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AUDIENCE REVIEW: Impressions of Maureen Fleming's "The Alchemist's Veil"

Company:
Gillespie Global Group

Performance Date:
October 27, 2024

Freeform Review:

                                       Impressions of Maureen Fleming’s The Alchemist’s Veil

     One is immediately drawn in with the multifarious digital images, designed by Christopher Odo, and the lilting tones of Philip Glass, played live by Bruce Brubaker, that open the performance, creating the sense of a human body in various inchoate stages of emerging from some primal chaos. As one’s mind adjusts to this, a body almost suddenly fills the projected screen, before one realizes that Fleming, behind the projected images, is their progenitor.

     Welcome to yet another occasion when Fleming has graced us with her inimitable performative presence. I am tempted each time to conclude that the performance before me is perhaps her best ever. If one knows her work, as I have over the past three plus decades, such encomium is neither rare nor unexpected (not only from me). For the performance I saw, a matinée on Sunday, October 27, at LaMama, I had just seen the exhibition on Belle da Costa Greene (1879-1950), the Morgan Library’s first director, a person of complicated, diverse experiences, a pioneer in her era of a woman emerging at the top of a white-male dominant world. Instantly, as Fleming and her projections filled the performance space, an analogy occurred: Fleming had toiled for some years in Japan under the mentorship of Ohno Kazuo, an original developer of butō, and of Tanaka Min and forged her way imperturbably through that similarly male-dominant world, to achieve her distinctive dance presence, by no means a clone of her butō mentors nor of those in different dance disciplines but a close-to-perfect meld of all her diverse influences and experiences to become a consummate dance performer with her own choreographic vision.

     Many observers have called her “dancer,” and she surely is, though, for me, the term is limiting, eliding her veritable cascade of aesthetic and physical accomplishments as evident in The Alchemist’s Veil. She is equally choreographer, “danceographer,” photographer, lyricist, and coordinating master of the multiple aesthetic aspects of performance, reminiscent of an orchestral conductor. Restated, she doesn’t “do” dance, she is the dance; she doesn’t merely perform, she’s the total performance.

     In that vein, while her performances are invariably about something, the movements and gestures, the coordination of movement with projected images, seamlessly interconnected, raise what one sees and experiences to a far higher level, enabling witnesses to crystalize meaning far beyond our verbal—words alone—ability to express what we feel. Inevitably what Fleming’s stage presence and work is about incorporates the inspiration and motivation to create it, refine it, embody it; it’s the performance itself. It would be a real challenge to leave such an experience without being preoccupied with what one had seen—sparking, for example, positive changes in how we regard the female body—and heard and felt—sounds, images and inimitable movement stirring heart and mind, her very alchemy gradually unveiling.

Submitted by

John K. Gillespie 

President, Gillespie Global Group

November 21, 2024

Encl: Photo courtesy of Maureen Fleming

Author:
John K. Gillespie

Photo Credit:
Maureen Fleminig