and professor at Virginia’s George Mason University, says that the use of motion-capture technology has not changed the content of Miller’s dances -- frequently exploring how culture shapes identity -- but rather has broadened Miller’s vocabulary. “She doesn’t use it in the way that I think it’s been used typically in Hollywood, to replicate the motion that was captured or as data for research,” Carbonneau says.

“I do think her vocabulary has taken a fascinating turn. It’s more eccentric -- and I mean that in a good way. It is in some ways more obsessive in the sense that by really having the data for motion capture, she can explore one person’s movement, and what it means to be that person, on a very particular bodily level.”

Miller, a native New Yorker, says she has been experimenting with projected imagery since 1995, and adds that many contemporary choreographers, as well as theater artists, are headed in a similar direction; this year, motion capture was used to analyze Merce Cunningham’s choreography at Stanford University as part of a yearlong campus event called “Encounter Merce.”

“I think we’re moving in a more cinematic way; at any party, people are going to be talking about some movie,” Miller says. “It’s the big screen, it’s seductive, and today anybody can make their own reality show. I originally wasn’t going to use the motion capture as imagery, I was just going to use it as a tool to make me look at movement differently -- but it’s seductive, it’s kind of ... cool.

“I feel like, when we watch movies, we lie back in our seats, and live movement takes us forward.” In combining the two, she says, “I feel like I’m choreographing the dance of the audience member -- when do you move back to take in this huge, huge image, and when are you pulled forward to look at the dancer, and can you accommodate both of those things? It’s always the challenge, using media in my performance, because it’s always easier to look at the image. How can I make some kind of immersive atmosphere that allows for both?”

The Velcro factor

THE motion-capture animation required the dancers to go into the motion-capture lab to have their movements recorded by digital video cameras, which pick up the image and relay it as data to a computer. “You have these little reflective balls Velcro-ed to you at joints and key body motion places,” Miller says. “I think the motion capture technology has a lot to learn from dance, because they assume that most motion happens with a single body, standing. We do a lot of contact, and we do a lot of floor work, so we were constantly knocking off these balls.”

Quite by accident, the little balls have triggered a new line of thinking for Miller. “We did a lot of improvisation that looked like dancing, but then one of the balls fell off -- and you see the dancer go from ‘dancer’ to ‘person’ to lean down to pick up this thing,” she says. “And I thought: How do you quantify that difference of intention between someone who is dancing, an aesthetic code of movement, to a person with an obstacle, a problem? I would love to play with that difference. Maybe this is the next piece.”

Miller insists that her new fascination with technology has not shaken her commitment to live performance. “I want to make that very clear,” she says. “I’d like to go further in both directions, but I feel live work brings something that can’t be denied, or replaced.”

She does note, however, that becoming a “nerd” has pushed to the background -- or at least, caused some sort of shift in -- her perceived identity as a black female choreographer.

“Someone pointed out to me that there seem to not be that many visible African American female choreographers, much less ones who are using technology,” she says. “So I went, like, ‘Oh, yeah’ -- onward.

“I feel like culture has shifted in some ways. I know, in my lifetime, I can’t walk into a room and not count the number of white people and the number of black or ‘other.’ It’s just how I will live my life, but I’m very glad that someone else may see things differently.

“By now, there are enough [black] choreographers who are working outside of what is the expected narrative of urban experience that is what we are all assigned to. In so many ways, I think that’s been broken, people are willing to let that go.

“I always say that I would love to talk about environmentalism -- I recycle, I think that’s important, and I think black people should, along with everybody else. So let’s change the dialogue.”

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Bebe Miller Company

Where: REDCAT, Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2nd and Hope streets, L.A.

When: 8:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday; 3 p.m. next Sunday

Price: $20 to $32.

Contact: (213) 237-2800.

Also

What: Bebe Miller and video artist Maya Ciarrocchi show and discuss excerpts from “Landing/Place.”

Where: Apple Store at the Grove,

189 The Grove Drive

When: 7 p.m. Monday

Price: Free

Contact: (323) 965-8400