Bee creative

Buffy Miller and Tim Harbeson’s compatible collaboration

By Tanya Whiton

Apidae (Bedizened) shows at 25a Forest Avenue in Portland, July 25 through 28. Call (207) 878-2774.

MILLER TIME: Bessie-winner Buffy Miller.

Inside a skeleton frame of an imaginary house, Tim Harbeson plays pump organ with one hand and trumpet with the other. Outside, in the foreground of a spare set she and Harbeson designed together, Buffy Miller dances. Between them, Miller and Harbeson create aesthetic ether that transforms any environment into a timeless, charmed vessel in which stories can unfold. They allude to — but are not constrained by — the elements of a 1930s traveling show; early modern tableaux vivante; an intimate confession told on a firefly front porch.

In Apidae (Bedizened), their first evening-length collaboration, Miller moves with the sinuous musicality that has informed all of her choreographic work — Testify, Abide With Me: Fast Falls the Eventide, and numerous short pieces — adapting to and illuminating Harbeson’s quirky, improvisatory style. Harbeson, with his characteristic shuffling virtuosity, takes cues from her precisely executed patterns in space. They work off of, through, and for each other in a marriage of technical skill and intuitive grace. Though each has a discrete part of the show to create, and separate, solo sections to perform, Apidae (Bedizened) demonstrates the possibilities of collaborating. Harbeson, a hesitant performer who tinkers his way in, and Miller, a rigorously trained ballet dancer who acted as both muse and medium for noted choreographer Eliot Feld, capitalize on each other’s strengths. She adds form to his meandering approach; he lends a lyrical edge to her specificity.

“We’ve both been trying to balance issues of independence and intimacy,” says Miller, who was honored by the New York dance community with its Bessie Award in 2001. “The piece isn’t about that, but it’s present.” She works in the morning: “I’m methodical and orderly, I start at the beginning.” He works at night: “I tend to feel my way through.” He’s a musician and a puppeteer who rarely speaks on stage — instead, his ensemble of beautifully crafted puppet characters relay narrative through their movemen–s. She’s a dancer/choreographer and an engaging storyteller who integrates text into most of her work. Yet somehow their sensibilities are similar.

“I enjoy working in an abstract way with an aesthetic intent,” says Harbeson. Abstraction and autobiography combine in Apidae (Bedizened) through a variety of media: spoken word, voice-over text, puppetry, live and pre-recorded music (Harbeson also plays ukulele and sings), and, of course, dance. Miller and Harbeson are both adept at layering fragments of information, at keeping an audience captivated by slowly unspooling the details that add up to a complete aesthetic experience.

In Testify and Abide With Me: Fast Falls the Eventide, Miller began the exploration of love, loss, and identity that she continues to develop in Apidae (a family of social bees), expanding on the thematic and stylistic concerns that have become the foundation of her choreographic style. Through incorporating her own lush, Faulknerian prose, and drawing on some of the more iconic facets of dance theater — in Abide With Me, Miller used a ballet anatomy chart, rapidly firing off a series of technical exercises while tapping points on a two-dimensional dancer’s body — she makes comment on both the brutal process and the transcendent pleasure of making and maintaining a creative life.

Harbeson, whose work with experimental trio Tarpigh has made him the shy hero of an entire community of musicians and performers, introduces a new puppet character in Bedizened (to dress or adorn with gaudy, vulgar ornament), and a new piece of pleasing puzzlement. Part magician, part humble observer of his own creations, he invites interpretation while at the same time obscuring meaning. His performance in Tarpigh’s marionette operetta, Il Lamento Di Ripo, compelled watchers to follow him, even as he seemed to erase his own footsteps.

Their work on the new piece began with an improvised recording of Harbeson’s, to which Miller immediately began to set movement. She laughs at herself in retrospect, at her impulse to establish a formal framework. “I was interested in working with Tim because we both wanted to stretch away from our usual modes,” she says. He considers this for a moment, and adds: “But if I’m going to play a piece of music and she’s gonna dance to it, it has to be exactly the same — it’s interesting, practicing something that came from a moment.”

Slowly, things began to fall into place.

The duo found an old photograph in a flea market that seemed to speak to their project: a pair of Gypsy children, dressed for a confirmation ceremony. The children hold hands and look directly at the camera in earnest, yet clothed in costumes that parody grown-up institutions. And each of them chose a word that referenced, in a playful fashion, to the act of making work for the stage. Apidae, from Miller, drawn to the collecting, gathering work of bees, and Bedizened from Harbeson, amused by the notion of ornamenting to excess.

When asked about how they achieve a sense of an imaginary place, outside of time, both demur, gesturing at the crooked house and ladder to the sky upon which they will sit and sing, the landscape that both encloses and separates them.

“We don’t even have to talk about that,” Miller says. “We both understand.”

“Well,” Harbeson adds, “I just thought, she wants a moon in the sky, I’d better make a stand for it.”

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@prexar.com.