I am doing a three-week training with Maureen Fleming again! I've studied with Maureen for many years now. Because her work and form is so internally driven--reaching and drawing form the inner body and the inner muscles and working from between and below the muscles, I always go to a new place.
In yoga or any movement form, there is always the experience of finding a holding pattern in the body, feeling a surge of freedom and expansion for an hour, a day, on a good riff, a week. But then, invariably our new opening leads us to the next closing, or more positively, the next inner chamber waiting to be released.
Maureen's work includes a series of expansion exercises with elastics on the hands and feet. Dancers use their own body for resistance, the body opens itself, part of the intimacy of her work, in my experience. In addition to the elastics, we dance through images associated with an area of the body and then, at the end, move the body with dynamic symbols for movement, pressing what ever part of the body touches the black marley floor into the ground as our limbs spiral into highways or contract and expand and compress mercury from the perineum through the spine and to the finger tips.
After doing a three hour session at her East Village loft, I leave feeling lighter on the inside as I stand on the subway platform. Sounds seem louder as if I've quieted something internally that is too often chattering. When I went to yoga afterward, I lifted into poses by reaching from that deeper center.
I'm so glad there are two weeks left (18 hours!).....
