Bebe Miller Company & Susan Rethorst

The Making Room

New York Live Arts Theater
Feb 21-24, 7:30PM
Tickets start at $30 | 20% discount for students and seniors

NYC premiere
The Making Room is an investigation into innovative ways of sharing the creative process from start to premiere. Organized by Bebe Miller Company, the project brings together choreographers Bebe Miller and Susan Rethorst to generate a joint experience of the choreographic process. Audiences follows the artists’ engagement in each other’s processes—witnesses to their ideas and their alchemical connection, as well as materials gathered from the processes. Along with sharing their conversations, inspirations, and insights, they’ll both be showing some of their new work:

Bebe Miller Company: In a Rhythm

In a Rhythm is a suite of new dance works by Bebe Miller Company is based on the dynamics of adaptation and translation. Inspired by the writings of Gertrude Stein, Toni Morrison and David Foster Wallace, whose voices capture diverse cultural relevancies through their structure of language, Choreographer Miller is looking at the syntax of movement—how we apprehend meaning through the juxtaposed dynamics of action and context in time and space. Our tacit reading of the building blocks of situations is inherent in the culture it serves. Working with the premise that our willingness to decipher the unfamiliar cultivates shared understanding, the dances use texts as underlying maps of events and situations. Miller’s focus is on the “tell”—the subtle interactions of gesture, timing, focus and dynamics that are uniquely human, yet often illegible outside of familiar frames. We understand these bytes of kinetic information because we, as humans, move.

Individual and cultural experience is a recognized presence in the studio during the creation of these works—we explore how overt or implicit the race/class/gender lens is, how it shifts and refracts. We embrace as well as suspend the implications of which men/women/raced/gendered individuals are conforming to as well as confounding expectations. We reflect on “who is available to do what; who is allowed to do what?” What arises between the dance artists—physically, psychologically—is brought forward as an integral part of the creative process.

Susan Rethorst: Stealing from Myself

Revisiting old work from the last 30 years, Rethorst draws on old bits and pieces to join new material in a new work for Gabrielle Revlock and Gregory Holt.

The Making Room is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by New York Live Arts in partnership with Wexner Center for the Arts, On the Boards, and NPN.

FEB 22 Stay Late Conversation
FEB 24, 2-4PM Shared Practice