Home & + | Search
Featured Categories: Special Focus | Performance Reviews | Previews | DanceSpots | Arts and Education | Press Releases
Join ExploreDance.com's email list | Mission Statement | Copyright notice | The Store | Calendar | User survey | Advertise
Click here to take the ExploreDance.com user survey.
Your anonymous feedback will help us continue to bring you coverage of more dance.
SPOTLIGHT:
PRESS RELEASES
ExploreDance.com (Magazine)
Web
Other Search Options
Sarah Hart
Press Releases
Modern/Contemporary
Post-Modern
multiple locations

Maureen Fleming Premieres Dances From Home (August 22 - Sept 4, Manhattan, NY)

by Sarah Hart
August 24, 2009
La MaMa, E.C.T
74A East 4th St. NY, NY 10003
phone: 212.475.7710
Maureen Fleming Premieres
DANCES FROM HOME
August 22 – September 4 at La MaMa's La Galleria
** Celebrating her 25 years of performing in New York **

"… a wondrous choreographic metamorphosis" - New York Times

La Mama E.T.C. presents DANCES FROM HOME, the first gallery installation / performance art piece by choreographer/performance artist Maureen Fleming. This unique performance and installation will feature a retrospective of photography, video and live performance spanning her 25 years as an artist in residence at La MaMa E.T.C. including photography by Lois Greenfield, Philip Renown for her lyrical sculptural performances, choreographer/performance artist Maureen Fleming explores the "moment between" as she invites NYC artists (painters, photographers, sculptors, etc) to capture images as she performs live. Fleming will perform a selected piece each hour over a three-hour period on August 22-24 beginning at 7pm. This is free and open to the public; donations will be accepted. Selected images from the live performance will be displayed during the second week of the installation in La MaMa's La Galleria.

As she 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.

Fleming has gained international recognition on five continents for her singular form of multimedia performance in such venues as Fall for Dance Festival 2006 at City Center, Jacob's Pillow Festival 2008, Italy's Spoleto Festivals, Japan's Butoh Festival, Mexico's Jose Limon Dance Festival, Iceland's Reykjavik Arts Festival, Columbia's International Danza Contemporanea, France's International Mime Festival and Korea's Seoul Performing Arts Festival, among others. Fleming is a recent Fulbright Fellow and an Artist-in-Residence at La MaMa E.T.C. and the Seoul Institute of the Arts. 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.

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, and 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.

DANCES FROM HOME is on view August 22- September 4, 6:00 – 10:00 PM daily with live installation presentations Saturday - Monday, August 22 – 24, at 7pm, 8pm & 9pm. La MaMa's La Galleria is located at 6 East 1st Street, between Bowery & 2nd Avenue in Manhattan — accessible from the F train at 2nd Ave. Free admission; donations strongly encouraged. More info at www.maureenfleming.com.
###

This installation is made possible in part with public funds from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council with additional support from The Seoul Institute of the Arts and La MaMa E.T.C.
Search for articles by
Performance Reviews, Places to Dance, Fashion, Photography, Auditions, Politics, Health