USA Projects

Over the next 60 days, Bebe Miller Company is seeking your support in raising $8,800 for the development of History, a new dance work that examines the creative conversation and cultural context embedded in the last decade of the company’s work.

At once a theater-based performance and an archeological inquiry into our deep exchange carried out over ten years, History will simultaneously exist as an archive and installation as well as a performance piece. The project centers on the nuanced, dancing relationship between veteran company members Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones under the choreographic direction of Bebe Miller.  Our long-term dramaturg Talvin Wilks, and video artist Lily Skove, will join us in the two-year process of developing this work.  We have logged thousands of hours of asking and answering questions, exploring intuitive relationships, crafting a rich vocabulary of movement, ideas and action which we hope to share in this new venture.  History is an opportunity to look at way past experience and ideas lead us forward.

Dance works are made of a complex mix of ideas, physical practice, forgetting, remembering, minor epiphanies and daily discoveries, joined together piece-by-piece in the evolving circumstance of creative research over time.

Traditionally, the container of a dance company’s research is the dances themselves, and the performances that are brought to the audience.  Through History, our company is aiming to create an interactive, dynamic exposure of how we do what we do.  Think of it as an archeological dig into our continuously evolving manner of asking questions about people, relationships, and the culture in which we live.  History will exist as a performance, archive, and installation that will give the audience access to our company’s creative process in new ways.  It is part of a larger initiative called Dance Fort, a virtual “play space” and archive of creative process that we are developing in dialogue with dance artists across the dance field.

Your support will help the Bebe Miller Company fund a four-week residency in July 2011 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois. The United States Artists Project goal of $8,800 will contribute to the $51,000 budget for this residency, which will cover six artist salaries, travel, and living expenses.  This residency will serve as a period of creative investigation and generation before we present in-progress performances at Wesleyan University next November and in preparation for the premiere of History in 2012. If your contributions exceed the projected amount, additional funding will go towards the research and development of Dance Fort.  If you would like more information about this project please post a comment or send us an email at bebe@bebemillercompany.org. 

Thank you so much for your support in making History a reality.