Ritualizing the Past: Ralph Lemon's Counter-Memorials

Ralph Lemon reconceived his work after 1995 as a multimedia and cross-cultural process that was still "dance" but that stretched itself to include other artistic modes. This process culminated in the Geography Trilogy—Geography (1997), Tree (2000), and Come home Charley Patton (2004), which catalyzes many different traditions of movement, culture, and life-experience.

Part 1, Geography, centers on West Africa, a site that Lemon calls "proximal emotional challenges" for him as an African-American. For this piece, Lemon recruited Guinean and Ivorian performers and explored the reverberations of the African diaspora. Part 2, Tree, focuses on Asia. Lemon gathered performers of Asian traditional music and asked them to collaborate with some of the dancers who had performed in Geography. In Tree, he conjures a performative idiom literate in many languages, musical and gestural, Western and non-Western. Coming to Asia knowingly as a tourist, Lemon avoided both exoticism and a self-conscious status as an outsider in an investigation of cultural difference that, in being both sociological and spiritual, was able to view India, China, and Japan with a percipient clarity. Asian spirituality, especially Buddhism, was important in Tree. Both works are chronicled by Lemon in two deeply personal and highly visual books, published recently by Wesleyan University Press.

The portfolio of Lemon's drawings and photographs in this section of PAJ is related to Part 3 of the trilogy, Come home Charley Patton. The title refers to the blues singer who, though not explicitly mentioned in the piece, reflects the sort of soul-searching that goes on in it. Charley Patton is set in the American South. Born in Cincinnati and raised in Minneapolis, Lemon evokes his own black ancestors who lived in the South, and, more generally, the South as the "home" of African-American experience, what he calls "ground zero of African-American history."

Several different media aid Lemon in this negotiation between the past and the present. With interests extending to video, photography, drawing, and writing, he uses all of them to develop his imaginative response to the issues of identity, place, and memory. Screens of videotaped images stand in back of the dancers, providing commentary and counterpoint. From the portal of the upper right of the theatre, a computer-generated James Baldwin appears and speaks, his contours taken from one of the artist's drawings. Here and elsewhere they provide not just visual icons but commentaries on the stage experience and are a benchmark of the choreographer's own sensibility.

The well-documented Geography and Tree volumes testify to this interest in paratexts, by-products of the creation of a staged work that are as important to what the artist is doing as the finished work itself. Even in our postmodern times, the Romantic, or modernist, ideology of the magnum opus as the peak of a creative process that is otherwise immaterial to it, has kept its grip on the way we think about art. Lemon, though, wants his audience not only to appreciate what they see on stage, but to also understand that the performance is an outgrowth of a larger process, and not an inevitable event. Charley Patton uses body movement in a way that internalizes the unseen journey that led to the performance. The body serves as a distilled history, a vehicle to communicate historical information. The overall conception, along with the other media—voices, music, drawings, videos—offer multiple ways to communicate this information.

Lemon's drawings deserve appreciation in their own right. With an arresting facticity resembling the drawings on Greek geometric vases, they provide information, as well as the artist's own perspective on it, inexpressible otherwise. Lemon's practice of what he calls "empirical performance formalism" means that much of the research isn't evident in the final work, although that does not mean his process does not exist on a level beneath our notice. The closest literary equivalent...