For booking or other inquiries contact
Celeste Miller
404-653-0951
404-625-4846 (cell)
email
Celeste Miller is a dynamic solo performer whose near indescribable performance style has captured audiences and critics from coast to coast.
"She has the knack for integrating word and movement, rhythm and effect"
-Los Angeles Times"She serves up these perfect morsels with a flair and panache that is stupefying, all the while telling very funny stories."
- The Austin Chronicle"stunningly beautiful"
-Atlanta Journal Constitution"compelling evening of theatre"
-Los Angeles Times"a triple threat artist"
-Tampa Tribune""a narrative swirl of sinuous motion, interwoven motifs and shifting personas"
-The Boston Globe"Solo performer and choreographer Miller's knack for effectively blending words and movement resembles the wry inquiry of Lerman, her artistic mentor. But Miller amplifies her monologue-driven choreography with idiosyncratic gestures attuned to her performing persona. There's a sensory awareness in her approach to articulating movement that infuses her work with scent, with unseen auras, with silent rhythms and even with a solidifying touch.
Miller's 'Cranky Angel' retells the biblical tale of Jacob's battle with the angel, with a twist. Through both words and an elaborately crafted language of hand and arm gestures, body tremors, undulations and sudden staccato kicks, Miller magnifies the transformative potential of a new viewpoint on a trusted, perhaps rusty, subject. When a reworking of "Cranky Angel", subtitled "Take Two", sets these same personally inspired gestures on a company of nine, the result clarifies why Miller remains one of Washington's most quietly compelling performing artists: Those dancers can do the steps, and Miller imbues them with spiritual meaning."
-Review of The Transformational Diner, Washington Post, January 28, 2003
BIO
Celeste Miller is a solo performer, choreographer, writer and
educator. She has been working nationally since 1983, doing performances,
creating choreography for others, designing community art residencies
and arts-in-education projects. Her unique performance style is
a combination of spoken word and movement that plumbs narrative
for physical imagery in juxtaposed connections with words.
Miller’s performance and choreographic work has been recognized
by numerous grants, fellowships and commissions. Most recently
she received an Individual Artist Award for Solo Theatrical Performance
by the Maryland State Arts Council. She has also received a Choreography
Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and awards
from the Rockefeller Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council’s
New Playwrights Fellowship, Atlanta Circle of Drama Critics Award
for Most Distinguished Choreography, Artists Fellowship from the
Mayor of the City of Atlanta and fellowships and project grants
from arts councils in Georgia, Massachusetts and Maryland. Commissions
for her work have come from Dance USA/National College Choreography
Initiative with Columbia College in South Carolina , Boston Dance
Umbrella, American Festival Project, New Orleans Ballet Dance
Collective, Emory University, Grinnell College, and others. Her
choreography for theatrical productions includes work with Seven
Stages Theatre, Atlanta, the Gloucester Stage Company in Massachusetts,
and most recently with Atlanta’s Synchronically Performance Group
on their “Women and War” project.
In addition to her stage work, Miller is recognized as a leader
in the field of methods for engaging Community in Artistic Projects;
and Arts in Education programs that integrate dance and academic
curriculum. Miller has been on the faculty of Spelman College,
teaching Choreography; and at the School at Jacob’s Pillow Dance
Festival. At the Pillow since 1995; she teaches in the Choreography
Lab program and is the founding and lead artist with their Curriculum
in Motion program in the schools which is now entering its twelfth
year.
Miller recently completed a term at Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
as Co-Artistic Director where she choreographed solos and group
works for the company, designed the Professional Apprentice Program
(ages 21-60 plus), and ran the Summer Institutes and the school.
For Dance Exchange Miller was Artistic Director in the Deer Isle,
Maine Hallelujah, involving participants from all aspects of island
life. Miller worked with Wagon Train Project in Lincoln, Nebraska
to build a community engagement piece on a football field with
one hundred participants including a high school marching band,
builders from Habitat for Humanity, a Folklorico dance company,
Native American drummers and singers and a gospel choir.
