Tree: Belief/Culture/Balance (review)

Awe: a one-word review. (Not likely.)

Is it critically viable to explore more Ralph Lemon's attempt to navigate a world—this world, this Tree—than his achievements as a dancer, as a narrator, as a scholar and student of dance/multicultural studies? What could be called a "proper review?" "Impossible. Okay, so what would be possible?" (106), this particular Tree whispers once again. Maybe "ontological choreography." Maybe "Lemon redescribes the 'object' of scholarship." Maybe "Tree performs a hauntology of the world-stage-now":

To be where I am. Just that. All of it. Fluid and clear, in all the complexity. Where I imagine these questions simply don't come up, or if they do it doesn't really matter to my life. And to the life of those around me. Amusing, right? / That was not my question, "Who are you?"

[14]

I simply do not know. So I wander, I wonder with Lemon how Tree explores Eastern traditions through Western eyes in a way that abjures the need for, as well as the efficacy of, this nefarious binary. (This works, too.)

I also like, building on the press material, how Tree performs one dancer's attempt to retrace the Buddha's steps in order to create new, collaborative dance compositions. He wishes to experience ancient traditions in the now/here of performance (itself) as well as recreate, through dance, the very possibilities that led to the idea (itself) in the first place. Yet, this mission, Lemon's task as dancer/writer/choreographer never achieves completion; he is always ahead or behind or beside himself.

He speaks through this world: home-run derbies, maniacal Indian taxi-cab drivers, family crises, "culture clashes" in rehearsal and during performances. Yet, through Lemon's eyes, the world (all of it: the conflicts, the connections) seemsor appearsas a composition that works through intersecting clichés, gestures, movements—an available pulsation of knowing and unknowing. It is precisely this particular embrace of intensive cliché that may show itself as the location of Lemon's collaborative genius:

Creating remarkable rigor. Driving dangerously fast, obscuring a point of view. Traveling a lot, being a tourist, without responsibility to the unfamiliar, a freedom. Often mistranslating. Dancing without borders, is often brilliant. Because we so need borders . . . In loving too much maybe we bypass ourselves, passing over our own innocence.

[259]

Here, Lemon experiences "staging" anew: withpeople, withthe world, within the constructed space of the theatre, the (de)constructed spaces of India, Hong Kong, New York, Jakarta, and so forth. But, even from within the contemporary rubric of "intercultural studies," Lemon seems determined to explore mostly how this happens, not that it happens, through an exploration of this world, his world, a world-as-it-is through his own encounter with it, as black-man-dancer-student-son-lover-friend-in-mourning. All at once, a realization from within this unstable experience: an enhanced experience with the world (itself) that leads to a level of detachment and transcendence only possible by way of complete engagement with the world at every moment.

Read this text—this notebook, journal, hypertext, random dramaturgical notation, performance criticism, collaborative photo essay, written exchanges between family/friends/colleagues, oral history, witness/testimony, and the jazz-like need to think otherwise. Lemon quite literally performs thinking as a "dancing through" the problem, the cause, the site of engagement whether among tourists at a deer park and zoo in Sarnath, India, or reflecting on performances at the Walker or Yale Repertory.

Tree is also one of those rare works that shows, literally re-presents, uncanny moments when life itself and performance itself strip away preconceptions, revitalizing a way of thinking that has (thankfully) lost itself. In this way, Tree alsoexpresses spirituality-outside-itself, an uncanny "here-ness" that has helped me (at least) muffle the blaring religious fundamentalisms broadcast from Washington, DC, and Baghdad. He expresses his subtitle ("Belief/Culture/Balance") so clearly when he writes:

I sat in a corner with the brothers of the waiter...