Background
She was born in Japan, the daughter of a United States Navy lieutenant who was part of the Occupation of Japan, and grew up in Yokohama.
choreographer dancer music educator
She was born in Japan, the daughter of a United States Navy lieutenant who was part of the Occupation of Japan, and grew up in Yokohama.
She studied butoh dance and is known for her meditative, dreamlike solo dances, which include elements of contortion, and in which she often performs unclothed (sometimes with her body painted white). Fleming studied ballet with Cecchetti method master Margaret Craske (1892–1990), and performed briefly with several New York City-based dance companies.
The New Yorker magazine has called her "perhaps the foremost American practitioner of Butoh."
She was injured in an automobile accident at the age of two, following which she lost the disc between her fourth and fifth vertebrae. Only learning of this accident many years later, she believes this experience to have shaped her career in dance, particularly her affinity for moving her body in a slow, deliberate fashion. She was first exposed to butoh in 1984 when she met butoh dancer Minister Tanaka in New York City, joining his company, Maijuku, for a time.
Following this, she studied butoh in Japan with Tanaka, and later with one of the art form"s founders, Kazuo Ohno, with whom she remains in contact.
Fleming has stated that she attempts to create archetypes in her dances, and believes the female nude to be a universal artistic image. She has stated that "the flesh is the costume of the soul."
About her work, she has said the following:
Through my art, my goal is to reveal the transcendent through images, which focus on the human body as a vehicle of transformation.
I am specifically defining a universal art which touches the evolutionary traces embedded in human experience and transcends the limits of nationality and gender placed on us all, with the aim of discovering what is truly universal about being human. She has stated that it often takes her ten years to create a new dance.
She has taught at the Juilliard School and the New York University Tisch School of the Arts.