Extraordinary Bodies

Bebe Miller Company HISTORY

This fall quarter in graduate school, I encountered two types of ‘extraordinary bodies’ that struck me from week to week: working with people with disabilities fondly called the 'ARC dancers', and conducting research surrounding the Bebe Miller Company. In both of these cases, I have been in the particular position of absorbing, observing, and joining the language, values, and histories that have been created in each unique community. 

I am currently a Graduate Assistant for Bebe Miller, with projects that have included logging and analyzing audio and video footage of rehearsals and performances from the last few years. The culture of the company places value on research and collaboration not only through physicality, but the communal discourse surrounding the doing and making of the work. Through this process I experience extraordinary bodies, witness to the internal and external processes of dancer and director.  In this I have also had the odd twist of also learning, through audio archives, the cadence and timing of how the company verbally communicates and how ideas are reinstated, re-questioned, and re-volve over time.

ARC Dancers, Ohio State University

Working with the ARC dancers, I have experienced a similar culture that values physicality, as it relates to music, physical touch, and community. I see in the class and fellow facilitators the desire to interact and access new ranges of physical and social possibility and movement expression with the population. I find in the ARC dancers a desire and willingness to move in their bodies, despite physical or emotional difficulties, with a drive that is more felt than verbally articulated during times together. We’ve all come to know each other and cultivate special relationships from week to week, and joyful would be my best descriptive word of these classes together. 

What great value in experiencing these two groups – the spectrum of dance in both community and professional settings. It has been a pleasure as I look forward to what winter 2012 will hold.