Meet: Campbell Miller

by Jacquelyn Thayer

In an hour’s conversation spanning personal history, a dance’s deeper history, and the pros and cons of codification, it’s apparent that Campbell Miller brings an academic respect for social dance and an exuberance for the form to bear on her work as social dance specialist at the University of Texas at Austin.

She grew up with a conventional studio dance education, studying the typical range from ballet and tap to modern and jazz, until her senior year of high school in the heady swing revival days circa 1997, when a friend, inspired by a visit with the Houston Swing Dance Society, introduced the style at school.

“That’s really, I would say, where my interest in partner dancing was sparked,” said Miller. “We did a very corny routine for a talent show at our school. So I got involved in swing dancing, went out dancing a lot, to my parents’ dismay, out late. You know, not the normal dancing where you’re at a studio and you just come home for dinner, whatever.”

Once admitted to Stanford University, where she would major in Computer Science, Miller planned to leave the world of dance behind — until she caught a performance from a vintage dance ensemble led by social dance historian Richard Powers.

“I think it sort of bridged my two worlds, really, from the solo performance stuff, which was all performance/competition driven, to the social dance world,” she said. She’d take up a minor in dance and work as a primary instruction partner in Powers’ classes. Today, her UT program draws from those foundations. But despite the academic context, social dance, she’s learned, is better taught prescriptively than proscriptively.

“My courses look at dance as a model for personal growth, I would say, more than from an academic side,” she said. “I start at what I think is the easiest, most digestible and most fun. It’s sort of like a little triangle of greatness. And then I lure them into these other modalities, these other styles.”

It’s a broad syllabus. Beginners typically tackle East Coast Swing, country two-step, cross-step waltz, bachata, salsa and West Coast Swing, while intermediate levels cover more difficult figures and a few additional styles. She teaches to a mix of musical genres, balancing cultural accuracy with the occasional popular piece that fits a style. But the emphasis is less on rigorous technical standard, more on lessons learned.

“I will offer ideas and I will definitely give techniques that I believe in, but ultimately I am teaching them how to be open-minded, adaptable to every partner, and that one way of doing something is not the only way,” she said. “So I guess what I’ve done is I’ve gathered techniques that I’ve seen and I basically have come up with kind of a universal technique that then I apply to these dances that I see overlap, so that the language we use between the styles is as common as possible.”

For anyone, student or non, looking to enter the social dance scene, Miller offers a few suggestions. Musical taste is fundamental — aversion to a genre, like vintage blues tunes, will negate much pleasure in the dancing of it. More, “I try to look a little bit at their personality — each dance has a different personality,” she said. “If you’re pretty shy, Latin dances and even West Coast Swing don’t really fit that personality well, right? If you’re more introverted, tango tends to work well for people who are very driven but introverted.” And dance communities, she argues, have personalities, with swing and blues among the most welcoming scenes in her experience. As her own inclinations go, the musicality of blues and tango especially draw her in, along with their possibilities for improvisation — “co-creation, I guess I would say, versus other dances, where it feels like the leader drives so much of it that it’s not as co-created, not as conversational.” But cross-step waltz, a modern approach with a more equal lead/follow hold, is a more traditionally-styled favorite — “mostly because I love waltz music, but also because it lends itself to being a fusion dance,” she concluded. Though most of her recorded blues performances have hewed solidly to that improv tradition, one exception stands out — a trick-heavy number with Chris Mayer to Nina Simone’s “Do I Move You.” “Oh, now that’s the only choreography I’ve ever done in blues,” she admitted. “That one would’ve been way too hard.”

But teaching opportunities expand beyond technique and into topics like use of non-gendered language or the impact of posture on mindset. Grading criteria, a necessary evil of the scholastic setting, has similarly evolved through experience. “They used to be graded by the look of what they did — they would have numbers on their back, almost like a competition,” she said, referring to the legacy of the program she inherited. “Then I realized, social dancing is so much more about feel than about look. So we changed it so they would dance with my assistants and would get feedback on how it felt, and it’s so much better. Now they do that and they do a personal reflection on ‘what am I doing well, what can I improve upon.’”

Of course, relative technical accomplishment remains a goal, and Miller has found three recurring challenges for novice students: close embrace with an unfamiliar partner, sometimes a simple case of shyness and sometimes a trigger concern; hip movement — “I feel like our whole society, our whole pelvis region is just locked” — and, typically, sense of rhythm or, rather, lack thereof. Students with some grounding in dance or similarly disciplined activities have an edge; one student, new to dance, surprised with a natural ease by day two — before Miller learned the student’s father was a tightrope walker. “I don’t know if it’s genetic, you know, but this kid was meant to dance. He should’ve discovered it earlier in his life, because he’s so good at it,” she said.

