Gallim Dance: Making Waves
Andrea Miller's Gallim Dance aims to push the genre forward
“It’s like a 60-minute push-up with a lot of reward at the end,” choreographer Andrea Miller says with a chuckle.
Her New York company Gallim Dance is gearing up for its Washington debut, performing the award-winning Blush — an ambitious work that aims to convey one of the most elusive human expressions. “It’s an experience, going through a very emotional arc with the dancers.” In the piece, all six dancers are expressly told to be and act as themselves, not as characters or performers, “to get as close to their true selves, or these universal ideas of human experience.”
Washington Performing Arts co-presents the performance in a partnership with CityDance, whose students will also open the show performing another work by the company, which Miller founded in 2007.
She was inspired by the surfers she would see as she walked to her dance studio while living in Tel Aviv. “The name means ‘wave’ in Hebrew,” she explains. “I felt like they really understood the earth, in this way that was very surprising to me — which is that there is always this momentum, this thing that’s pushing forward in the waves. And basically all you can do is carve your path within that place.”
Miller, honored as a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow for “demonstrating exceptional creative ability,” is certainly making waves with her company. She regularly partners with organizations and events outside the world of dance — most recently with “a site-specific live dance and projection installation” in the atrium at New York’s Lincoln Center last fall that, through video work and viewings from different angles, offered spectators different perspectives on the same moves.
“I’m not inspired by dance in general,” Miller says. “I find it a very limiting thing. I try actually to use everything other than dance to create my work…to make it relevant to people beyond the dance world.”
Gallim Dance appears Thursday, April 16, and Friday, April 17, at 8 p.m. Lansburgh Theatre, 450 7th St. NW. Tickets are $30. Call 202-785-9727 or visit washingtonperformingarts.org.
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