Casting Spells

Buffy Miller's magical movements

by June Vail

Choreographer, writer, dancer Buffy Miller presented an extraordinary hour-long solo concert at the Portland Performing Arts Center on July 14 and 15. Abide with Me: Fast Falls the Eventide, her first independent production, is an unusual event, first, because there have been so few dance concerts by local artists in recent years, and also because such performances rarely integrate elegant, polished production values: lighting, set, sound, and costume design.

Words are as important as movement in the three-part concert. The performance begins with a narration (a long excerpt from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, read by Christopher Price), words are intermittently projected onto a scrim on stage, and three spoken monologues by Miller are central to the performance. Quotations from poets William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and an epigram by Jeanette Winterson appear in the program: "There's no such thing as autobiography. There's only art and lies."

The evening is divided into nine parts: first, the narration, prologue, overture, and then the three "Spells" that comprise the body of the performance, each preceded by an interlude.

While the word "spell" brings to mind magical powers, here it refers to fainting spells, the real subjects of Miller's tale. While it's a stretch to equate youthful fainting episodes with an epileptic's heightened cosmic awareness in the instant before losing consciousness (as The Idiot's narrator tells it), Miller's Spell monologues describe similar ecstatic dancing experiences between the ages of 15 and 19.

The three Spell dances are costumed by Amy Curtis in witty versions of ballet practice clothes, though Miller dances barefoot and bare-legged, no pink tights and slippers here: a red unitard dissects arms and legs from trunk with white stitching; a white neo-tutu bodice and skirt layer over a cap-sleeved black leotard; and a blue unitard is topped by a white leotard that looks like a cross between a gauze bandage and a Victorian corset with a lace-up back (notorious for causing fainting spells.) These costumes echo those worn by figures in the textbook diagrams projected onto the scrim to illustrate correct execution of classical steps and positions. To explicate them, Miller employs a little baton, reminiscent of the thin wooden sticks carried by some old school ballet teachers, handy for tapping out tempos or for flicking a student's lazy leg during class. My favorite part of the monologues was Miller's chanted sequence of steps called out and repeated over and over again, the French terms taking on a rhythmic life of their own, similar to drills in another sort of boot camp.

After the opening narration, Miller begins dancing behind the scrim. At first, we can just make out traces of her body -- knees and toes turn in, elbows jut out, shoulders hunch, her head looks down. Everything's the opposite of ballet's turned-out, lifted, and expansive aristocratic bearing. In a highly introspective and calibrated dance sequence, Miller introduces us to the ways human joints work, and eventually how they shaped and mold the dancing body, a marvelous exhibition of control.

Control is an unspoken motif in Abide with Me, the mirror image of the uncontrollable swoon. Miller's speaking voice is highly disciplined (when it slips for effect into a natural Southern accent we hear a far wider range of expressive possibilities). Miller's gorgeous, slim, athletic, sensual body presents large geometrical shapes and small articulations all perfectly defined and synchronized with the music. Even her hair is completely disciplined, slicked back in a ballet bun. Energy feels reined in. There are few dynamic variations in the three sections. Miller hovers close to center stage with leg extensions and slow turns, or progresses across the stage in a slow folding and unfolding of limbs, or moves in repetitious circles around the central point of the vortex. Rather than conveying a sense of freely flowing, organic energy or improvisatory whims, Miller's choreography makes me think of shapes from several classical movement vocabularies: ballet's arm and leg extensions, yoga stretches, and, curiously, Indian classical dance's poses and gestures.

The three Spell episodes evoke the yearnings of a young ballet girl, longing for . . . what? Beauty, perfection, discipline, devotion, submission, approval, love, admiration, power, abandon, the ecstasy of sensual fulfillment -- but all safely controlled within strict bounds of symmetry, order, certainty. Just before the curtain falls (a kind of black out, you could say), Miller spirals to the floor and stops, poised, and I puzzle over whether this moment ends with a swoon, or, as I hope, an awakening.

June Vail can be reached at jvail@bowdion.edu.