DISTILL: Dance and Performance Workshop with Amy Miller, January 2013
Nov. 19, 2012
The Oberlin Dance Department has announced a new winter term project for student dancers working with New York-based dancer and choreographer Amy Miller. The project will begin the day with a contemporary technique class and then the afternoon will be focused on developing a dance with Miller for the Oberlin Dance Company concert in May 2013. With a working title of Distill, this project is a collaborative exploration in memory. Miler’s choreographic process is centered on combining ideas generated from task-oriented exercises, improvisational investigations and movement stemming from her own kinetic sense.
Amy Miller is a founding member and the artistic associate of Cleveland-based GroundWorks DanceTheater. A former member of Heinz Poll’s Ohio Ballet and a graduate of the University of Akron’s dance program, she has been a part of the NE Ohio dance community for over 20 years. Awarded the Outstanding Artist in Dance Alive! Award by the Akron Area Arts Alliance in 2009, Miller is also the recipient of a 2010 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for her choreography. Credits include GroundWorks DanceTheater, Cleveland’s Dance/Theater Collective, Cleveland State University, Bowling Green University and the University of Akron. In 2012, her solo work has been seen at Triskelion Arts, Spoke the Hub, and Gibney Dance Center in NYC.
Her ongoing collaboration with Oberlin College professor/composer Peter Swendsen from the TIMARA department (Technology in Music and Related Arts) brought Running to Earth to GroundWorks last season and continued with the recent premiere of Sift at NYC’s Scandinavia House, home to the American-Scandinavian Foundation. This fall, Miller presented an expanded version of her solo Trust the Future as Little as Possible with a new original score by Swendsen at Spoke the Hub’s Space at Gowanus Arts in Brooklyn.
An avid teacher as well, Miller has been involved in integrated educational residencies within the Cleveland Public Schools sponsored by Young Audiences, an NEA sponsored intergenerational residency at Cleveland’s Fairhill Center for Aging, teaching at the University of Akron’s children’s program The Dance Institute, as well as summer residencies at Cleveland State University and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Recent NYC performance projects include David Parker and The Bang Group at New York Live Arts, Lynne Taylor-Corbett at the Guggenheim Museum’s Works and Process Series, jill sigman/thinkdance at 92st Y’s Harkness Dance Festival, Gibney Dance at Ailey Citigroup Theater, Shandoah Goldman at Joyce Soho, and Collective Body Dance Lab at Manhattan Movement & Art Center.
A new member of Gibney Dance, Miller will be involved with the development of an upcoming evening length work in collaboration with the renowned string quartet Ethel and Cleveland Arts Prize winner composer Ryan Lott (Son Lux.) Miller also appears in this season’s productions of Don Giovanni and Doug Varone’s Les Troyens at the Metropolitan Opera.
