Choreographer Maureen Fleming Bids Farewell to Her Studio with DANCES FROM HOME (FREE)
Company:
Maureen Fleming
After 40 Years, Choreographer Maureen Fleming
Bids Farewell to Her Lower East Side Studio with
DANCES FROM HOME
October 1 - 31, 2021
"a wondrous choreographic metamorphosis” -- New York Times
Maureen Fleming Company presents DANCES FROM HOME, a gallery
installation and performance series by 2021 Guggenheim Fellow
choreographer/performance artist Maureen Fleming. This unique series
will feature live studio performances as well as Fleming’s new and
retrospective photography and video spanning her 40 years as an artist
working in her Lower East Side studio. Fleming will soon lose her
studio where she has worked and performed since 1981 due to
gentrification and the lack of adequate rent regulation protection in
the current laws governing small buildings in NYC.
After being the subject of many photographers including Spencer Tunic,
Philip Trager, Lois Greenfield, Jean-Baptiste Huynh, and Ethan Hofman,
Maureen Fleming embarks on a new journey of capturing her own images
from “home” through photography and video. Fleming invites viewers to
reconsider the notion of home as the crossroads between one’s place of
origin and the dimension beyond birth and death in an exploration of
archetypal images from her original work. DANCES FROM HOME explodes
the fertile moment between artists and audience involved in
co-creation.
DANCES FROM HOME will be performed live for a fully vaccinated
audience October 1-3 and October 29–31, 2021 at 7:30pm and 9:30pm.
Each evening will feature a piece set to music by acclaimed composer
Michael Harrison as well as other excerpts from her repertory. Light
design is by longtime collaborator Christopher Odo. DANCES FROM HOME
is free and open to the public for a limited audience of 12
people/performance; donations will be accepted. Reservations are
required through Eventbrite at www.MaureenFleming.com. Renowned for
her lyrical sculptural performances, Fleming also invites other
NYC-based artists (painters, sculptors, etc.) to sketch images as she
performs DANCES FROM HOME live. Maureen Fleming Studio is located at 6
East 2nd Street, between Bowery & 2nd Avenue in Manhattan --
accessible from the F train at 2ndAvenue. For more info, visit
www.maureenfleming.com.
Those unable to attend one of the live DANCES FROM HOME performances
can also stop by Fleming’s studio to view an installation of new and
retrospective choreography photography curated by Elizabeth Chatham,
available by appointment October 4-31, 2021. To schedule an
appointment, visit www.maureenfleming.com
Maureen Fleming is renowned for her original form of visual theater
realized through choreography for photography, video, and live
performance. Fleming connects cultures and art forms in an
interdisciplinary celebration of femininity and the universality of
the soul’s journey. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Scholar to
Ireland, S. Korea and Colombia, her solo and group works have toured
spanning five continents including the Spoleto Festival in Italy, FILO
Festival Brazil, Performing America’s Tour Colombia, Argentina and
Uruguay, the O’Shaughnessy Women of Substance Series in St. Paul,
Jacob’s Pillow Festival, Emerson Majestic and Institute of
Contemporary Art in Boston and La MaMa, Irish Arts Center, and NY City
Center Fall for Dance Festival in NYC. Born in Japan to American
parents, the effects of a severe accident when Fleming was two years
old have influenced her approach to movement. The accident left a bone
spur and the loss of the disc between her 4th and 5th vertebrae, a
condition that would confine most people to a wheelchair. Her
distinctive slow-motion style of twisting the body into extreme
positions, where the blood builds up and stops, then slowly untwisting
so the blood flows more quickly, creates a kind of cleansing. With a
strong belief in the body's regenerative powers, Fleming explores the
evolution of her wounds. Her choreography emphasizes aligning the
body's spiritual center while using the female body as a symbol for
the earth’s cycles of regeneration. She brings the discipline of a
classicist and the imagination of an iconoclast to her unique style of
movement inspired by her studies with Kazuo Ohno, the co-founder of
butoh. Fleming went on to perform with his son, Yoshito Ohno, and to
tour internationally with performance artist and choreographer Min
Tanaka. Fleming continued her training in the US under the Cecchetti
master Margaret Craske. Since 1994, she has conducted workshops
including the Juilliard School, N.Y.U. Tisch School of the Arts, Brown
University, Rhode Island School of Design, and the Seoul Institute of
the Arts.
Christopher Odo, an eclectic artist and designer, has worked with
Maureen Fleming since 1993 in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Russia and
was in the original Tony Award-winning M. Butterfly on Broadway.
Michael Harrison is a composer and pianist who performs original and
traditional North Indian classical music on the piano. Harrison
studied extensively in India and the U.S. with Ustad Mashkoor Ali
Khan, Pandit Pran Nath, and Terry Riley. Harrison earned international
recognition when "Revelation," his 75-minute work for piano, was
selected as one of the Best Classical Recordings of the Year by The
New York Times, The Boston Globe and TimeOut New York, and "Just
Constellations" was selected in NPR’s BEST 100 SONGS OF 2020. Harrison
is the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2019 NYSCA/NYFA
Artist Fellowship.
Elizabeth Chatham is a NYC-based independent art curator. In 2021, she
founded Azure Arts, an online platform dedicated to showcasing New
York local artists. Chatham holds an MFA from New York University in
Visual Arts Administration and has worked at Sotheby’s Auction House
and Gagosian Gallery.
This installation is made possible in part with public funds through
the City Artist Corps Grants program, presented by The New York
Foundation for the Arts(NYFA) and the New York City Department of
Cultural Affairs (DCLA), with support from the Mayor’s Office of Media
and Entertainment (MOME) as well as Queens Theatre.
Pictured: Maureen Fleming in "Invocation in Ruínas da Igreja"
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