Tiffany Mills is the new director of dance at Lewis & Clark College. I did not know this when I first learned that her company, Tiffany Mills Company, would be coming to the college to host a week of community workshops and a run of performances on the weekend of April 4 and 5. As a choreographer and someone interested in working with college students, I was excited to put two and two together, learning of Mills’ work at Lewis & Clark, so I dove headfirst into this story, signing up for multiple workshops and opening night of the performance.

Though I had no clear sense of Mills’ choreography, nor of what to expect from this engagement, I found over the course of the week that Mills is someone deeply invested in connections. She models a commitment to nurturing the individual artistry of dancers, knowing this will support their interrelation with one another and the wider community.

Mills hails most recently from New York City, where she had been based since 1995. Through the company, incorporated as a nonprofit as of 2000, she has engaged in a range of exciting opportunities for more than two decades, including a 2023 collaboration with Ensemble Ipse at National Sawdust. For this, she developed three dances with accompaniment from seven violists.

When Mills came to Portland to serve as Lewis & Clark’s director of dance in 2024, she continued directing her company in New York City remotely. I learned from talking to her at the workshops that she had been planning to bring her company, and this performance created with Ensemble Ipse, to Lewis & Clark for more than a year, carefully crafting multiple points of local engagement during the lead up.

Mills offered five company workshops, free and open to the community — two of which took place at a partner site, Reed College, while the other three happened at Lewis & Clark. 

I first attended an Improvisation workshop with Mills on Tuesday, April 1, in Lewis & Clark’s black box theater. The space was packed with students and community members ready to dance. In the opening circle, Mills asked each member of the crowd to introduce themself with both their name and a gesture, which the rest of us mimicked.

The inquiry of this workshop centered on imagery of Haystack Rock, which Mills had captured on a recent trip to the Oregon coast. She projected the image on the wall, inviting the participants to engage with sensory and textural themes related to the image. This is one of Mills’ talents, I realized: encouraging solo and group improvisations by invoking sense-memory and tugging at the threads of imagination.

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Accompanied by music from a live musician, Mills invited the group to make passes across the space. She explained that she learned this score from Nancy Stark Smith, a legendary practitioner of contact improvisation, a type of dance improvisation that often involves weight-sharing between partners.

Mills also invoked the legacy of Steve Paxton, commonly referred to as the founder of contact improvisation. Mills’ sensibility fit right in with the interest in contact improvisation at a local level, stewarded long-term by the likes of Portland’s Carolyn Stuart, Lewis & Clark College dance educator Eric Nordstom, and Reed College dance educator Carla Mann — the latter of whom was in attendance at the workshop.

Shannon Mockli, Associate Professor of Dance, was also present, visiting with a busload of University of Oregon Dance Students. They all wore their department T-shirts that read “Dance is hard,” on the back — a sentiment I could relate to.

This time, students, community members, and university dance faculty received instruction from Mills with assistance from Luke Gutgsell, a Portland-based mover who had danced for Mills during his tenure in New York City. I watched Mills and Gutgsell move together, soaking in their familiar rapport in partnering, so soothing to witness. Gutgsell would make a guest appearance with Mills’ company in the performance later that evening.

The workshop explored familiar scores for solo improvisation from the previous day, adding in moments of physical partnering with fellow class-takers. Mills prompted us to support each other by our “under-surfaces,” using the underside of limbs and body parts. I appreciated this language in reference to surfaces rather than the typical binary of “under-dancer” and “over-dancer” — which plays into circumscribed and limiting roles. This invitation gave way to my own responsiveness in partner dances.

Mills concluded the workshop a few minutes early, explaining that the University of Oregon students would now share a short performance during the last bit of our time together, as a kind of “exchange.” These students danced a work they had created together and with direction from faculty, lifting each other ambitiously in compelling motifs. Their work was met with avid applause. The students’ support for one another—both in the dance and as audience members — reflected an impetus toward interdependence in extended circles of relationship.

