Maxwell, who reunited with her boyfriend Curtis in 1982, decided to travel with him to France, where her older sister lived.

Though both had a working knowledge of French—Maxwell having spent her senior year of high school studying in Paris and Curtis having encountered it as a translator of philosophy—they spent their first three months in Europe traveling through Germany so that Maxwell could audition for various companies, including Pina Bausch, who rejected her because she was “too cheerful.”

“I looked like a cheerleader at a sado-masochist encounter,” Maxwell says, laughing. “Nobody was interested in me in Germany.”

Returning to Paris, Maxwell took any dancing job she could find. From 1985 to 1988, she worked as a traveling circus clown and kick-line chorus girl for Cirque Magicville; she also choreographed and danced a gypsy solo with Danse de Roumanie, a traveling Romanian folk dance company.

Through her work choreographing and dancing in smaller Paris dance venues, Maxwell was eventually asked to choreograph, sing, and star in Ophelie Song, a “rock opera” based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and told from Ophelia’s viewpoint. The production, which toured Paris’ Café de la Danse, New York’s La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, received critical attention and good reviews.

COLEMAN COLLABORATION

In the early 1990s, Maxwell was introduced to classical and jazz composer Ornette Coleman, with whom she felt she could connect musically.

She embraced his muscial theory of “harmolodics,” which gives equal weight to harmony, melody, and movement. The two exchanged phone numbers and kept in touch, maintaining a friendship and collaboration she says she still values today.

“I wanted to find a composer I could connect with about form,” Maxwell says. “Balanchine found Stravinsky, I found Coleman.” She notes that her favorite piece, “Trinity,” was composed for two dancers and a violinist playing Coleman’s music.

“I was very enticed because her dance has as many forms as there are in music, and I was really moved by the way she performed. She’s very natural and very creative,” says Coleman, noting that Maxwell sees no difference between her dancing and the music from the violin.

In 1997, Maxwell received a commission from the Festival de l’Imaginaire, for which she created Corps-Eros in order to explore western eros.

The solo, which she performed nude, was followed by a two-hour discussion by anthropologists, sociologists, novelists, art historians, and critics, and received great critical acclaim.

“She is...an excellent dancer and an exceptional choreographer. In seeing her move eurythmically...one often has the impression that she is not a dancer but the dance itself. What more can be said?” wrote Pierre Lévêque—president emeritus of the University of Besançon—on Maxwell’s website.

PHILOSOPHY OF DANCE

As a choreographer, Maxwell says her job is to present her audience with her idea of how the world is or should be. The marriage of her choreography with philosophy hearkens back to her days at Harvard, where both she and Curtis concentrated in philosophy.

“I wanted to study philosophy and aesthetics at Harvard and nobody would give me the time of day,” says Maxwell, recalling a day during the blizzard of 1978 when she discovered the diaries of Thoreau in Widener library. “I went into the woods to live deliberately, to confront the essential facts of life,” she quotes from Thoreau’s Walden. “Part of the reason I wanted to dance was because I felt that dancers did this.”

“A lot of her work combines dance with philosophical subjects and a number of her performances invite participation and discussion by intellectuals and also by the audience, so that the entire evening is in the mode of questioning,” says Curtis, who is also the administrator of Maxwell’s production company, Mon Oncle D’Amerique Productions. He cites Maxwell’s 1997 production La Cartésienne, or Cartesian Women, which is based on the correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and philosopher René Descartes, as an example of the correlation between her dance and philosophy.

For Maxwell, who chose never to marry or have children, dance is everything.

“I really love dancing. I can never get enough of it, so it doesn’t really feel like work, it feels like endless pleasure,” she says. “I don’t do a lot of projects in a year, and when I do, it takes all year, but I just feel that for the moment of joy that I get in performing it, it’s worth it. It’s a freedom that no one can ever take away from me. Whether people like or dislike what I do, I always have the experience.”

—Staff writer Anne E. Bensson can be reached at abensson@fas.harvard.edu.