Acclaimed Butoh Performer Maureen Fleming

The upcoming concert by dancer / performance artist Maureen Fleming caught our attention first for the uncommon beauty of its publicity photos by Lois Greenfield (no wonder they look so good). A Google search reveals effusive positive reviews of Fleming's work. Her high level artistic collaborators are also impressive. Greenfield's photography is integrated into the performance and we learned later that Greenfield and Fleming have developed an intense collaboration far beyond the usual commission for publicity photos.

The 2 musicians who will provide live accompaniment for the Cleveland concert, Akikazu Nakamura and Bruce Brubaker, both have extensive discographies and good critical reception. Nakamura is an eclectic master of shakuhachi, a Japanese end-blown flute; he plays and records rock, jazz, world and contemporary music as well as the meditative Japanese and improvisational music that he’ll play for Fleming’s Cleveland concert. Brubaker is Piano Chair at New England Conservatory of Music and a noted interpreter of Philip Glass and other contemporary American composers.

Inquiring into these important collaborations, we learned that Fleming was born in Japan to American parents, is unusually well grounded in Japanese culture, particularly the post-war movement art of Butoh, and that her use of Glass’ music emerged from a highly interactive collaborative process with the composer.

Even on YouTube, with its tiny screen and jerky flow, Fleming’s slow-motion compositions fascinate. Her beautiful, hyper-mobile body and her frequent use of partial nudity to reveal the same are obvious pluses, but it is the expressive power of her work that has the capacity to blow one away (yes, even on YouTube). We wondered: What was the source of that expressive power?

In an interview with Fleming by phone we asked first about the integration of Greenfield’s photos into the performance.

Maureen Fleming: I’ve been working with Lois for many years now, and over the years she’s taken a number of press photos. Chris Ohno, the visual designer, has made slides and integrated some of those images into the visual design. When Chris started doing that, Lois said, ‘oh, that’s really interesting,’ and she (Lois) began doing something similar where she focuses on one part of the body – like a bodyscape – and then we’re projecting some of the bodyscapes that she’s made (onto the performance).

When I work with Lois, and this is important, I usually spend a lot of time preparing. I videotape all of the images before I go into the photo session. We’ll take one image that I’ve videotaped and repeat it 100 times and when you repeat something a hundred times you really start to find the peak moments. It’s a really wonderful process.

(Writers notes: We’ve talked with other dance artists who’ve worked w/ Greenfield. They too have alluded to repetitions – often of jumping, airborne movements – that Greenfield’s process requires. The difference is one of attitude; Fleming is the first person we’ve talked with who describes this exhausting process as “wonderful.”)'''

Further inquiry into video, lighting design, and music revealed much the same story, a meticulous, time-intensive back-and-forth between artists. The video of Mother and Child, which figures prominently in the Cleveland performance and which can be partially viewed on You Tube took, according to Fleming, about 2 years.

Fleming: It takes a long time (because) my movement really is a series of sculptures that melts from one to the next. In order to make a melt into a sculpture I use video, first improvising a shape and then noticing how I move from shape to shape, through the process of doing it hundreds of hundreds of times.

But the real judge of if a moment is working is whether the soul body is motivating the movement. And what I mean by that is, as you know, when we die our body becomes 2 and a half pounds lighter. So there is a physical place in the body that is the soul, and when that part of the body is motivating movement, you can see that. It’s something that I have developed an eye to recognize. Of course the shapes in themselves are important but whether the soul body is important in the performance, that’s the most important. And that’s what I’m hoping will happen in Cleveland. That is something that you don’t control.

(Thus Maureen Fleming explains the source of her expressive power).

Cool Cleveland: You’ll be performing Waters of Immortality and Other Works. What was your inspiration for that piece?

Fleming: I was exploring the idea of immortality. Is it an elusive paradigm that we’re waiting for or is it present in the here and now? How can we develop the consciousness to see it all around us? That’s why the shakuhachi music from Japan and the Glass music are so important to the development of the piece; it’s about putting one in the proper state.

When I began exploring the life and work of William Butler Yeats I was so inspired to learn that the rituals that his Golden Dawn group were practicing around the turn of the century were very close to what it was like to take a class from Kozuo Ohno (a founder of Butoh and one of Fleming’s teachers).

(In an interview with the art museum’s Massoud Saidpour, Fleming further elaborated): Waters of Immortality is a sensuous multimedia celebration of the feminine archetype, inspired by the lush symbolism of William Butler Yeats. Series of movements and scenic tableaux, inspired by Yeats, are combined with video, photography and music to create a work that invites audiences to join in my exploration of images that depict the elementary idea of “waters of immortality”.

I will be performing Waters of Immortality, Dialogue of Self and Soul, The Stairs, The Driftwood, Mother and Child (video), and The Immortal Rose.

For Fleming, the similarities between Eastern and Western mysticism as expressed through the poems of Yeats were the inspirational spark… a spark that also illuminated her past repertory, and thus provides the thread that ties this particular evening together.

See Maureen Fleiming this Saturday February 28 at 7:30PM at the Ohio Theater in PlayhouseSquare. Tickets: CMA’s online box office at http://www.ClevelandArt.org/Tickets or by phone at 888-CMA-0033. Student “pay what you can” rate is available at the door subject to availability.

From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas vicnelsaATearthlink.net
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