PORTLAND’S FINEST

A Bessie for Buffy

By Tanya Whiton

When I met Buffy Miller, four years ago, she was an adamant expatriate of the New York dance scene. After 10 years of dancing with noted choreographer Eliot Feld’s company, Ballet Tech, she was ready to retire, to pursue something different. Since that time, she’s created innovative and poetic pieces for Ram Island Dance and New Dance Studio; attended and participated in just about every wacky, performance-oriented, Portland-area event from Story Night to the Sacred and Profane; and in 1999 she choreographed an evening-length solo show, Abide With Me: Fast Falls the Eventide. She’s been awarded a New England Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Maine Arts Commission individual artist grant. She’s appeared in two feature-length films. And what’s more, she’s been moonlighting.

Each season, Miller disappears for a month or more to go back to New York and guest with Ballet Tech. As former principal dancer for Feld’s maverick company, Miller’s emotionally resonant, physically demanding performances are always noted by the arts media. But this last time, her achievements as a dancer were noted by the community of her peers: she won a Bessie Award, the New York dance world’s highest and most-respected honor.

“A solo ballet muse who smashes the ballerina mold,” reads the inscription on her plaque. And anyone who has seen Miller meld meticulous technique with an unabashed expressiveness and athleticism would have to agree. The award, given specifically for two solos, Clave and Ion — both choreographed to music by Steve Reich — is “the only [one] there really is for working dancers in the trenches,” says Miller. “It’s nice to be appreciated from within your community.” Feld’s idiosyncratic ballet works have generally been missed by the downtown-ish Bessies — no one at Ballet Tech has ever received one.

“It’s like they’re saying, ‘she’s a freak like us,’ ” says Miller, whose own pieces make liberal use of other performance traditions: puppetry, spoken word, singing, storytelling, tap, and mime. Her presence in Portland has single-handedly rejuvenated the dance and performance worlds: if there’s a show, she’s at it, or in it. There is no end to her inventiveness — or to her relentless creative drive.

Though every now and then Miller threatens to quit for good, to leave dance behind, to retire somewhere peaceful and pastoral and park herself in a rocking chair, I don’t believe her. And apparently, neither do the arbiters of achievement in one of the art world’s toughest disciplines.

Congratulations.