About this Event
After 40 Years, Choreographer Maureen Fleming Bids Farewell to Her Lower East Side Studio with DANCES FROM HOME October 1-31, 2021
“… a wonderous choreographic metamorphosis” -- New York Times
Azure Arts / Maureen Fleming Company presents DANCES FROM HOME, a gallery installation / performance art series by 2021 Guggenheim 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 since 1981. Fleming will soon lose her studio due to gentrification and the lack of adequate rent regulation protection in the current laws governing small buildings in NYC.
Fleming embarks on a new journey of capturing her own images from “home” through photography and video and 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 on October 1-3 and October 29–31, 2021 at 7:30pm and 9:30pm. Masks are required. 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.
Renown 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 A. Please note: This is a home-studio event and involves a two-story walk-up. There is no elevator in the building.
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, available by appointment October 4 - October 31, 2021. To schedule an appointment, visit www.maureenfleming.com or contact Azure Arts.
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, 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. 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 butō . 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. His designs and performances include New York’s City Center Fall for Dance Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Festival and festivals in Italy, Mexico, Iceland, France, Germany, Russia, La MaMa E.T.C., Cleveland Museum, Virginia Museum, Emerson Majestic Theater and Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, among others. Before joining Maureen Fleming Company he performed with butō artist Min Tanaka in Delphi, danced with Solaris/Lakota, a cross-cultural project with Native American artists in the USA, Africa, France and Sweden. He performed Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Public Theater and Lincoln Center Institute 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.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Maureen Fleming Studio, 6 East 2nd Street, New York, United States
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