FRINGE FESTIVAL : AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL GENRE : CELESTE MILLER & CO. IN DANCE-DRAMA

Celeste Miller, who traveled from Atlanta to appear in the Fringe Festival, has found her niche in the current performance-art scene. Enormously gifted as a story-teller, attractive enough to pass for a starlet, witty, personable, inventive and energetic, she has the knack for integrating word and movement, rhythm and affect.

Thursday, on a 10-cent budget in a room at the UCLA Dance Building, she and two other company members explored the Celeste Miller specialty: autobiographical dance-drama, a genre put on the performance map by such innovators as Meredith Monk and Tim Miller.

Anatomy-as-destiny pretty much defines the shoals of feminism for the lady from Atlanta. And, as she charts her confessional course in “True Stories From New Jersey,” a young girl and her fantasy of wearing patent leather “princess shoes” materialize. So does the tomboy, her mouth drawn into a hard line as she gives karate chops to her brother Doug.

Along the way were choice insights like: “I had a nurse-mom who was attached to my imperfections, when I always wanted a friend-mom to tell me I’m terrific.” But instances of trite melodrama also crept in.

In other pieces of this program, to be repeated tonight and Tuesday (at 6 p.m.), Miller codes her tales as a poetic enactment of e.e. cummings-esque lines on a page, mingling words with modern mime and movement to construct an image.