Tree: belief/culture/balance (review)

My father calls, an excited voice. Leaves a message. He's never called me before, ever. I'm shocked and call him right back. "How did it go?" he asks.

—Ralph Lemon (258)

Ralph Lemon's manuscript takes the form of a documentary album about the making of the second installation of the Geography Trilogy, Tree , commissioned by Yale Repertory Theatre for its inaugural 2000 performance in New Haven.¹ Album is the choice term here, as the volume records Lemon's photographs, drawings, love letters, dreams, correspondences, journal entries, travel itineraries, weather reports, working notes, interviews, and poignant reflections on sound—focusing especially on the relationship between meditation's stillnesses and the relentless noise of everyday industrial and postindustrial life, a theme that is powerfully felt in the sonic performances of Tree. Lemon's album, then, is an elaborate travelogue, documenting as dance research select events and collaborative creative processes that launched the work. Tree emphasizes artistic production as an exercise of oral history: differently documentable, definitively informal, and made up of the everyday speaking voices of those working "from below," rather than the highbrow discourse of seamlessly institutionalized logos.

For readers, the book also levers dance scholarship at the tripartite borders of thinking globalization, national configurations of race and ethnic studies (sometimes multiculturalism, here "African American dance" [see Gottschild 2003]), and the enduring imprint of area studies methodologies. Whereas Geography I (1996) focused on ideas of Africa—"My body had not learned that much," he reflects (107)—Tree tours the fabled Easts of India, China, Japan, and Hong Kong in what could be seen as another, redoubling quest for what Brecht called "the Asiatic" in performance or modes of materialist thinking that might amplify an aesthetics of resistance to world conditions of capitalism, in what Lemon calls acts of everyday and especially spiritual "suspension" (197): "The search for race instead found spirit, and inscrutable prayers" (256). Here Lemon's astute Orientalism (a Marxian Tao?; see Jameson 1998) need not suffer from the suppression of the role of capital in cultural production, as theorists have charged the literariness of postcolonial studies after Edward Said (1978). Nor does it exactly repeat the constraints of area studies as a predetermined geography of cultural knowing because, as Lemon notes, to ask the question of where people "dance from" (105) is not quite the same as asking to know where people are from, on the map.

The "being there" of travel research and documentation defines the methods of area studies as well as ethnography, in what Rey Chow calls a "condemn[ation of] 'third world' cultural production [...] to a kind of realism with functions of authenticity, didacticism, and deep meaning" (1995:56). Lemon's approach slips oral history between the paradigms to study sites of pleasure and subjection in global/local spaces. His studious deferral of form is what makes the intimacy of the album both rewarding and difficult to follow, and with sometimes chilling arrest. Swatting a fat mosquito in his Indian bedroom, only to find himself unbitten by it ("it was not my blood," he says) Lemon meditates on the uncanny nearness and alienation of others in the everyday of global living (130). In swatting the thing, Lemon realizes that he has not only killed, but he has touched the blood of someone else, someone unknown to him. In an otherwise ordinary routine in the protection of one's own body and blood, Lemon finds himself splattered with the remains of another body, and with someone else's blood. Such banal, intimate, and variously intentional connections define the everyday life of the global.

"I'm working with found information," Lemon says (143), and because he is traveling, this is a recording of information for foreigners (Gambaro 1992) that is not fully curated either by the regulatory language of the state, nor by "art," but rather by Giorgio Agamben's whatever that is the everyday: the everything that matters (1993). Yet Lemon notices that recognition...