Lean Into Love With And She Was Loved

Breath. Movement. Words.

These three principles guide Zell Miller III’s And She Was Loved, the inaugural performance of Black Rose Theater ATX. It’s a perfect entrance for a company dedicated to, as their mission states, telling “American love stories through an African American lens.” They’re a sorely needed voice for Austin, where spaces for those stories are being diminished. Black Rose’s first season lineup elevates Austin’s Black voices, including future partnerships with dynamic organizations like Black Pearl Books (which persists despite the closing of its brick-and-mortar shop).

Miller, an essential local figure, serves as artistic director. As a fixture of FronteraFest and as Austin’s first and current poet laureate, Miller announces a bold vision with, again: breath, movement, and words. And She Was Loved is a choreopoem, a journey through grief’s darkness. 

Begin with breath. That thing impossible to catch when dealt a blow like the death of a loved one. Miller wrote this script to commemorate the crushing grief of losing his mother, Vernell, and his mentor, Laurie Carlos. These two strong feminine powers shaped and guided, hurt and stretched him, in uncomfortable ways. The journey begins with Miller as Yasha, a lost boy. He’s guided by G (Siobhan Alexis), no flighty Tinkerbell but a powerful, tap-dancing fairy queen. Alexis astounds with her dynamic presence, totally transfixing. Her entire aura is magic, even before she breaks into mind-boggling tap numbers, a cascade of hypnotic sounds. She’s got infectious joy and an emotive face that makes you want to connect, that makes you yearn for Miller to fully embrace her guidance. When not leading the memory-quest with rapid rappity raps, G and Yasha mirror each other in ritualistic movements, once again set to the rhythm of breath.

Those motions are haunted by a Shadow (Marley Luna Miller), who becomes the mysterious key to the entire experience. At first Shadow seems like Yasha’s own childhood, the one his mother’s death killed for good. But Shadow is played by Miller’s own daughter, and her raw childlike monologues dig more into a unique backstory. She represents not the shades of Yasha’s past, but a ghostly manifestation of generational trauma. 

The performers start with breath, inhales and exhales creating grounding pulse, something that can be returned to during utter confusion. Miller is a lost boy, but he is still alive. The breath, that pulse, proves it. Then comes dancing, rituals, motions that can grasp at incomprehensible pain, or burst with hope and joy. But at the core, Miller is a poet. While breath and movement ground this performance, it is through words that we fly and discover the land of never … or the land of possibility. Miller’s words lead us through the rawest anger in the discovery of loss, through unearthing generations of truth and trauma. They’re a central point that stabs each heart. By the end my arteries were squeezed and scraped with the power of those words. 

Through sheer happenstance, I wore my father’s tie to this performance. He died in 2020, and while there was always a distance between us it felt important to take a part of him home after the funeral. I took two: a tie, the ultimate symbol of my remote and hardworking father, and a binder I didn’t know he had, filled with every story I’d written in school. There were times during And She Was Loved where I clutched at the tie while Miller described the pain of losing these women and the ways that they strengthened him. When the pain or the pleasure of memory got too intense, the tie tethered me to the moment. 

We have all experienced loss. We all have generations of hurt, whether we look it in the eye, or whether we try to bury it down. And She Was Loved gives a voice to these moments. It invites us to join in the ritual of remembering.

This article appears in September 11 • 2026.