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Byrne Miller: A Presenter of Parallel Passions
| Byrne Miller is a woman of parallel passions: one is her late husband, writer Duncan Miller; the other is dance. First-class modern and contemporary dance that is, which for nearly three decades she has been presenting in, of all places, Beaufort, South Carolina. Out of her home on Wilson Drive, where she now lives alone in a small house crammed with photographs, paintings, and memorabilia of her marriage, her daughters, and her life in dance, Miller operates a presenting organization that over the years has brought Beaufort Eiko and Koma, the Limon Company, Dendy Dance, Susan Marshall Dance Company, Mummenschanz, and, in the 1997-98 season, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Neta Pulvermacher & Dancers, and Nucleodanza. Financial support comes from the South Carolina Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, a few private sources, plus the yearly presentation of The Nutcracker by the Charleston Ballet. Recently, a state-run bingo put her organization in the black for the first time. “I gotta tell you, that is lovely money,” she says in an early June 1998 interview. Such a line-up would be remarkable anywhere in the country outside of Miller’s native New York, but Miller, eighty- eight years old and nearly blind, lives and works in an unlikely setting for contemporary dance. Beaufort, home to twelve thousand people and a number of ante-bellum mansions, is nestled into a marshy site in the Carolina low country. No less than three military installations, including Parris Island (the Marine training ground), are close by. Miller’s twin passions began in New York City, where she grew up in Morningside and Washington Heights, in a close-knit and musically inclined Jewish family. “My mother was really a singer,” she says, “but she did a lot of cooking.” Miller’s father, before the Depression wiped him out financially in 1932, had one of the first dry cleaning chains in New York. He was also gifted at music, though untrained. “I was meant to be a concert pianist,” Miller says. “I would be struggling to learn a new piece in the front of our long, railroad flat, and my father would walk down the hall listening, and then sit down at the piano and play it right through. It used to make me so mad.” The piano lessons began when Miller was six, and she believes that “piano was probably my real talent.” Dance, she felt, based on her participation in the kind of social dancing school that was inevitably part of the upbringing of children of her economic status, was not. “I was always tall for my age, with long arms and legs, and I was taller than the boys. I felt awkward.” Even as she approaches her ninetieth year, Miller still has the remnants of a beautiful figure and retains most of the five foot, nine-and-a-half inches of her adult height. Her legs, in striped slacks, still look long and she is only slightly stooped. It is because of that wonderful body that the dance career she calls a “fluke” began. |
 Photo courtesy of Byrne Miller |
When the Depression hit, Miller could no longer spend Saturday afternoons at matinees that included performances by German modern dancer Harald Kreutzberg, on whom she developed a crush. The would-be musician went to work in an office, pulling down a good salary of $25 a week. In 1934, as she searched through the classifieds for another job, her eye was caught by a theatrical ad calling for tall, beautiful dancers. She followed up on it and found “a classic casting director with wet cigar, who said ‘Whatcha want, girlie?,’ had me take off my glasses and my hat, looked me up and down, unwound himself from behind his desk and came back with a woman who had me put on a tank suit and join the rehearsal. I was hired for my figure, not my talent,” Miller says of the only dancing job she had for which she was paid. The troupe, a vaudeville opening act for the movies, was called the Sara Mildred Strauss Company. Eighteen or nineteen scantily clad women, many of whom had been prostitutes, and one man, Dean Goodelle, made up the ranks. “We did two numbers,” Miller recounts. “The second had three girls, with one on a pedestal waggling her hips, wearing two inches of cloth.” Goodelle spotted the talent Miller didn’t know she had, and steered her into modern dance training with Polly Korschein, a disciple of Kreutzberg, who had a school in New York. As this point, the burgeoning dancer had been married for two years to a writer by the name of Duncan Miller. Marriage, however, didn’t stop her from going on tour: this was the Depression and the young couple needed the money. Duncan was “nice to look at,” she says, and only eighteen when they were married (Byrne was in her early twenties). “He was much more sophisticated than I was,” she says. “I wondered how he could bear this dumdum. He was very charming, women fell over him, but I didn’t mind. Duncan had the quickest, piercing mind. He’d had a very unhappy childhood and was estranged from his family. I was the first to marry out of the Jewish faith, but Duncan loved my parents, who accepted him as a changeling. Anyway, my mother told me I had to leave the tour and come home—Duncan wasn’t eating.” For the next three years, Miller took classes from Korschein in exchange for work in the studio. “Polly had been a student of Harald Kreutzberg and I got good, strong technique from her.” Kreutzberg was not well known for dance pedagogy, but the former Wigman dancer was by all accounts a highly theatrical performer, so compelling that when he danced in New York in 1929, a young Mexican in the audience called José Limon gave up painting for dance. During this time, Kreutzberg—to whom Miller had written fan letters—came to New York and taught a master class. “I didn’t feel I danced beautifully and I was too shy to tell him I had written to him. I couldn’t concentrate and,” she says flatly, “I was trying too hard to be marvelous.” |