Artists & Projects Directory
Ralph Lemon/Cross Performance
My creative process entails a vigorous collision of creative cultures
and inspired conversations that dictate how the work is constructed, and how it
will be shared with public audiences. I am always asking how can an intensive
artistic research and immediate art-making process translate to the staged
realm of a theater or gallery? This ongoing struggle between process and
production creates a tension that is a vital element in all of my artistic
work.
Ralph Lemon is Artistic Director of Cross Performance,
a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary
performance and presentation. Lemon's projects expand the definition of
choreography by crossing and stretching the boundaries between Western,
post-modern dance and other art forms and cultures. For each project, Lemon
builds a team of collaborating artists-from diverse cultural backgrounds,
countries and artistic disciplines-who bring their own history and aesthetic
voice to the work. Projects develop organically, over a period of years, with
frequent public sharings of work-in-progress, and the culminating artworks
derive from the artistic, cultural, historic and emotional material uncovered
in this rigorous creative research process.
In 2005, Lemon concluded The Geography Trilogy, a decade-long international research and performance project
that spanned three continents as it explored race, history and memory. The
project featured three evening-length dance/theater performances: Geography (1997); Tree (2000); and
Come home Charley Patton (2004); two
Internet art projects; the publication of two
books by Wesleyan University Press; and several gallery exhibitions. Other
recent projects include (the
efflorescence of) Walter, a mixed-media art installation exhibited in NYC,
Minneapolis and New Orleans; the three-DVD
set of The Geography Trilogy; Konbit, a video collage about Miami's Haitian community; Three,
a dance/film created with choreographer Bebe Miller and filmmaker Isaac Julien;
and Persephone,
a book with Philip Trager's photographs of Lemon's choreographic work, with
text by Lemon and Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, and poems by Rita Dove and Eavan
Boland. In 2010, Lemon curated I Get Lost, a performance and discussion
series for Danspace Project, NYC.
Lemon is the recipient of a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Fellowship, and a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for
Interdisciplinary Work. In 2006, he was one of 50 artists to receive the
inaugural United States Artists Fellowship. He has also received a 2005
"Bessie" (NY Dance and Performance) Award in recognition of The
Geography Trilogy; a 2004 NYFA Fellowship for Choreography; and a 2004
Fellowship with the Bellagio Study and Conference Center.
In 1999, Lemon was honored with the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts.
Among his many teaching positions, Lemon was a 2009 Visiting Artist
Fellow at Stanford University's Institute for Diversity in the Arts and has
been artist-in-residence at Temple University in Philadelphia
(2005-06); George A. Miller Endowment Visiting Artist at the Krannert Center
(2004); and a Fellow of the Humanities Council and Program in Theater and Dance
at Princeton University (2002). From 1996-2000, he
was Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre.