Miller, Charles James

Biography/History

Charles James Miller was a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and close friend of Russell Meriwether Hughes, better known as La Meri--the "Queen of Ethnic Dance." In the early 1940s (during World War II), Miller served in the Army as an interpreter in French and Spanish for the Arabs; he was also director and choreographer for Army Red Cross shows in Algeria. After the war, Miller became a dance-dramatist and instructor with the La Meri Ethnological Dance Center in New York City where he met Hughes and became one of her students. At the time, Hughes was 47 and Miller 24; they had a short-lived love affair which developed into a life-long friendship as attested by the volume of correspondence which Miller saved, including the carbon copies of his own letters to Hughes.

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