Maureen Fleming and Loretta Livingston
Butoh, a Japanese dance form, was first shown in America about 20 years ago. Created in the late 50s, this bleak, nihilistic genre is often considered to reflect the atmosphere of bitterness and exhaustion that followed Japan’s defeat in World War II. One of the first troupes to visit America, Sankai Juko, often created “installations” focused on extreme physical endurance: the performers might be hung upside down for hours several stories aboveground. The troupe stopped performing these pieces when one performer fell to his death. Only a radically bleak art form would ask artists to risk their lives.
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Fleming follows butoh conventions but is concerned with eros, alchemy, and spirituality rather than social dissolution; her dance has a classical structure of tension and release. Butoh conventions include superslow movement, nudity except for a thong to cover the genitals, and white body makeup. But in an American context, the meaning of these conventions is different. Japanese butoh dancers’ nudity is an expression of vulnerability rather than eros. Butoh dancers’ bodies are the gods’ dice; they remind me of the piles of naked bodies outside Nazi crematoria. But in America nudity is usually erotic. Wisely, Fleming understands this and makes eros the subject of her dance.
The games that Fleming plays are subtle, and her methods are appropriately simple–she keeps us caught inside her body and maintains a sense of mystery. The next section in After Eros is a film projected on an upstage scrim. First we see what is apparently an abstract, symmetrical flower that evolves into more complex patterns, as if growing in time-lapse photography. Then we realize that the “flower” is a kaleidoscopic amalgam of parts of Fleming’s body, formed into a mandala. The image remains erotic but somehow undermines our ability to make bodies into erotic fetishes.
There’s also a fascinating personal dimension to After Eros. As a two-year-old living in Japan, Fleming was thrown through the windshield in a traffic accident. Recently an X ray showed that a bone spur had replaced a vertebral disc, a condition the doctor said would have put a “normal” person in a wheelchair. Fleming is convinced that her slow, twisting motions bring more blood to the injured area, helping it heal. This is a nonmetaphorical story of transformation, of how a crippling injury can be turned into health. Fleming’s tale attracted the attention of composer Glass, who was inspired to write the score, and of David Henry Hwang, author of M. Butterfly and F.O.B., who provided the scenario.
