Acclaim for GALLIM’s New Work “MOTHER”

GALLIM’s newest evening-length work, MOTHER, premiered at the Krannert Center in Fall 2025, followed by its New York Premiere with a five-night run at The Joyce. In MOTHER, world-renowned choreographer Andrea Miller conjures a fantastical universe beyond human myth, charged with mystical allure in a sensual, haunting physical reality. Through GALLIM artists’ virtuosic intensity and fearless movement, Miller confronts what she calls the “Apocalypse of Matter”: our growing distance from touch, skin, and organic surrender. Visceral, mesmerizing, obsessive and aesthetically uncompromising, MOTHER takes us to an unimagined, magnetic world, made to be inhabited through our senses. A collision of fashion, art and music, MOTHER features an original electronic dance score by Frédéric Despierre, with surreal costume design by Orly Anan, and evocative lighting design by Vincent Vigilante.

“Each dancer, wearing a unitard in varying shades of the rainbow, glows under Vincent Vigilante’s brilliant, highlighter-bright lighting, which transforms the stage into a living painting. The dancers embody balletic shapes—arabesques, penchés, splits—and molten, elastic movements, at times taught with sculptural precision, at others, melting into an almost boneless fluidity.

I begin to wonder if “MOTHER” is not a single figure, but a collective body. An ensemble presence remains near constant in the work, with solos or duets that break away from the group’s shifting clusters. The cast frames the space, holding hands or rearranging within their group, lifting one another up or breaking away in canon. So much beauty unfolds at once that I don’t always know where to look. Spotlights guide my gaze to featured moments, yet I long to take in everything. Miller’s movement language marries sharp control with an organic slipperiness, and each dancer’s individuality enriches the whole.”
The Dance Enthusiast

“Mother is a masterpiece of individuality, vulnerability, and strangeness. Mother invites the viewers, dancers, and Miller herself to explore: what does the creation of creation look and feel like? The act of motherhood is this exploration, and Mother digs right in. A brilliant excavation.

A particular potency of Gallim dancers and Andrea Miller’s choreography is the extreme use of obscurity, encouraging the body to escape its typical boundaries. Through the thematic ranges of the repertoire, dancers find anatomically defying positions, extensions so far from Laban’s kinesphere that their limbs (and spirits!) arguably transcend. Otherworldly beings take up the stage as Miller’s movement embodies this consistently.

Revealing their range, dancers contorted their bodies in impressive partnering, striking articulations of their arms and legs, bobs and twitches of their heads and extremities.

Dancer Billy Barry even changed character, dancing in a huge white tasseled work of art, a culturally-inspired regalia of sorts. The entire piece was extraordinarily layered, over the ambient sound score and guttural vocalizations.”
eye on dance

“at once a trippy chronicle of planetary creation and a vision of social harmony expressed with imaginative lyrical force. In this intergalactic disco, Miller has captured the essence of wonder.

Tender and magical and often funny, MOTHER is set ‘in the primeval present’, per program notes, in which the dancers ‘exude traces of genesis’. That imagery was potent. The curtain rose on a lone woman in a deep birthing squat common to many indigenous cultures. Elsewhere, the ensemble flitted about like pollinators, thrusting jagged arms toward a stationary dancer. And in a highly engineered mid-air penetration, dancers lifted a comrade in a split toward another airborne dancer, gliding her front leg through the V of the other dancer’s legs. All this was executed with equal parts solemnity and serenity.

The ensemble of nine delicately yet resolutely picked their way across a stark white otherworldly landscape. They were wrapped in paper-thin unitards, the extraordinary creations of Orly Anan, like spray-painted second skins marked by shimmering blobs of color that resembled starburst galaxies as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope.”
Bachtrack

“From the moment the lights came up, I was drawn in. A soloist moved across the stage in a sheer, skin-tight unitard, her breath audible in the silent house. The lighting (by Vincent Vigilante) and costuming (by Orly Anan) were in sync — every shift in tone brought out something new in the dancer’s form. A soft lullaby-like voice entered, followed by swelling electronic tones that grew into deep, resonant bass. The movement was unclassical, raw, and rule-breaking. I grew up around ballet, and this was the opposite: hard heels hitting the floor, broken lines in limbs and torsos, legs folding in on themselves like question marks. Haze crept across the stage. The soloist was replaced by a formation of nine dancers, four against five, moving in harmony and tension, the music now driving and chant-like. I could feel it in my chest.

The groups morphed to trios, soloists, and pairings. The choreography captured a feeling of life forming, fracturing, then reforming. At one point, a single dancer appeared silhouetted in bright white light, howling into the space. An answer came — a dancer fully cloaked in white tassels, face and body hidden, arms draped, topped with a wide-brimmed hat. Ghost? Spirit? Future? Whatever was represented, they were mesmerizing.

Their duet was echoed by the full ensemble, sound rising with wind and chimes until the tension onstage reached near-horror levels and then: the end. The curtain dropped mid-dance. Music still spinning. A shock, then applause. Then the curtain rises, dancers bowing beside Andrea Miller, joined by collaborators. That’s how you end an act.”
Smile Politely (Krannert Center Premiere)