Getting into the room with 2 choreographers

That huge temporal imbalance seems like a problem, yet if you listen to many choreographers and dancers, you get the sense that just scheduling more performances wouldn’t solve everything. These artists often imply that the process, not the product, is the most valuable part of their work — at least to them. Performances, by these lights, are more like peepholes.

Is there a way to widen the aperture? This appears to be the goal of the The Making Room, a project led by the veteran choreographer Bebe Miller. At New York Live Arts last week, she and her colleague Susan Rethorst each presented a new piece on a shared program. So far, so ordinary. But Miller’s company also unveiled a website — themakingroom.org — that gives the public access to more of the making.

The access we get isn’t equal. Over two years, the choreographers operated largely independently, and the text and video clips on the website offer much less of Rethorst’s process than that of Miller, whose company organized the project. We see bits of Miller’s rehearsals and in-progress showings, source material and improvisations, experiments that yield discoveries or don’t, and lots of stuff (including dancers) that didn’t make it into the performed piece.

Clicking around, you can get a decent feel for what Miller and her dancers do with their time, and for the collective exploration that matters to them. That’s much less true of the pages devoted to Rethorst. But the project has a third element: three occasions on which the choreographers met and compared notes. And here Rethorst’s participation is crucial.

As she demonstrated in her 2012 book, “A Choreographic Mind,” Rethorst is uncommonly skilled at articulating how her kind of choreographer thinks. She’s a straight talker, too. She’s the one, on the website, who suggests that all this exposure of process might be more interesting to the participants than to audience members.

Compared with her writing, Rethorst’s aperçus on the site aren’t as fully formed. Neither are Miller’s, and it’s a little frustrating to watch revelations spark and fade. What’s most illuminating is to witness these contemporaries (they both danced in Nina Wiener’s company in the mid-1970s), each long accustomed to doing her own thing, observe and comment on the other’s approach. The divergences bring out their distinctiveness.

Miller is all about asking — of a gesture or movement — “What is this?” She and her dancers consider the question together, bringing up associations, memories, movies. Rethorst, by contrast, would never ask that question. “It is what it is,” she says. She knows what she wants, even if she keeps changing her mind.

This difference was somewhat discernible in the two pieces at New York Live Arts. Rethorst’s “Stealing From Myself” stitches together parts of earlier works. (It might have been nice if the website clued us in to the sources.) As she explained in a postshow discussion, the work uses music in a filmic way, to impose mood. Yet the choreography doesn’t impose an interpretation. Two people (Gregory Holt and the radiant Gabrielle Revlock) seem to be in a silent play of found gestures quilted together. A whimsical, slapstick quality might turn sinister, but what holds your attention is the specificity. It is what is.

Miller’s “In a Rhythm” is altogether more elaborate. With easy authority, she verbally introduces her strong cast of six, tells us about David Foster Wallace and Toni Morrison, and explains her interest in syntax. The dance is many disparate things put side by side, a structure that the website reveals as both aesthetic preference and practical reaction (which dancers are available when). Irresistible music (the Commodores, Donny Hathaway) oozes in and is then ripped away like a rug, or like the rugs that serve as set and sometimes costumes.

It’s a rich stew, with the suggestive power of its juxtapositions unfixed, yet especially in the context of The Making Room, it raises the question of how many doors of entry a dance needs. The website raises the same question, differently. Yet ultimately the site isn’t a tool to understand better these particular dance works. It’s an imperfect portal into these choreographers’ ways of working, for those who have the time.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.