The A List - Pick Hits for the week of May 3-9

By Caroline Palmer

In a world increasingly overrun by urban sprawl, market obsession, and strip malls, it’s a relief – no, make that a divine gift – to have an opportunity to enter a dark room and watch someone shape-shift their body (and nothing else) to create a powerful meditative experience. For Maureen Fleming, a New York-based performer trained in the powerful postwar Japanese dance form butoh (by none other than master Kazuo Ohno), both progress and its subversion come from a stillness, the essence of emotion emerging through painstakingly detailed movement. In After Eros, a suite of four solos performed by Fleming, composer Philip Glass, and playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) contribute their own mythmaking abilities to create a work drawn from the images of Greek legends, namely Psyche and Eros, as well as the natural world. "I had become the one whose love I sought," writes Hwang in one section: indeed, there is no higher form of individual respect (not to mention personal risk) than a well-crafted, intimate performance such as Fleming’s.