 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Byrne Miller,
| The company presented its first season, which was funded by the South Carolina Arts Commission, in 1972. A year later, the Commission funded a pilot study in the Beaufort Elementary School for using movement as a teaching tool, with Miller as director and sole teacher. In 1974, she presented her first outside performers, not surprisingly, former Limon dancers Betty Jones and Fritz Ludin. From there, Miller never looked back, building presenting seasons that each year brought a balance of ballet, traditional modern, and post-modern and contemporary dance. As more and higher-quality touring dance troupes came into Beaufort, they also toured elsewhere in the state, largely thanks to Miller, without whom, according to Marianne Draine, a program director with the state Arts Commission, there probably would be no modern dance in South Carolina. The Byrne Miller Dance Theater became a presenting organization only, retaining the name because of its familiarity. One of the emerging artists Miller brought in was Susan Marshall, who was just starting out with her company when she and her dancers did their first extensive teaching residency in Beaufort a decade ago. “What I remember about her,” Marshall says, “is that she got the most bang for the buck. We worked very hard, went to lots of schools, one for kids with disabilities—we did a lecture demo there and the children were very involved and eager. I also remember that Byrne was very genteel in her negotiations with us, sort of like the Japanese, with whom I was also dealing at the time. She’d say “no problem,” but it didn’t necessarily mean no problem.” Miller sometimes makes friends with the dancers who come through Beaufort, among them Eiko and Koma, whose work she adores. “Lucas was their first serious teacher, too,” she says, showing me a photograph of the pair that hangs on her bedroom wall. Mark Dendy, whose company performed in Beaufort in 1990 and 1991, is another choreographer in whose talent she believes deeply, but, she said, shaking her head, “He was difficult, very difficult.” “I was,” Dendy agreed. “The second year I performed there I was a mess; I was addicted to cocaine and alcohol and the members of my company were about to walk. She got on the phone at two in the morning and persuaded my lead dancer to stay when she could have canceled. But she believed in the work.” |
 Photo collage of Byrne Miller’s husband, Duncan, of Byrne dancing with mentor Lucas Hoving, c. 1960, collection of Byrne Miller. Contemporary photography of Bryne Miller by Martha Ullman West, June 1997. |
Not only did Miller have to contend with Dendy’s addictions, but a local councilman who didn’t even see the show (based on a review that described the dancers as topless and a duet as mildly homoerotic), tried to close it down. Miller paid no attention, although Dendy points out that they have not been invited back. “She’s pretty incredible,” Dendy says. “There she was, in her eighties, driving us everywhere. She extracted me from my hotel room where I drank a whole bottle of sherry the night before. It’s one thing to be in your eighties and have staff and handlers to do everything the way Martha Graham did, but Byrne still does all the leg work in her late eighties. She’s a maverick who pushes the envelope. I think it keeps her going.” Miller has been extremely successful in her years in Beaufort, winning the 1988-89 Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Award for epitomizing “the spirit of dance” in South Carolina as an artist, teacher and arts administrator. Still, it remains a struggle to stay afloat. And her personal life has not been easy: when her husband contracted Alzheimer’s disease, she looked after him at home for nine years; in the same period, Jane was killed. Two years ago, a bad fall caused Miller to lose an eye and she is losing the central vision in the other. Yet Miller continues to cope, and her driving interest in dance continues, although there are two things she worries about in the current state of the art. “Everyone is so involved in including other art forms,” she says, “speech, playing an instrument, the real context of dance is getting lost. What I look for, what I choose, is to see dancers dance. Using the other arts to enrich the performance is okay, but to replace? Unh-unh! The other thing is that people are trying to be so varied they’re focused on entertainment instead of dance. I think it’s television. One of the worst things that ever happened—it’s trivial, fills in time, dumbs down.” Passionate, principled, and holding strong views, Miller can be difficult to deal with. But as Marianne Draine, who has worked with her for eighteen years, puts it, “she’s the single most diligent presenter of modern dance in the state; she hasn’t wavered, and if it weren’t for her, it wouldn’t be presented.” While she is concerned that Miller is a “one-man band” and worries that the series will die with her, Draine is quick to point out that “Byrne has standards. And because of her, Beaufort schools hired seven dancers to teach, and that alone is a pretty big achievement.” Miller, who neither fears nor courts death, remains a busy woman. She wants to see at least one of her husband’s novels in print. And she is writing a journal, a memoir of everything she knows about—Duncan, herself, her family—so that her daughter Allison and Jane’s son will know “that they come from remarkable people.” This season the Byrne Miller Dance Theater is presenting Paul Taylor 2 in the fall, the usual Nutcracker, and ODC San Francisco and Rennie Harris in the spring. “My life is very good,” she says. “And I have jobs to do.” |