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Byrne Miller,
| This was the first of many classes she took from Kreutzberg, and she attended all his New York concerts. He was “a tremendous personage” in Miller’s life, and her current artistic choices as a presenter reveal a direct lineage stemming from the man who once said, “I am not a leader nor a creator of any school of dancing. I dance to express myself. I dance from my heart, blood and imagination.” (Kreutzberg, quoted in John Martin’s Introduction to the Dance, Dance Horizons, 1965, p.282). Miller is quick to tell you that in addition to Korschein, she owes her technique to Lucas Hoving, a former Kurt Joos dancer who joined Jose Limon’s company in New York, and Elizabeth Rockwell, the first dance department chair at the High School for Performing Arts. “I couldn’t have found three more marvelous teachers,” she says. After three years with Korschein, Miller became pregnant with her daughter Allison. After the birth of a second daughter, Jane, Miller stopped dancing for nearly fifteen years. During this time, she and Duncan had an agreement: each would give the other a year to create. Duncan used his to write his first novel, which Miller typed and edited for him. The novel interested an agent who referred Duncan to an editor. “Nothing much came of it,” Miller recalls, “but the editor told Duncan he was the only man this side of the Atlantic who wrote like Thomas Mann.” Duncan wrote several novels before the onset of Alzheimer’s disease nine years before his death, none of which were published. “He was a marvelous talent,” Miller says. “It’s not fair that no one recognized it.” It wasn’t until the mid-Fifties that Miller began to dance again, first in Hoving’s company, where she also served as his assistant. Rockwell, who had also taken a child-rearing hiatus from dancing, formed a company of her own in this period, and Miller managed it as well as danced in it, demonstrating her characteristic ability to fuse practicality with her passion for dance. Over the years the Millers were always a team—he took her classes, danced in her company, and supported the family with jobs on newspapers. |
 Photo courtesy of Byrne Miller |
They lived in Connecticut, the Virgin Islands, and Santa Fe, New Mexico before landing in Beaufort. Wherever they went, Miller taught dance, but not always for money. On a Russian cruise ship going to Ireland, she relates, Miller felt compelled to move, and offered to teach class to the passengers, for no pay. After watching her, the crew asked if she would teach again, for them. “We did exercises in a terrible storm,” Miller says, laughing. Once in Ireland, Miller taught movement in a skin diving center, dodging wet suits and puddles. “I had three nuns doing floor work in full habit,” she says proudly. After a year in St. Thomas (the only place Miller didn’t dance), the couple, their two daughters by this time adults, landed happily in Santa Fe. There, she held a position at St. John’s College teaching modern dance in the school’s spacious studios. It was in Santa Fe that the Byrne Miller Dance Theater was born, and there that this “tough old bird,” as she characterizes herself, rejoiced in teaching modern dance to classes that included people of all ages and abilities, every level of education, and all racial and cultural backgrounds. “You have to love students, love to do what you do,” Miller says wisely. As much fun as the Millers had in Santa Fe, and as busy and productive as they both were, Duncan hated it. “He said it was like living in nothing but dirt because he couldn’t see water.” In 1969, when Miller was sixty, the couple moved to Beaufort. They had visited the town a number of times because their younger daughter, Jane—killed in an automobile accident a few years ago—had joined the Marines and married a career Marine officer stationed at a nearby base. Beaufort scarcely had the cultural amenities of Santa Fe, but it was surrounded by water. Soon after the move into their present house in 1970, bad luck visited the Millers again. “I was mysteriously paralyzed,” she says calmly. “One morning I was carrying tea into our bedroom and I suddenly felt strange. I told Duncan I was going to lie down a minute and started down the hall. My husband heard me fall, called an ambulance, and I spent five weeks in hospital. They did a spinal tap, never did diagnose the cause.” Lying on the examining table, Miller remembers being asked what she did. “I’m a dancer,” she answered. “You were a dancer,” the doctor replied as he picked up her leg, which she couldn’t move, and pushed it back to her ear. “I am a dancer,” she asserted to the incredulous medico. Reflecting on this story today, Miller is entirely sure of why she recovered enough to enjoy nearly three decades more of an active career. “Dancers have a good sane attitude toward life, you know. It’s a life affirming art form, very fulfilling.” Once she was on her feet Miller assembled a company of twelve dancers, six women and six men, many of whom came from the nearby Marine base. When Miller talks about the military men in the company, she grins. “They sometimes didn’t have too easy a time of it when they went back to the base,” she says. “But they really wanted to dance.” While the company wasn’t chartered as a non-profit organization until 1972, the first performances were held in 1970 in a ballet studio that is now a private nursery and elementary school. Performances, consisting of a lecture demonstration and what Miller calls a ‘dance study’ were given one Sunday a month, for no charge, and people of all ages would attend, some sitting on the floor and others joining in a group improvisation at the end. |