Beatrice Miller, FCLC '26

Major: Dance, Music minor

Bio: Beatrice Miller (she/they) grew up in the Bay Area, California. Beatrice is currently a senior in the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program. She has performed works by Alvin Ailey, Hope Boykin, Christopher Huggins, Keerati Jinakunwiphat, Tamisha Guy, Kimberly Bartosik, Rachel Harris, and Danielle Diniz. They are a 2026 Dance Fellow of the Carmel Dance Festival. She has choreographed works for the concert dance stage and for the exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design, Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe.

Title of Research: In, Out, and Around

Mentor: Andrew Clark, Dance, Languages and Cultures

Research Partner: Alaire Galloway

Abstract: In, Out, and Around is a multimedia dance-play by Beatrice Miller and Alaire Galloway with music by Valerie Tauro. It tells the story of five characters stuck in a time loop, haunted by a projected, animated entity. The work draws from research on existentialism, performance theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, as well as from choreographers who have combined text with dance and for whom repetition characterizes their art, like Hope Boykin, Bill T. Jones, Pina Bausch, and Judith Jamison. 

Although IO&A shows one cycle of the story, it references an eternity of repetitions and asks whether repetition allows for difference. In an imagined reality with infinite time but a finite set of events, the characters constantly desire something just beyond their reach. Their becoming is repeatedly reset, so they struggle to grow and change. In the end, through the mutability of the body and mind, the characters find difference in the repetition and a reason to continue on.   

Dance and language are used as storytelling forms. Although language is usually considered more tangible, dance has a clear role in the rhetoric of the story. The movement of the body draws attention to ephemerality. No movement can be exactly replicated because it exists in the context of its moment. The same movement again is never the same. To emphasize this variation, the performance includes projections of rehearsal footage, earlier iterations of the loop. Each performance of In, Out, and Around differs by design, so although the story is always the same, it is never the same show.