TEACHING

Company members and collaborators are available for teaching technique, composition, improvisation and dance and technology workshops in your communities on tour at other times during the year. Contact us to find out about teaching in your community.

Here are sample descriptions from recent workshops:

COMPOSITION
My own interests as a choreographer are in finding context in the physical expression, along with its reverse: using physicality as a device for locating oneself in our current times. How we listen to the weight of a gesture, how we qualify the space between movers is a constant current, packaged with how we hear/see ourselves in the world. If we take it on faith that our composing eye is active while we're making sense of what's around us, perhaps the connections between idea and action can be seen as ongoing discovery rather than problems to be solved. I'm interested in creating a space for in-depth exchange on the manner of process as well as aesthetic range and detail.

What's the path from idea to dancing?  Where did you get stuck today, and is it the same as yesterday?  What are current obstacles in current work? Where is the flow heading? These are useful questions (which we may not solve) to instigate action and conversation, to help in using our studio mindset (which one do I put on to begin?) as a creative practice.

During the course of the workshop we will use improvisational structures and compositional trial-and-outcome to generate movement vocabulary as well as context. Locating initiation and focus in the body, in dynamic, in phrase-making and state-making, we will accumulate dance 'matter' in line, hopefully, with our lives.

CREATIVE PROCESS
The aim of this course is the investigation of creative process in relation to choreography, both in solo and group work.  The emphasis is on identifying and developing one's own creative strategies as the contextual framework for choreographic content, and to aid in the comprehensive collection of embodied ideas and practices that underlies choreography. By identifying preferences and habits students will bring them to the choreographic table as options to keep or move beyond. Students will be asked to differentiate diverse approaches to creative process, and encouraged to share their observances in order to develop a useful diversity of options. This course aims at articulating a choreographic practice as a set of choices that are parallel to one's world-view.

IMPROVISATION
Dance improvisation is a practice that gives us the opportunity to invent our own movements and to dance with others using informed choices made in the moment. This course is a working exploration of improvisation as a creative endeavor, by which we spontaneously organize space, context, ideas and dynamics in motion. We will look at how we approach/arrive at an idea, how we make choices, how we behave in relationship, in time and in space, and, finally, how we shape this exploration in performance. Synthesizing thought and action, mind and body we'll work to find a range of ways of discovering and deepening our dance experience, together. The experiential nature of improvisation depends on a safe, non-judgmental place of inquiry, but it also needs your observations and opinions. The work is an exchange: everyone?s input is vital, and the success of the course will depend on your commitment to the process. We will spend time talking, writing, reading as well as dancing, and will culminate in an improvisation performance at the end of the quarter. This course is designed for intermediate to advanced dancers.

MODERN TECHNIQUE
The goal of this course is to build on and further develop skills involving the articulated use of weight, the alignment of skeletal, muscular and other support systems, and a mindfulness of the synthesis and subtleties of the physical, dynamic and intuitive needed to dance fully in space.  We'll explore somatics-based systems of support to deepen our foundational knowledge and experience, moving deliberately through systems that support a healthy, balanced dance practice. This class is also a means of delivering my aesthetic approach to dancing and movement, and I will allow the form of the class to shift and adapt as needed.

COMMISSIONS

The company is available to set new or existing work on professional companies and university dance departments. Contact us to find out about commissioning work by Bebe Miller. Recent commissions include:

Six People In A Room And Something Happens (1993)
            University of Washington, 2007

Resistance lessened or increased and taken (2006)
            University of Minnesota, 2007
            Cornish School of the Arts, 2006
            Ohio State University, 2006 (premiere)
Rain (1989)
            Linda Johnson, Portland, OR, 2002
            Mason / Rhymes Productions, Washington, DC, 2002

Cantos Gordos (1994)    
            Chamber Dance Company, 2002

The Hendrix Project (1991)
            Ohio State University, 2005 (as The Blues Project)

RESIDENCY ACTIVITIES

When on tour the company works with the presenter's community to create dynamic and relevant activities to foster audience interaction with the artists. Past events include facilitated audience Q & A's, presentations of technology uses in the creative process in collaboration with Apple stores. Contact us to design residency activities in your community.