Ralph Lemon: Intercultural Collaboration
Ralph Lemon is an internationally recognized artist, choreographer, curator, writer, and filmmaker whose work often takes years to make and uses multiple disciplines to uncover contentious cultural themes through dance making. He once said in an interview with Lynn Lukkas that he wanted to live as creative a life as possible. He said, “It’s about asking questions and sort of giving form to those questions.”
In the 1950s, Modernism’s celebration of the genius, the essential singular voice in the creation of form and beauty, was subsumed by new perspectives on time, process, and the body as material for making art. Improvised dance began to appear in the live artworks of visual artist Robert Rauschenberg, composer John Cage, and choreographer Merce Cuningham who sometimes performed together.
Lemon, born in 1952, was inspired to study dance from watching Merce Cunningham perform on public television. In an interview with June Wilson, Lemon said, “I...and he did that Cat solo, and I thought well I'm gonna go to New York to work with Merce Cunningham.” After working with the Nancy Hauser Dance Company, from 1977 to 1979, he studied with Meredith Monk in Boulder, Colorado. He finally left for New York City in 1979 with Meredith Monk's performance group, where he danced until 1985. He started his first dance company that year.
Lemon's collaborative experiments reveal multiple ways of investigating a question aesthetically, culturally, and narratively. In his ten year investigation entitled, "The Geography Trilogy," he explores the possibility of intercultural collaboration, the complex realities of communication, the allegiances of race, and the cultural resonances of memory. The work spans three continents and several group collaborations with local people, both artists and non-artists, to make the dance. Throughout his collaborative constructions, he attempts to embody the variegated pressures to represent African dance and the reality of being a Black artist in a post-slave America. He challenges himself to make use of cultural traditions without erasing or defining them. He said, “I feel like I can claim the idea of race as something that I’ve embodied, and racism as something I’ve embodied, but also something I can work with as a material in all my art practices, and that feels like a gift.”
He draws on the contrasts of cultural influences between his parents and himself. In an interview with Marissa Perel he said, “I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and Minneapolis, Minnesota, with my mother listening to Dinah Washington and Louis Armstrong, while I listened to the Beatles and the Stones and Jimi Hendrix and Captain Beefheart. I learned the blues through brilliant white musicians from England. So, I feel like my creative world started from that constellation. I had a very black high-yellow mother, from a very black South Carolina culture, while I grew up in Cincinnati and Minneapolis, which were racially promiscuous, a miscegenation of culture, especially Minneapolis. There was a riff, a kind of improvisation going on all the time between race and culture. The tricky music I was listening to felt right to my body.”
Sound plays a crucial role in Lemon’s dance making. In collaboration with Sound Artist Kevin Beasley, the abrasive sound of a Cotton Gin obfuscates the voice and desynchronizes linear associations that might traditionally be made between a musical score and the choreography. The sound recreates a viscerally fertile environment where collective trauma more immediately presents itself in the speaker's voice and the bodies of the performers. Like Ishmael Houston-Jones’s early Contact Improvisations with Fred Holland, Lemon introduces new possibilities for dance improvisation in collaboration with Okwui Okpokwasili, Stanley Gambucci, Paul Hamilton, Angie Pittman, and Darrell Jones.
Lemon has been awarded Alpert Award in the Arts (1999), a Creative Capital grant (2000), the inaugural USA Prudential Fellowship (2006), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009) and in 2012, received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant (2012), and the Francis J. Greenburger Award for under-recognized artists. He has received many other prestigious awards throughout his career. He has presented works at MOMA, The Walker Museum, the Lyon Ballet, the Whitney, MCA Chicago, and many prominent museums, performance spaces, and cultural venues around the world. From 1996 to 2000, he was Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre and currently works with his long time collaborator Okwui Okpokwasili.
Ralph Lemon on Coming Apart, and Piecing Himself Back Together (2019)
https://www.frieze.com/article/ralph-lemon-coming-apart-and-piecing-himself-back-together
Talking Dance: Ralph Lemon (1997)
[Whitney] Ralph Lemon | Performance from Kevin Beasley: A view of a landscape (2019)
Performing at a Distance | Ralph Lemon (2020)
https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/369
Thoughts on Blackness in Dance Politics by Chris Braz with Artist Ralph Lemon
https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/ralph-lemon-untitled-2008-2/