Axis Mundi – Vtenlinea - April 27, 2012

Maureen Fleming returns to Culiacan and impresses with "Axis Mundi"

BY MARCOS CASTRO

Having performed several years ago in the José Limón International Dance Festival on the same stage with the same show, this Wednesday night, the American choreographer Maureen Fleming returned to impress the lovers of dance with the show "Axis Mundi" at the Teatro Pablo Villavicencio of Sinaloa Institute of Culture.

Representative of the Butoh dance worldwide, Maureen Fleming cited the poem by an old medieval poet Rumi, as an invocation for this work: "I lived hundreds of years as a mineral and died as a mineral and became a plant. / I lived hundreds of years as a plant and died as a plant, and became animal. / I lived hundreds of thousands of years as an animal; and died as an animal, and became human. / What did I ever lose by dying? "

With music by Philip Glass, Henryk Gorecki and Somei Satoh, in this show, Fleming shows how the eternity of time passes in a second, with slow movements sometimes almost imperceptible, showing our fears and emotions with a single motion, with an expression of the body so deep that is able to move (us).

She becomes an unmoving body in a spring, as the root emerges from the mud of creation. From stone to plant, feeling the centuries pass as the wind passes, slow, immeasurable, in light of the stars also immobile. An arm that winds like looking for missing handles, impossible turns in an impassable realm.

The slow movements of Japanese butoh, giving rise to new forms in each movement, a haven for artists in search of images. Incredible contortions, at a leisurely pace almost unshakable: a character who is made and remade over and over again in a mixture of body language and poetry, reinforced by skillful lighting (Christopher Odo) that creates illusions and ambivalence.

In this way, the old poem of the 12th century was expanded with images, attesting to the perfect communion between the ethereal and the earthly, where the body is the hub (axis) of the world. The search for (the meaning of) life from another point of view, where everything ends (is temporal), but everything is back to just restart in an endless cycle. 

Born in Japan and U.S. based, Maureen Fleming is an artistic director and performance artist. In multimedia presentations, Fleming invents surreal movement poetry with the discipline of a classicist and the imagination of an iconoclast, and explores, through metaphorical images, our relentless pursuit of what is universal about the journey of the soul.

After intensive studies in Japan with Kazuo Ohno, co-founder of Butoh, an avant-garde movement developed in postwar Japan, Ms. Fleming went on to perform with his son Yoshito Ohno, and travel the world in an international tour with the performance artist and choreographer Min Tanaka.