After washing the dances of the day off, I returned to Lewis & Clark to attend the Tiffany Mills Company performance later that evening. The show featured a restaging of the Viola Trilogy, this time with recorded viola music as opposed to live. Mills introduced the show, noting that the viola usually does not enjoy the spotlight, but typically functions as accompaniment to the violin. In the program, I read that the trilogy explored “what it means to be seen, to be absent, to be perceived, and felt,” conceptually influenced by the heightened presence of the violas. The evening would also feature a performance by ten of Lewis & Clark’s dancers.

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To my left in the audience, I noticed a row of seats filled with visiting University of Oregon students. In fact, I noted, many young people occupied seats in the auditorium. In my journal that I brought to take notes on the performance, I wrote a note to myself: “So many young people in the audience — does this mean Dance is cool?” 

The performance began with a dance by Tiffany Mills Company members and guest artist Luke Gutgsell, titled Poem from Exile and set to layered dissonant viola music composed by Stephanie Griffin. This yearning and emotionally wrought work took inspiration from the poet Ovid’s historic exile. At the start, Emily Pope — who is also the company rehearsal director — danced a staccato solo, melting quietly into the side of the stage. Gutgsell performed a virtuosic  motif, writhing on the floor, and dancers Ching-I Chang and Jordan Morely followed suit with a fervent and whirling duet. The work ended as all dancers moved toward the background, with a subtle “come along with us” gesture from Gutgsell. I learned in the artist talkback that this work was largely improvised by the dancers.

Doa Persembunyian – A Prayer for Refuge was performed by an ensemble of Lewis & Clark dancers. This work featured music for a choir by Tony Prabowo, which was then arranged for violas by composer Griffin. The story of this work made reference to the agony of a woman in Romania wracked with civil war. It featured a soloist who emerged and re-emerged throughout, seemingly siloed and alone, even in a crowd of peers.

Doa Persembunyian stood out among the evening’s works with intricate physical collaborations that reflected Mills’ self-proclaimed celebration of the performers’ differences — what they each brought to the work to exact a true collective composition. The dancers formed a line and exploded from it in a cannon of movements. They rolled on and lifted each other expertly. At the end of the performance, the full audience exploded with joyful applause that pierced my eardrums. I overheard one young person in front of me with a friend in the performance talk about crying as they had watched.

The final performance, Vapor/Blood, featured four Tiffany Mills dancers. Dancer Tony Bordonaro greeted the audience verbally in an extremely theatrical manner, stating, “I’m going to go through something, and you are going to come with me.” Mills created this work in direct collaboration with the composer Max Giteck Duykers, who created a soundscape using silence and MIDI viola samples, as well as dramaturg Peter Salvatore. 

This work took audiences on a journey into Bordonaro’s character’s dream state, punctuated by antics from three other company dancers. Guanglei Hui performed a solo with pointed fingers and twizzling arms, at once mesmerizing, illusive, and technically stunning. Chang donned sunglasses and teased Bordano, acting as a “fly on the wall.” Pope provided comic relief and casual verbal contributions that loosened the immense theatricality of the performance text. 

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In a moment that left me a bit uncomfortable, Bordonaro, on his knees, straddled a prone Chang and howled. The gender dynamics read as quite lopsided in this odd moment and were never inverted to my satisfaction in Chang and Bordonaro’s onstage relationship. Yet, in retrospect, I also recognized that Mills still altogether avoided the gendered and relational physical depictions of visceral violence I have become so accustomed to in contemporary dance. As a result, I remained available to connect with many possible interpretations emerging from this work, which read as a stream of consciousness rising up and falling below the surface again and again, much like the sound of the viola. 

After the performance, Mills hosted an artist talkback with the whole cast of the show — a stage full of company and student dancers — answering questions from attendees and leaving space for the rest of the dancers to do the same. Her gentle and responsive sensibility seemed a beautiful fit for this academic context, where she had already helped bring about a new Dance Concentration Major in the Theatre Department (which had previously only offered a Dance Minor).

In this economy, I would argue that fostering students’ individual artistry and collaborative capacity as freelancers — much like the careers of Mills’ own company artists — serves them better than technical training orienting towards the increasingly competitive, withering company model. With this range of offerings, hooking into the community at so many points, Mills has provided a glimpse of the many vibrant possibilities for the future of dance at the college level in Portland.