Some of her community art projects include the commission through
the Dance USA/Choreography residency with Columbia College in
South Carolina to create a piece with the college dance department,
local high school dancers, and town residents that was drawn from
local stories and histories. In Gloucester, Massachusetts she
led a two year project with local nurses “to celebrate, honor
and give voice to the nurses of our community”. She is currently
in the planning stages with the Kansas City Ballet for a Nurse’s
Project in Kansas City.
Miller works nationwide with Curriculum in Motion, the program
developed with Jacob’s Pillow. It is an innovative arts-in-education
integration method that uses choreographic structures as a teaching
and learning mode.
Miller has conducted residencies in schools throughout the United
States, using Curriculum in Motion. Miller also teaches this approach
to teachers and artists at conferences and gatherings around the
country including: Arts Literacy Project at Brown University;
Cultural Education Collaborative in Charlotte, NC; Hot Schools
program of the Connecticut Commission for Culture & Tourism, Arts
Education in Maryland Schools Alliance, Young Audiences of Indiana;
National Cathedral School in Washington, DC; Maryland Artists
Training Initiative; Montalvo Center in Los Gatos, California,
the Alabama Dance Summit and the Institute for Education and the
Arts’ summits in Traverse City, Michigan and Albuquerque, New
Mexico. Her keynote, How I Became God in Social Studies, has introduced
her work at many of these conferences.
Miller has served as a grants panelist for the National Endowment
for the Arts, Pew Charitable Trusts, Georgia Council for the Arts,
Fulton County Arts Council, Bureau of Cultural Affairs City of
Atlanta, Maryland Arts Council, Ohio Arts Council and others.
Miller is the author of a workbook of tools for developing text
and movement work, “Dancing from the Heart: Life Stories”, which
is in use in university dance and theatre departments throughout
the United States and Great Britain.
Miller currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia working as an independent
artist. Her current work includes collaborations with Argentinean-born
Normando Ismay, a visual artist, storyteller and musician. Miller
and Ismay are working on performance that combines English/Spanish
spoken word, the intersection of their respective art forms, and
designing alternative performance spaces to confound the notion
of where performance takes place and the means of interaction
between performer and audience. Miller is in residence at the
Atlanta based Moving in the Spirit dance facility which includes
a theatre/studio space and extensive community based dance programming.
She was recently contacted by APS (Atlanta Public Schools) to
begin year-round consultant work for arts-integration teacher
training
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Celeste Miller: Artist Statement in progress (always)
I do it because its fun, I do it to survive, I do it to understand
the world not necessarily in that order.
I intertwine movement with text in a choreographed arrangement
of the body and spoken language to create a mytho-poetic symbol
system.
I want something other than what is assumed to be true to fall
out unnoticed.
Scamper across the floor, slide up a pant leg, or into a sock,
hop in a purse, nestle in a pocket, get inhaled in a guffaw
I hope for the capacity for metaphor to be unleashed.
I take the words, the movement and the image and mash them up
against each other, weave them irrevocably, sort them out in stacks
and give them new names. I ask them to surprise me, teach me something
new about myself that I didn’t know before. I sell them to the
highest bidder and see what happens when I beg for their return.
I love words I take them out dancing and they are never the same
again. I want to eat them, dangle them over a waterfall set them
to sail downstream in a paper boat. I sprinkle them on cereal.
I sneeze them, cough them, drape them over my belly and tickle
them. I throw them away and get very, very angry with them. We
kiss and make up.
I am a scientist when I put the words in my body and release them
in a rhythm of ragged vocabularly glances. This is a body research
where the words are unbalanced, analyzed, restructured, constructed,
flipped, tossed, tasted, smelled, screamed, whispered, I put the
words under the body microscope, in the body Petri dish, through
the flame; boiled in tears, placed on a mountainside in the rain
to see what remains.
I look for the construction of moments that are a rhythm of honest,
RIGHT THERE-NESS of the performer without pretense contrasted
with moments of intimate high theatricality.
I want the work to stimulate the viewer to create metaphor.
I want to create an experience for the audience where they can
be engaged in the process of performance, rather than the consumption
of the experience.
I want it to matter.
November 13, 2006
