Artists & Projects Directory
Ralph Lemon/Cross Performance
How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? features bodies honed by years of contemporary dance
training and bodies honed by decades of physical labor; contemporary artists
with an urban 21st-century sensibility and a former sharecropper in a rural
southern community whose life spanned over a century. The project takes on
questions of transcendence as experienced in human partnerships, in the idea of
escape, in the performance of dance, in the end of human life, and in the
attempt to translate personal experiences into works of art.
How Can You Stay... is a four-part project consisting of live performance, film
and visual art. The first three parts are presented within the proscenium frame,
the fourth as an installation through which audience members can come and go.
Lemon employs these multiple and intertwined media to approach themes of human
connection, loss, and the elusive but ever-compelling possibility of grace.
The
stage components of How Can You Stay... begin with the overlap of projected film and
live narration, casting a retrospective eye on Lemon's work and life since
2004, and an imaginative glance forward into the future. It is particularly inspired
by Lemon's creative relationship with Walter Carter, a 102-year old former
sharecropper, carpenter, and gardener from Bentonia, Mississippi,
with whom Lemon worked periodically over eight years. The film-talk includes
excerpts of an intimately staged film, created by Lemon in collaboration with
Carter and his wife Edna, that remaps Andrei Tarkovsky's hypnotic sci-fi film Solaris (1972) in the "outer space" of
the Mississippi Delta.
The
second part of How Can You Stay... shifts to live performance, exploring dance on the edge of "disappearing." An ensemble of six performers, Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Darrell Jones, Gesel Mason, Okwui
Okpokwasili, Omagbitse Omagbemi,
David Thomson - all but Omagbemi
veterans of Lemon's previous stage work, Come
home Charley Patton (2004) - cast themselves into turbulent physicality
that borders on complete exhaustion, revealing
what remains when we think we cannot go any further. The third part is a
contemplative, minimal duet for Lemon and Okpokwasili, accessing an analogous
state through very different means.
Lemon
created the fourth and final chapter of How
Can You Stay..., entitled Meditation, in collaboration with
video designer Jim Findlay. This visual/film installation reiterates the
live performance's themes using film projection, light, and shadow to create an
immersive environment. Meditation will generally be shown at the same site as the performance.
Other
collaborators on How Can You Stay... include longtime dramaturg Katherine Profeta, sound consultant Lucas Indelicato, and lighting designer Roderick
Murray. How Can You Stay... is a co-production of Cross Performance Inc. and
MAPP International Productions.