Sun. Nov. 4

This is what you'd call quite a backstory: In 1994, dancer-performance artist Maureen Fleming was standing on her head waiting for her act to begin ... waiting a bit longer than usual for the lights to come on. Suddenly, something snapped in herneck. X-rays showed a bone spur and a vertebra fused, a condition the doctor said would confine many people to a wheelchair. The doctor said the probelm likely originated when she was a child. Could she recall anything? Fleming dug in and discovered that when she was two, her family at an American Navy base in Japan, a man on a bicycle darted in front of her mother's car and Fleming's head went through the windshield, causing her to lose the disk between her fourth and fifth vertebrae.
She's still dancing - and in fact performs "Waters of Immortality and Other Works" at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater   Sunday Nov. 4. Pianist Bruce Brubaker and bamboo flautist Akikazu Nakamura provide musical accompaniement - works from minimalist Philip Glass - as 3-D video projections and stil photography by Lois Greenfield surround her. The show is "a sensuous celebration of the feminine archetype, inspired by the lush symbolish of Yeats," say the promoters, CRASHarts. (The New York Times has temred the work "a wondrous choreographic metamorphosis.") Fleming's work askes the question: Is immortality an elusive paradigm we await oris immortality present in the hear and now? Pretty heady and sumptuous stuff, we'd imagine. The last of three performances is today, Sunday Nov. 4 at 4. Tickets: $35. (Oh yes, we're told the performance contains nudity.)

100 Northern Ave.,617-876-4275 www.CRASHarts.org