Teresa Bruce's Blog, page 51

Mothers of a different kind

          I may never truly understand why I needed Byrne Miller as much as I did when I met her, in my early twenties. But I came a little closer when Pat Conroy told me the story of his re-parenting and the remarkable Julia Rendel. 

          Before he became a best-selling writer, Pat was a spectacularly unsuccessful teacher. He cared far too much, crossed way too many lines in the race-divided South. Readers of The Water Is Wide know of his ignominious firing from the one-room schoolhouse ...

The brilliance of re-parenting

          Mine was not an abusive childhood but a smothered one. My younger brother was crushed under the wheels of the family truck – an accident that happened at home, in a split second, when my mother was watching my baby sister. He was almost four and I spent the next thirty years trying to replace him. I became whatever my father needed, even when it was a silent partner while he raged against the world that took my brother from him. I stopped being a kid when my brother died and took...

The Re-parenting Dance

          Summer is when I miss Byrne Miller the most. Maybe it's the flowing clothes that catch the breeze, or the near nakedness of swimming in the creek outside her house. It's the season for abandoning pretensions and inhibitions and the heavy, sticky heat of it reminds me of the woman who freed me. Until I met her, I was a little ball of guilt, trying to fix or placate my far-from-perfect parents. She was already in her 80s and had given up on that foolishness since before I was born. 

  ...

Eiko+Koma are Byrne's children too

Eiko+Koma with Byrne in 1995

 

          Not all of Byrne Miller's "adopted" children are as famous as the legendary modern dancers Eiko+Koma, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/arts/dance/26eiko.html but she made each and every one of us feel utterly treasured.   For almost a century she created this family and filled it with students and friends – starting with her husband. Duncan Miller was estranged from his own parents – some deep dark secret that she said he never shared with her and she n...

The Scandalous Silver Slipper

If it's too hot to do anything else, dance. You're sweating anyway, right? Byrne Miller always said sweating is the sign of doing it right, whether "it" was dance or sex. It's your body's testimony to the effort, the consciousness of movement. She was always conscious of how she moved, and how dance is the most sensual of acts possible to perform alone.

I became conscious of the latter when she invited me to take a master class from Martha Graham dancers. They were in Beaufort, South Carolina ...

When the economy tanks, give them bosoms!

It's easy to think this recession is unique. We may indeed be the first generation to lose our houses to banks bailed out by our own pre-layoff tax dollars. But of course economic misery isn't new, and every time I'm tempted to think it is I am reminded of Byrne Miller.   

She came of age in the Great Depression and had to marry her husband twice because of it. The first time in secret, because leaving her father's household to start her own would mean the family would lose the meager income s...

Ghosts of Olar

 

     Leaving Olar at almost seventy miles an hour is not when you want to see a South Carolina state trooper. Especially not one headed back into town, wondering what's your hurry. His lights flash all they want but still aren't near as blue as the disappearing sky. There's no excuse crazier than the truth. The ghosts of Olar are at our back, puffing their cheeks to blow us away.
     We try it anyway. The trooper can't be but twenty-five at most, might not have heard it all yet. No sir, not ...

Fishing is nothing like dancing

It may sound obvious, that fishing is nothing like dancing, but it wasn't to me. Until yesterday, when a friend took me out on his boat for six hours just off the coast of Parris Island.

I'd practised, assuming that, like dance, this is what fishing takes. For the past few weeks I took my rod down to the end of our dock around noon, when my mind usually starts to wander away from whatever page I'm writing. Instead of checking Facebook, or even blogging, I practised casting. There was no sense ...

If you are ugly, know how to dance

The Nyanja people of Zambia have a proverb Byrne would have loved: If you are ugly, know how to dance. How telling, when dance is so much a part of a culture that to be able to dance is celebrated almost as much as beauty.

I like to think that dance is on an upsurge again in our own culture, if only as evidenced by popular TV contests like "So You Think You Can Dance." I'm not sure that dance was ever as central to the North American culture as it is in other places. Maybe the very number of d...

Dancing with Poems

 

April is National Poetry Month, and I saw a poem the other day that made me think of Byrne Miller. I never took the time to ask Byrne who her favorite poets were, but something tells me Langston Hughes would have been one of them.

Black Dancers – by Langston Hughes

We

Who have nothing to lose

Must sing and dance

Before the riches

Of the world

Overcome

Us.

We

Who have nothing to lose

Must laugh and dance

Lest our laughter

Goes from

Us.

Byrne not only brought modern dance to the Deep South, she b...