Brooklyn-based dance troupe Gallim looks to its dancers for inspiration

Because Andrea Miller is interested in what’s inside her dancers rather than the ideas she might impose on them, her choreography can look different each time it’s performed, depending on who’s onstage.

“It was hell at first, dancing with her,” says Dallas native Jonathan Campbell, a former member of Miller’s Brooklyn-based troupe Gallim, which is headed to Dallas for the latest shows in the TITAS/Dance Unbound season.

“But it opened me up to improvisation and gave me permission and confidence to make choices within my own body inside the framework of her creation,” he says. “She really feeds off the choices and the impulses of the dancers.”

Miller, a graduate of the Juilliard School like Campbell, co-founded Gallim in 2007 after two years in Israel’s Bathsheva Dance Company under the leadership of Ohad Naharin. His sensation-based technique, called Gaga, favors process over final product, pleasure seeking over rigid structure, and has become a major influence on contemporary choreographers like Miller.

TITAS director Charles Santos first saw Gallim about 15 years ago in New York when Campbell was in the company. Santos says he’s been trying to bring them to Dallas ever since. He was struck not only by Miller’s particular movement vocabulary — intense and visceral — but also by the seeming intelligence of the dancers.

“You have companies today that want dancers who are going to creatively participate in the process,” Santos says. “Andrea takes that a long way.”

In 2019, Miller told the art magazine Bomb that this is especially how she has liked to work since she was pregnant and unable to demonstrate what she wanted.

“It set the stage for the dancers to be able to be creative and think for themselves and not wait for me to give them materials for the movement.

“The dancers are at different places. … Some are struggling, and once in a while, you just need to tell them, ‘This is great,’ without giving them any feedback. Once they stop questioning everything they do, they’ll make better material. … Some need to be pushed, and some are resting on their laurels.”

Resting doesn’t appear to be a major feature of Miller’s dance pieces, six of which will be performed in Dallas in a program she’s calling “Bodies of Matter.” They range in length from the four-minute duet No Ordinary Love, set to the Sade song of the same name, to the six-times-as-long Desde, described as a fleeting, atmospheric work performed to the haunting soundscapes of American composer Nicholas Jaar.

“This evening that Andrea is bringing is a good picture of her work,” Santos says. “They’re all different, they’re all interesting, but you can see that they’re coming from the same creative mind. I love someone that has that ability to use their vocabulary in many different ways. … I find her very contemporary, very young, very daring. She’ll push some boundaries that other choreographers don’t.”

He’s a particular fan of 2019’s Sama, which will close the two Dallas performances. Commissioned by Juilliard and the British troupe Rambert2, it features dancers in burnt orange costumes and on stilts performing to a pulsating electronic score.

“It has great energy,” Santos says. “In a dance series of 10 companies, it’s nice to have something that you know takes the audience to a new place.”

Campbell, who co-founded the now defunct MADboots dance group, remembers seeing Gallim at the Joyce Theater in New York while he was still at Juilliard.

“I was immediately awestruck by how rigorous the movement vocabulary was,” he says. “I think it was the first time I recognized how intense and sensual movement could be, which was very influential in my choreographic career. … I don’t think anyone’s going to walk away feeling indifferent toward her.”

Miller has said she made Sama out of concern that the digital age might be numbing us physically.

 “Is this the beginning of an apocalypse of the body?” she asks. “There are essential, ambiguous and complex elements of our humanity that can only be accessed through our physical experience. Forget conventional, oversimplifying or automated rules of reasoning.”

Or as she told Bomb, “If life is filled with so much hardship and pain, how do you get to a point where you can both recognize the beautiful things and let them affect you in a way that enables your spirit to transcend such heaviness?

“We look for a lot of those answers outside ourselves — looking at your phone, through substances, or a boyfriend — disassociating through focusing on external things that make you happy,” she told the magazine.

“The real work happens when this question is something you can solve with yourself, with your own consciousness. … The way you talk to yourself about who you are, how you berate yourself and how you love yourself or are grateful to yourself. I feel like the work has to be done here, in the body.”

May 29-30 at 7:30 p.m. at Moody Performance Hall, 2520 Flora St. $43-$97. attpac.org.