Artists & Projects Directory
Cross Performance/Ralph Lemon
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
The question of transcendence and the human destiny of
partnership lie at the heart of How
Can You Stay in the House All
Day and Not Go Anywhere?,
Ralph Lemon's four-part "speculative fiction epic" merging dance, text,
media, sound and visual art. Deeply influenced by Lemon's seven-year collaboration with Walter Carter,
a centenarian and former sharecropper from Bentonia, Mississippi, How Can
You Stay bridges the personal and the universal, drawing from myths and
realities to offer "visions of humanity, simple and complex; part history, part
memory." The four parts feature
"walls" and "rooms" representing the interior and exterior landscapes of
cultures and human spirit, while imagery of spaceships and flying saucers
recall ideas of futurism and the escape to a wholly new place with unlimited
potential.
- Sunshine Room "remaps" portions of Andrei Tarkovsky's sci-fi romance film, Solaris (1972), and Jean-Luc Goddard's futuristic film, Alphaville (1965), in the "outer space" of the Mississippi Delta. Featuring filmed performances of Walter and Edna Carter, and commissioned sculptures by Walter's son, Warren, and friend, Lloyd Williams, Sunshine Room offers visions of life transitions (such as illness, leave-taking and death) that are experienced as life lived "outside of time." Accompanied by Ralph's onstage narration, Sunshine Room embraces cultural memory and moving forward- imagining some future, despairing of leaving, and holding nostalgic visions while negotiating a new belief system.
- Wall/Hole is an intervention and a breaking point, showing the path to change both longed for and resisted in Sunshine Room. Wall is performed by five dancers from Lemon's 2004 work, Come home Charley Patton- Darrell Jones, David Thomson, Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Gesel Mason and Okwui Okpokwasili- with the addition of dancer Omagbitse Omagbemi. Beginning where Charley Patton ended- an impassioned and cathartic dance called "Ecstasy"- Lemon extends his choreographic exploration with the dancers past the point of exhaustion to a place of vulnerability and release. Wall is immediately followed by Hole, a new solo performed by Lemon, in which he tears down a figurative wall. Envisioning the wall as both an abstruse door and a keyhole, with the dance as the key, Wall/Hole suggests "the inevitable and infinite consequences of change, from birth, from growth, from death, from war, from life itself."
- No Room is a reduction of themes from Sunshine Room, and a parallel reduction of Tarkovsky's Solaris to its primary love story, performed by Lemon and Okpokwasili, who portray what makes us human in partnership- birth and death, love and marriage- and the accompanying joys and loneliness.
- Rescuing
the Princess is a mixed media art installation to be exhibited either
on its own or in tandem with the staged performances of the other sections,
and visually reiterates the project's themes of love, loss and possible
redemption. It includes:
- A series of 10 to 15 large format color photographs of Walter and Edna Carter reenacting primary scenes from Tarkovsky's Solaris and Goddard's Alphaville, two films about the estranging future having already arrived, and at their centers, two beautiful and haunting love stories.
- A series of 10 to 20 ink drawings of Walter in his spacesuit, visiting different (American) time periods and moments in the western modern art world/canon.
- A room-size installation using greatly slowed film projection, light and shadow to create an immersive environment that distills the emotional themes of the work into a meditative experience.