Ralph Lemon and the Language of Loss

At the beginning of How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?, choreographer Ralph Lemon nonchalantly walked on stage and sat in a plastic lawn chair. Once seated, he casually crossed his legs and arranged himself within comfortable distance of an adjacent microphone. With a stack of neatly ordered pages in his hands, Lemon seemed prepared to deliver a talk. This would have been routine for an artist of his stature, especially since the celebrated Geography trilogy (1997-2004), which incorporated theatrical elements into dance in order to explore personal and social content, most notably his cultural heritage as an African-American.

Despite its success, Lemon ceased this dance-theatre project after Geography and roamed the country in search of sites associated with injustices inflicted on African-Americans. His written and visual record of this journey laid the groundwork for a 2007 multimedia installation, The Efflorescence of Walter, and informed his 2010 return to the stage, How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? How Can You Stay consisted of a rich-media monologue and a twenty-minute dance followed by three slow, enigmatic scenes: a crying woman, a procession of animated animals, and a duet. During the first section, Lemon delivered philosophically refined reflections against a backdrop of video footage from previous performances, rehearsals, and his experiments with Walter Carter, a centenarian ex-sharecropper from Mississippi. This monologue addressed the motivations behind his current work and its relation to a singular event from his private life: the death of his long-term partner, dancer Asako Takami, who succumbed to cancer shortly after Geography.

In reaction to Asako's death, How Can You Stay invoked a powerfully human theme: the inability to accept or explain the loss of a loved one. As an act of mourning, it was an unusually accessible and emotionally intimate example of contemporary dance. However, this poignant subject matter belied its complex investigation into the limits of Geography's theatrical format. Because theatrical representation organizes content into universally valid particulars, it cannot convey the singular nature of everyday experience. As Lemon discovered, symbolic language effaces real experiences, such as the memory of Asako's life and the personal significance of her death. He likewise explored the loss of personal experience in formal representation through his work with Walter Carter, whose memories provided a connection to another painfully real history—the history of slavery.

Faced with these experiences of loss, How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?—as per its interrogative title—posed a question: given the exclusionary function of representation, how is it possible to speak of personal history? For Lemon, this question required a search for representational forms that could communicate his personal grief and the cultural dislocation at the root of African-American identity. Since his investigation into African-American cultural heritage began in Geography, it is first necessary to review its conclusion in its final installment, Come Home Charlie Patton (2004), which Lemon showed on video and discussed during his monologue in How Can You Stay.

Dance as Revelation and Liberation in Geography

In the finale of Come Home Charlie Patton, Lemon performed a solo that holds an infamous place in African-American history, the buck dance. According to Lemon's dramaturg, performance scholar Kathrine Profeta, the buck dance originated in nineteenth-century plantations, where slaves were "forced to dance to prove their fitness on the auction block or entertain."¹ The dance has remained an iconic image of racial submission and "a key ingredient in the painful tradition of minstrelsy." With his body subserviently hunched, Lemon's rendition of the buck dance's lopsided steps rekindled the memory of this tradition, presumably in order to confront or combat the shame embedded in African-American cultural identity. However, as has become commonly accepted in critical accounts of minstrelsy, this ostensibly submissive performance had subversive intentions. In order to draw attention to the minstrel quality of performance, Lemon exaggerated its theatrical aspects by wearing a burgundy velvet suit and using similar material in the surrounding...