Geography Trilogy Part 2, 2000; Photo by T.Charles Erickson [Enlarge in New Window]

Ralph Lemon: The Geography Trilogy/Part 3: Come Home Charley Patton

At the end of "Tree," the second full-length program in choreographer Ralph Lemon's Geography Trilogy, a Chinese musician sits at the edge of the stage listening to a recording by an American blues singer. Inspired, the man begins singing along, only his vocal technique draws from his own musical tradition, not the blues. The moment is both an homage to the blues and an eloquent testament to the power of art to speak across racial and ethnic boundaries.

Similarly, in "Geography," the first part of Lemon's trilogy, West African and American dancers share dance idioms, the Americans learning the physically energetic movement styles of Ivory Coast terpsichore, and the West Africans adopting the more lyrical and uniquely visual language of the Americans.

Lemon's tripping of the light fantastic isn't limited to dance; he also trips across time. One electrifying sequence from "Geography" begins with a clutch of dancers moving with geometric precision to Bach's "Goldberg Variations" and ends with Lemon simulating his own death by stoning while a car alarm, that uniquely late-20th-century sentinel, blares in the background.

This complex interplay of collapsed cultural boundaries, shifts in time, and the melding and contrasting of world dance and music, is a characteristic feature of Lemon's decade-long dance and music project, which the New York-based choreographer himself has called "a conjuring of many minds on a single art question." For those who think Lemon is merely dabbling in exotic tourism and multicultural spectacle, think again. "This work is not about replication," says Lemon, "it's about remembering, in the present."

Indeed, for "Geography," Lemon has assembled artist/collaborators from around the world whose dance and music traditions are in peril of being forgotten, or worse, white-washed under the rubric of multiculturalism. "Geography" and "Tree," which premiered in New York in 1997 and 2000 respectively, include the work of collaborators from Haiti, Taiwan, Senegal, Ghana, India, China, Indonesia, and Japan. "House" (working title), the third and final installment of Geography Trilogy will commingle American dance and music idioms with others from the trilogy. The piece is scheduled for a world premiere in the fall of 2004.

Ralph Lemon has been a vital force on the international dance scene since the 1980s. In 1985 he formed Ralph Lemon Company, receiving popular acclaim for an inventive, often abstract dance style that reveled in sometimes austere formalism. "In many of these pieces, I was experimenting with choreography as silence," says Lemon. In the mid-'90s, the choreographer began to craft a piece about "a work that disintegrates." Killing Tulips was perhaps autobiographical, for after its premiere, Lemon says, "this way of working was over for me." In 1995, Lemon dissolved his company and formed Cross Performance Inc., whose purpose is to explore interdisciplinary art and performance.

Lemon says the idea for Geography Trilogy came to him while he was touring Africa in the mid-'90s and met performers with whom he "wanted to have a conversation." Later, during rehearsals for the piece, Lemon realized that this "conversation" could not be done in one work, and that what had started out being just about Africa was now "about the world."

"Geography Trilogy," Lemon observes, "grew out of questions about Africa, race, culture, modernity, and the individual." In some ways autobiographical, the piece explores, quite literally, the collision of elements within Lemon himself, whose identity as an African American forces him to reconcile vastly different and in some ways contradictory components. "Tree" shares similar concerns, but the inquiry into identity expands as the collision of ethnic, racial, and metaphysical elements includes Asian perspectives and even touches on issues of gender.

"Come Home Charley Patton" reflects Lemon's recent work with the landscape and with collaborators in the American South. The piece promises to be a typically Lemonian mosaic, encompassing research of events and architecture seminal to the '60s civil rights movement, including buck dancing (a traditional black American step dance), the early roots of black music in America, and impressions from "counter-memorial" projects at lynching sites throughout the South and from the giant fallen trees of geologic "bone yards" of the Georgia Sea Islands. " 'House' is a culmination," says Lemon, so it will include elements of the earlier pieces alongside the new. It's a natural conclusion to a long and exhaustive inquiry into the meaning of American, and by extension, human identity.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Performance > Dance | African American Themes | Americana | New York | 2000