Buzz Miller
Early life and Training[edit]
Vernal Miller, known from boyhood as Buzz, was born in Snowflake, Arizona, a small town in Navajo County founded by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Raised in a family with three brothers and two sisters, he was educated in local schools. After graduation from high school, he joined the U.S. Army and spent two years as a front lines messenger on active duty in World War II. He was honorably discharged from military service after being injured in combat. In 1947, when he was 23 years old, he began his dance studies with Mia Slavenska, a glamorous Croatian ballerina, in Hollywood, California.[2] After only nine months of study, he got his first professional dancing job.
Later years[edit]
In 1978, Miller was a founding member and reconstructionist of the American Dance Machine, a company and briefly a school devoted to preserving the great dance numbers from Broadway and television shows. He was responsible for restaging Carol Haney's choreography for "Me and My Girl," first presented on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1962. He also taught master dance classes at many universities in the United States. He was regarded as one of the leading teachers of jazz dance in the country.
Openly gay for most of his life, Miller had a five-year liaison with Jerome Robbins in the 1950s.[10] Thereafter, in 1957, he met Alan Groh and began a relationship that lasted for some thirty years, until Groh's death in 1996.[11] Miller himself died of emphysema in Manhattan in 1999. He was 76 years old.
[12]
His archives and papers are held in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.[13]