But like many a veteran of the blues scene, Miller is more than teacher of the style; she’s also an experienced competition judge. It makes for a rather complementary pair of roles.

“In teaching you want to see what people are getting at the moment,” she said. Judging comes down to what a more experienced dancer can show. “So then we’re looking usually at partner connection and can both partners contribute? And that’s very tricky, because contributions in blues dancing can be very small and subtle and you can easily miss them judging from the outside versus if you were in the dance, you would feel it.”

It’s about discerning between showy displays and real technique. “As a judge, I look at are they actually being musical versus are they doing something to make it look fancy? It really shouldn’t be about the fanciness; it should be about the musicality.”

And, often, it’s about navigating past the subjectivity of judging. While Miller notes greater instances of relative consensus in recent years, discrepancies can still rear their head; on a panel shortly before our June meeting, she recalled, one dancer was ranked both last and first or second by judges.

Given the depth of Miller’s involvement with blues, it’s the subject of the dance’s future as a more easily defined formal style that raises some particular questions. Her own introduction to blues was, you might say, informal, a past friend kindling her interest with the promise of an improvisational, eclectic style. Following the discipline of the Stanford program study, she was, she jokingly remarks, “shoved into” co-teaching blues while still new to the dance herself. “At the time, the scene was different back then. It was, like, nine or 10 years ago,” she said. “I feel like things were maybe like no one really knew what they were doing, you know? People were kind of making things up.”

Another challenge to the purity — and popularity — of blues is the allure of the new, whether electronic dance music that doesn’t quite suit an authentic blues style to freewheeling attempts at fusion. But Miller distinguishes between “modern fusion dancing,” a process of quilting together disparate social elements sometimes to the detriment of a recognizable stylistic thread, and a more focused approach she’s performed and taught. “I think if you take two particular styles like, for instance, West Coast Swing and tango, we have to find transition points between the styles, so where do they actually fit together?” she asked. “There has to be an understanding of not only what’s the posture and what the connection is in the dance — West Coast tends to be open, it uses a lot of stretch and leverage, so tango doesn’t really work in that context. But West Coast does pass through an embrace of a sort, so any time I’m in an embrace, I may be paying more attention to where my axis is, where my weight is.”

And maybe those non-standard roots contribute to blues dance’s difficulty in developing the popular interest generated by its glossier swing cousins. “We’re not just at a house party any more, even though that’s where most of the blues dancing started,” she said. “As soon as you get more serious about it or more codified or more formalized, it’s like you have to take a little bit of that, I’ll say ‘sex element’ out of it to make it work.”

With that history of more private venues and dark rooms compounding a touch-heavy dance style, blues can be perceived by some, fairly or not, as associated with an aura of seediness. It’s a concern strong enough to have prompted discussion within the blues and wider Lindy world about consent and the realities and prevention of sexual assault. But blues has no exclusive claim on the genre of sexy social dance, and it’s long since migrated into the brighter realm of organized competition, well-advertised festival, and PG-rated YouTube performance and instruction videos.

What still sets blues apart, though, is a lesser degree of the codification that’s systematized so many other social dances, presenting newcomers with a universal set of steps and figures beyond basic components like connection and drag. Miller acknowledges that a sensitivity to the style’s roots — grounding blues in its vernacular antecedents danced in the early twentieth century African American community — limits some efforts to create a more regimented style, lest recommendations deviate too significantly from historical accuracy. But there’s more at stake, too.

“I feel like swing is in a place that it’s probably never going to die off — it has enough people interested in it that it’s going to maintain,” she said. “I feel like some of that is because it was codified enough to talk about it, to say ‘Here are the basics.’ If you were to do a lesson plan for four weeks or eight weeks, it’s pretty clear what you would do if you want to learn Lindy hop. Certainly around the country and different cities, people are creating [blues] curricula, and there’s more sharing going on than there had been before. But in terms of the words we use, there’s still not been, like, a consortium where we’ve met together and said, okay, when we do this basic, we’re all going to call it this.”

She cites the example of an Austin-area dance instructor who teaches kizomba, an Angolan dance that, like blues, relies on music-driven improvisation and close contact between partners, in a “neo” form, offering a series of ballroom-like levels through which new learners can pass. It suggests a potential model for blues — but only to a point.

“Blues is a family of dances, so then it’s like, well, you’ve got this kind of style and this style and we blend them,” she said. “So it’s a complicated mess, you know? Maybe you could almost liken it to swing, how there’s Lindy and Charleston — you can fuse them and pretty much everyone does. There might be a way of shaking that stuff out, but ultimately with blues, there’s not as clear of a history, right? It wasn’t written down and captured even on video as much as swing was.”

And as teacher, judge — and, at heart, dancer — Miller will continue to revel in the messiness.

 
Learn more about Miller’s work at the Austin Social Dance site and catch more of her work on YouTube