Tiffany Mills and Ching-I Chang find each others’ legs in the air.

Lying back-flat, they paddle their limbs to the ceiling—left and right legs oscillating—so that, from my vantage of the Mark Morris Dance Center studio, they appear conjoined at the hip, cycling an invisible bike above. 

Nearby, Emily Pope and Tony Bordonaro slosh around—rolling, sweeping, and sliding along each other’s frames, until, suddenly, they stop.

Bordonaro mutters something to Pope, and she fastidiously begins to massage a patch of flesh beneath his rib. There might be pain. Soreness. It’s been an intense week. Tiffany Mills’ ensemble has been rehearsing for six days straight. 

I initially read Pope’s tending to Bordonaro as contact improv. (They perfectly decant into the gesture.) But it’s not improv; it’s Mills’s direction, which she had announced at the top of their warm-up:

“Come as you are.”

The group weaves in and out of jumps, turns, laughter, and tumbles like jitter-struck children on a playground while “Boy With Luv” by BTS scores the recess.

A few days later over Zoom, Mills explains the group’s playfulness:

“I just wanted to say thank you for sitting through [our rehearsal]. We are a chatty group, but also—because we're really trying to blend dance and theatre and music—there is a lot that we are sifting through.” 

Her dramaturg, Peter Petralia, and her composer, Max Giteck Duykers, occupy the other two video panels. Like Mills, Petralia is at home. Duykers, however, relays to us from the road, which makes the dramaturg nervous: 

“Please don't crash. Oh, God. I hate when people do this.”

The trio met in 2003 through HERE’s Artist Residency Program (HARP), a program for New York based artists that provides generous support for performance, visual, and new media works. Petralia and Duykers entered the program together as a theater company called Proto-type. Mills entered as her own dance company. 

“I was really excited, immediately, by Max and Peter’s work,” Mills remembers. “I thought—tucked in my brain somewhere—it would be really great to collaborate with them. Tomorrow’s Legs was the first time I worked with Peter, and that premiered at St. Mark’s Church in 2009.”

The original ensemble of Tomorrow’s Legs composed a textual-somatic script for the piece using the cast’s personal memories. The performance is equal parts dance and theatre. And, in true Proustian fashion, each sequence of reverie bursts from the seed of some lived sensation (e.g. squeezing an orange or discovering a tiny relic in an attic).

In one especially moving sequence, dancer Luke Gutsell recalls the story of being almost groomed by an older family friend. He’s blindfolded, and the surrounding dancers—Jeffrey Duval, Whitney Tucker, and Petra Van Noort—repeatedly thwart the story’s recital. They clasp Gutsell’s mouth shut. They crowd Gutsell’s body with the angles of their limbs. They suspend Gutsell in a lift. When the blindfolded bard finally gets the truth out about the attempted abuse, Duval and Noort relinquish him to the ground.

I witnessed a similar tableau form during Mills’s rehearsal of her latest piece Vapor/Blood, which will premiere at National Sawdust. Chang—filling in for absent dancer Guanglei Hui—cups Bordonaro’s eyes with her hands from behind. His face crumples beneath. As Bordonaro struggles forward in a lunge—arms spread in a wingspan—Pope struggles against him, as if shielding him from a soon-to-be-discovered truth. Pope departs, then recounts a dream to Chang, decibels below audibility. 

In the corner, now alone, Bordonaro sinks: his knees into his feet; his countenance into his palms; his mind into his memory.

“Interesting creatives are obsessed with certain things,” Petralia imparts. “For myself, I’ve always been obsessed with dreams and the things you can’t see. That is very much rooted in experiences from childhood and the role that dreams have played in my life in an almost witchy way. I’m always drawn to that: the idea that we create these vivid worlds that evaporate when we wake up.”

Both Tomorrow’s Legs and Vapor/Blood privilege moods and atmospheres over clear narrative structure. Mills and her collaborators are interested in those deeper clefts of the brain where feelings and remembrances accrue before we ascribe them meaning or genre. 

“The brain creates experiences out of the combination of stimuli from the body, from the mind, from the environment, from chemicals,” Petralia continues. “You can't say there is a memory in your brain. It's actually a series of things in your body. And that's why—every time you remember something—it can sometimes evolve. And that's why there is a bit of unreliability in memory.”

As for Mills, she was obsessed with classic children’s novels growing up:

“I love referring back to Alice in Wonderland and The [Wonderful] Wizard of Oz—these classic stories where things are surreal and dreamlike. The child’s mind is so open. So, tapping into that idea opens the aperture of what’s possible.”

The child’s mind is profoundly associative. In those first few years of life, the human brain establishes neural connections at a rate of 1 million per second. Similarly, when Mills, Petralia, and Duykers recount their childhoods for me, they rip through scenes of mud pits, balancing beams, Florida gators, eviction notices, grand pianos, and opera concerts. They fire from one synaptic impulse to the next, and they often cut together their pieces this way:

“[In Vapor/Blood], there’s a reference to black eyes,” Tiffany starts. “And when you have a black eye, it’s swollen. You can’t see things. Or, your perspective is slightly different. And it’s also very visceral. I remember my brother hit me by accident with a golf club swing back when I was a kid. Then in one of the improvisations [in the piece], Ching-I started bringing in this idea of a fly. So there’s this dream[like] strangeness coming in and out [of the piece].”

If Mills's choreography is the driver, and Petralia’s script is the engine, then Duykers’s score is the haunted body of the car that drives Vapor/Blood home. The ensemble is comprised of seven violas (Ensemble Ipse with guest artists) and viola MIDI samples triggered by lead violist Stephanie Griffin using a foot pedal.

Back at rehearsal, Duykers seemed the most worried about getting the piece done. He still needs to teach his viola section the show music. In the corner of the dance studio, Duykers was sifting through musical scores and passages on his laptop. Without his ensemble present, Duykers played demos of his arrangements over the studio speakers. 

At moments, the score recalled Resident Evil 1’s “Save Room Theme:” deep drones, synth string glissandos like banshee howls, and woody, plodding viola plucks. In other moments, the composition lifted, became a less fussy ocean of string swells, making room for the piece’s humorous dialogue and playful choreography.

Mills’s theatre of the mind constitutes a dense web of dreams, memories, fables, and relations. There is room for joy and there is room for lament. The mind moves that way. So does life.

When I ask Mills what she’s taken away from the last 20 years of her Company, she shares:

“We're not telling a perfect story with a throughline in every kind of way. We're trying to be storytellers, but not in a traditional sense. I've been around for a while. The dancers that come [to work with me] want to be part of a process that's going to be chewy and full and complex. I want to keep working with artists in that vein.”

About Nala Duma

Nala Duma is a musician, choreographer, and writer whose critical lens on popular culture and contemporary music takes up Blackness as the break that might rupture our attachments to Worlds, territories, and Man.