Worlds Collide

Miro choreographs a sisterhood of the traveling dance.

by Lauren F. Friedman

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Published: Jan 13, 2010

Neal Santos Philadelphia's Amanda Miller (pictured) and Indian-born Viji Rao found their lives in dance mirrored each other in uncanny ways.

Amanda Miller's body is long and lithe. Her neck and spine form a perfectly straight line, and her hands glide through the air like graceful birds. She absentmindedly riffles through the costumes on a rack — part of the set for How Am I Not Myself? — but even with these simple motions, there is no mistaking it: She is a dancer.

Each outfit represents a piece of Miller's dancing life. A yellow, pint-size fairy dress hangs next to a flowing practice skirt and a sparkling Nutcracker tiara. "I've done so many Nutcrackers," she says dolefully. "Too many to count." Miller danced with the Pennsylvania Ballet for nine years before founding Miro Dance Theatre in 2003 with Tobin Rothlein. She smiles widely and plucks an ornate, sequined tutu off the rack. "These, of course, I would wear a lot," she says.

When Miller met the Indian-born Viji Rao in 2007, the two quickly realized that the many uncanny parallels between their lives could be fertile ground for creative collaboration. They were born the same week; they started studying classical dance at the same time (ballet for Miller, Bharatanatyam for Rao); they were the same age when they got their first dance jobs; and several years ago, they both began to focus on contemporary performance while continuing to teach classical dance. These dovetailing paths — which include their shared struggles with training, meeting rigid expectations and forging identities as contemporary dancers — form the basis of How Am I Not Myself?, which just wrapped up a two-week tour in India and opens at the Painted Bride on Jan. 29.

At the How Am I Not Myself? premiere in Bangalore, a conservative audience of traditional Indian dance enthusiasts packed the theater. "They didn't understand what Viji was doing because it looked so contemporary, but whatever I did just looked like ballet to them," explains Miller. "I have a feeling we might get the opposite reaction with Western audiences who know ballet but don't know about Indian classical dance."

Miller emphasizes that the dancers' stories are the same, even though their styles of movement are different. "We share that we're still connected to the classical and contemporary worlds," she explains. "I'm very passionate about my teaching, but I make contemporary work. We each found another person who understood ... how you could have passion for both, [and] maybe even contempt."

A dancer's complex and sometimes conflicting feelings about her craft are not necessarily obvious to a nondancer. "They were so emotional about this," says Rothlein, a visual artist. "I kept saying: What's so emotional? I don't think everyone will get why you're super upset that someone said your dance was classical."

As the show's director, Rothlein tried to mold the piece so that broader audiences could connect with what was so easily shared between Rao and Miller. "What was interesting in it for me was thinking about how their stories — which seemed really personal and autobiographical — could be put into a format that could mean something for people who didn't care about their stories," he says.

After two years of rehearsal and collaboration, the piece that has taken shape tells an intimate, highly personal story about dance, but its core ideas — about identity, drive and self-esteem — are accessible to just about anyone. Audiences well-versed in dance will recognize references to classical pieces and relate to some of the performers' dance-specific struggles. But for everyone else? Rothlein puts it simply: "This is a just a story about two women and their baggage."

Rao and Miller enter the stage carrying actual suitcases, stuffed with a lifetime's worth of costumes, each of which serves as a hook into a particular period. How Am I Not Myself? uses choreography, spoken text and Rothlein's videos to walk the audience through the dancers' careers and inner conflicts.

While Rao and Miller's stories proceeded essentially in lockstep, their dance vocabularies diverged. "I needed to learn what [Rao's] classical dance was so that I could understand what she was doing to make it contemporary, and vice versa," explains Miller. Initially, Rothlein — who has a background in documentary film — interviewed both dancers about their histories, but what he describes as "a breakthrough" finally came when they realized one day in rehearsal that much of the story could be communicated without words. "I asked them each to tell a story through dance that they had told me during an interview. I thought it would last a minute," he recalls, "but they danced for a really long time."

In some ways, How Am I Not Myself? marks a back-to-basics approach for Miro, whose multidisciplinary performances sometimes put dance on equal footing with text and video. "We're really looking back to dance as a form that can tell a story in its own language," explains Rothlein. "As much as there's [spoken] dialogue in the piece, the real story is told in those moments of dance where they're telling everything with their bodies."

Throughout How Am I Not Myself?, Miller and Rao both perform snippets from past shows, leading to a contemporary performance with a heavy dose of classical dance. Miller even dances in her pointe shoes, which had been in storage since 2003, when she tore her Achilles tendon. "I said [then] that I'm not putting them back on until I have a really good reason," she recalls.

"No one has seen Amanda do so much ballet in a long time," says Rothlein.

Anyone who watched Miller as a dancer with the Pennsylvania Ballet, where she was especially praised for her skill in pointe shoes, will thrill to see her back onstage as a ballerina, as if no time had passed. While Rothlein says that there was a "ban on ballet" in Miro's early days, part of Miller's journey with this piece meant reconciling her many years of classical training and performance with her current identity as a contemporary dancer. "I'm really trying to find a way to understand how I can both use and discard the classical form in my contemporary choreography," she says.

"The voice in my head is not nearly as critical now. ... It's that feeling of dancing in your living room. It's why I loved ballet — and why I don't do it anymore."

(lauren.friedman@citypaper.net)

How Am I Not Myself? runs Fri.-Sat., Jan. 29-30, 8 p.m., $25, Painted Bride, 230 Vine St., 215-925-9914, paintedbride.org.

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