Bebe Miller

Bebe Miller is an American choreographer, dancer and director.

Daughter of an elementary school teacher and a ship steward, Bebe Miller was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1950. She was raised in a public housing project in the Red Hook Neighborhood. When Miller was five years old she began to take modern dance classes due to the fact her mother had to take exercise classes for arthritis. When Miller was thirteen she took ballet classes at a studio in Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. Miller stopped attending because she quoted she, "didn't fit in," and she also states "I was intimidated." After high school Miller was educated at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. She majored in Art (B.A., 1971). After earning her bachelor's degree she moved back to New York and waitressed while she lived with her boyfriend for the first time. Later, she attended Ohio State University after receiving a fellowship from them.(M.A., 1975). After completing her master's degree, she danced for Nina Weiner and Dancers company for six years. In 1981 Miller launched her own dance company ("Miller"). Commissioned performances of selected original works include The Habit of Attraction, 1987, Thick Sleep, 1989, Rain, 1989, Allies, 1989, and The Hendrix Project, 1991. Commissioned performance of collaborative work, The Hidden Boy: Incidents from a Stressed Memory, 1991.

Miller had focused a lot on the relationship between dancers. She focused mainly on the way that male and female relationships had developed. Miller also liked her dancers to work "equally" with one another, despite their gender. Miller also used motion capture technology to discover new choices of movement as she called it. Miller also uses video projections which add a sense of visual energy. As stated in an article written by Joseph Carman, "When Bebe Miller launches into her solo, Rhythm Studies, she may be creating a new genre of dance: black urban flamenco. Stamping on the floor, beating on a set of drums, and then venting her anxieties through words and gestures, she reaches for a primal place that could only be accessed by a woman of vast experience" (Carman).

Bebe Miller's dances subtly reflect her experiences both as a black woman in America and as a member of the black community. "If you look closely, it's there. We all do intensely personal work, not of 'the black experience,' but definitely of the black experience," Miller wryly told the British Dance Theatre Journal in 1987 when she performed in London with other black artists on a showcase tour called Parallels in Black. Increasingly, Miller's modern dance pieces—such as her solo, Rain, which she has described as a "black woman's return to earth," and The Hendrix Project, her celebration of the 1960s rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix's music—show her sense of belonging to a particular community.

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