Artists & Projects Directory
Cross Performance/Ralph Lemon
How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go
Anywhere? is a three-part multimedia performance work that bridges the personal and the universal,
drawing from the myths and realities of the Deep South (where Lemon has
increasingly been working) to offer "visions of humanity, simple and
complex...part memory and part history." Each of the three parts-Sunshine
Room, Wall/Hole and No Room-will live as a
complete performance, and will also be constructed to come together in one
evening-length work. The project is currently in development and is anticipated
to be completed in 2010.
How Can You Stay...has evolved from Lemon's five-year collaboration
with centenarian Walter Carter, a former sharecropper who
has lived his entire life in Bentonia, Mississippi. The full work will involve
professional performers as well as residents, young and old, of Bentonia and Yazoo City.
Lemon has commissioned Walter Carter's son, Warren (a former factory worker)
and Lloyd Williams (a longtime farm laborer) to design and fabricate a
spaceship, a flying saucer and a locomotive that are essential visual elements
of the stage sets for How Can You Stay....
- Sunshine Room (4 performers). An
intergenerational performance/film created with and performed by residents
of Bentonia/Yazoo City, Sunshine Room takes place inside the
installation of a spaceship as it references cultural memory and moving
forward-imaging some future, despairing of leaving home, and holding
nostalgic visions of childhood while negotiating a belief system. The
contributions of the local people participating in the project will help
move the work towards its focal point, described by Lemon as "the
human nature commonality of how one lives a life-how special, ordinary and
inspiring."
- Wall/Hole (6 performers). This work,
composed of a quintet and a solo, envisions a wall as an abstruse door and
as a discovered "keyhole," with the dance as key, opening to
"the inevitable and infinite consequences of change, from birth, from
growth, from death, from war, from life itself." Wall is
performed by the cast of Come home Charley Patton (Part 3 of
Lemon's Geography Trilogy): Darrell Jones, David Thomson, Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Gesel Mason and Okwui
Okpokwasili. It revisits the choreographic language of the final section
of that work-an impassioned, chaotic, dangerous and cathartic dance that
the cast referred to as "Ecstasy." Lemon imagines Wall as
an intervention and breaking point and asks: What are the opportunities
beyond the breaking point? Hole is a new solo performed by Lemon,
with an actual wall that gets torn down.
- No Room (2 performers). No Room features two characters (played by professional performers) who portray most of what makes us human in partnership-birth and death, love and marriage-and the accompanying joys and loneliness. It will also include references, movement, images and text from the lives of Walter Carter and his wife, Edna. No Room takes place around an "extension" of the spaceship set and an installation of a suspended locomotive train and/or a set of train tracks.