Photography, dance, poetry, and the environment combine to give a mythic story its fullest expression.

Persephone

Arts & Photography

Lemon, Ralph

DOVE, RITA

BOLAND, Eavan

Trager, Philip

Szegedy-Maszak, Andrew

Photography & Video

Wesleyan Univ Pr

Geography, a rich tapestry of journal entries, choreographic scores, drawings, and photographs, leads us through the creation of an evening-long dance, "Geography," a collaboration about being American, African, brown, black, blue black, male, and artist. This dance piece was a major departure for Ralph Lemon. In it everything is at stake -- his identity, his politics, his art, his very way of moving. In order to create it, he traveled to Africa in search of dancers and a new relationship to the stage. The intimate, keenly observed passages in this artist's journal give us extraordinary insights on the process of dance-making -- from the discovery of specific movements to the sometimes uneasy relationships between the dancers. Aeschylus' Oresteia forms the subtext of the dance: Lemon subtly portrays the exiled son of his mother Africa. Dancing is his crime, a stoning his trial, and an ancestral chorus his threshold to the future. At every juncture the collaboration posed difficult questions about representing African dance and culture within the context of modern America's post-slave heritage. The book beautifully documents Lemon's ability to negotiate different dance traditions without either erasing or cementing them.

Geography: Art / race / exile

History & Criticism

Wesleyan University Press

Tree is the second installment in Ralph Lemon's critically acclaimed performance trilogy and documents his travels through India, Indonesia, China and Japan as he retraces the Buddha migration map. More artistic sociologist than mere traveler, Lemon kept journals, drew, collected ephemera, conducted informal interviews, and took photos as he explored performance traditions and met the performers with whom he would eventually choreograph an evening-length work. In the process, he worked through his own preconceptions and misconceptions about the people and the places he encountered. Tree is ritually structured, and reveals a rich collision of cultural values pertaining to performance, race, identity, modernity and tradition. Like the first installment in the trilogy, Geography (Wesleyan, 2000), this book is exquisitely designed and lavishly illustrated to allow the reader to follow and interpret Lemon's observations and his creative process. The world premiere of the final part of the trilogy, House, will be at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Urbana, Illinois in September, 2004. Additional U.S. and international performances will follow.

Tree: belief / culture / balance

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Come home Charley Patton is a moving and an imaginative memoir documenting the Civil Rights Era and contemporary southern culture. Intricately layered and deeply arresting, Ralph Lemon's research on the African American experience intertwines personal anecdotes and family remembrances with diaristic accounts of the making of a dance, as Lemon journeys the mythic roads of migration―visiting the sites of lynchings, following the paths of Civil Rights marches, and meeting the descendants of early blues musicians. Come home Charley Patton is a rich, transcendent text, and a historically-charged meditation on memory in America. It is a formidable finale for the Geography trilogy (including Geography and Tree), three books connected thematically by racial identity and the related dance projects choreographed by Lemon. Generously illustrated with family photos, original art, and photos of the performance, the book will take its place in the canon of great African American writing.

Come home Charley Patton

Humor & Entertainment

More than 40 works across media, including major ensemble performances, emerging in the afterlife of postmodern dancePhiladelphia-based artist, dancer and choreographer Ralph Lemon (born 1952) is one of the most significant figures to arise from New York's downtown scene in the 1990s. This catalog, published on the occasion of the first US museum exhibition of Lemon's work in movement, film and installation, traces the arc of his ongoing collaborations, which extend far beyond the paradigm of dance. Text by exhibition curators Connie Butler and Thomas Jean Lax is accompanied by essays and contributions by Kevin Beasley, Adrienne Edwards, Saidiya Hartman, Darrell Jones, Ralph Lemon, Okwui Okpokwasili and Kevin Quashie. Featuring a dust jacket that unfolds into a poster, the book includes full-color illustrations of Lemon's artworks and reproductions of his sketches and notations.

Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon

Individual Artists

MoMA PS1

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Books by Lemon, Ralph