AUDIENCE REVIEW: Timely and timeless: 17 years of Andrea Miller's BLUSH
Company:
GALLIM
Performance Date:
January 17th, 2026
Freeform Review:
by Sofía Ruvira
It’s snowing outside, when I walk into the Schwarzman Center at Yale, a multi-purpose venue that hosts among its fluted columns award-winning artists like the one I came to see tonight. Andrea Miller is the first choreographer commissioned for the 2026 season, and she comes with the legendary BLUSH, a sixty-minute piece she created in 2009 that has been performed worldwide for almost two decades.
When the lights go off, there is a subtle gloom on the stage, a tenuous light that illuminates the tape-marked square where the dancers are going to perform. And suddenly, a twisted single body dances onstage, performing scruffy yet elegant movements. At first, we don't know if the dancer is naked: The way the lights beam over his body makes it hard to perceive anything else but pure flesh — a flesh that moves around in a way is almost non-human. A couple of minutes later, the mystery is resolved; he is wearing a small and flowy black costume that reveals everything but his pelvis, his feet are covered in black tape and he is covered in a white powder. He moves slowly, then hectically, following the music in some moments and going counter-count in others. There is so much fragility in the way the dance develops, and yet there is a strength that reverberates all over the moves.
BLUSH is performed by six dancers, a small cast, yet large enough to create a wide variety of compositions, duets and trios that shift as the piece progresses. After the first solo, the six dancers all covered in powder gather together, and dance in different arrangements all over the space. As the piece progresses GALLIM, Miller’s Brooklyn-based contemporary dance company, offers the audience a powerful duet, performed by Vivian Pakkanen and India Hobbs, who oscillate between madness and delicacy. The legs move high, emulating quasi-balletic steps. But the dancers are so grounded, their pelvises close to the stage, with gravity so perceptible that one cannot mistake the contemporary-driven dance for anything else: a dance of the moment. There is another occasion in the piece where we can see the power of nowness: when two male-presenting dancers, Donterreo Culp and Donovan Reed, perform a duet. The dancers, their bodies now almost powderless, reveal the force of their naked skin, fighting with each other and ultimately loving each other. Their arms and legs move fast as they approach one another, and calmly as they separate. They run along the stage, Reed covering Culp’s face with his hands, making Donterreo trust him, to only later fall into Culp’s arms, beat him, and ultimately leave the space. The duet exemplifies the fragility of trust between two men, something that Miller later discusses in a post- performance colloquium.
Blending past and present, bringing classic into the contemporary, and featuring music spanning centuries — from Chopin to Arvo Pärt — BLUSH is nevertheless a dance rooted in its own time; but what happened when this time passed 17 years ago? Miller, responding to a question posed by an audience member, alludes to the ever-changing yet timeless quality of the dancing body. Humans have been trusting each other for millennia, and yet the world that surrounds us is in constant development. The exploration that Miller accomplishes in BLUSH pertains to the mysterious nature of dance and the powerful capacity to abstract narrative. The choreographer emphasized the ability to search the remote, the abjectum, with movements. The dancers move onstage — they bounce, plié, jump, raise arms — creating a meaning that is to be felt more than analyzed.
Miller also recounts how she created the piece in a deep search for what she calls the “muscle of happiness” in the body, only to later realize she was also seeking out a deeper connection with dance, one that would expand far beyond her position as a dancer. With BLISH she consolidated herself as a choreographer. The piece, which was first performed at Joyce Soho in 2009, gave Miller the opportunity to develop an evening-length work that would make the audience sit with an idea longer than usual, intensifying the commitment between the artists and the audience.
Toward the end of BLUSH, we can see a lingering feeling of exhaustion in the faces of the dancers, who not only dance with their bodies, but exercise the muscle of their voice, which is often neglected in the classical dance world. With weeping grunts, they jump on each other, creating effortless-looking portés that at the same time demonstrate the contained strength of the dancer's muscles and bones. The last variation feels like a joyous rave, the expressions of the dancers shifting from unsettled to utter bliss, leaving us resting in the changing power of vulnerability and finding consolation in one another.
BLUSH, Miller later reveals to the audience, is in the sweat-covered skin, which illuminates after the white powder is removed. The power of sweat, of effort, of the possibility of aloofness that dance allows explains the work’s longevity and what makes it so timely and timeless to the ever-changing contemporary moment today and for many decades to come.
