Artists & Projects Directory
Ralph Lemon/Cross Performance
How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? was co-produced by Cross Performance, Inc. and MAPP International Productions. It premiered at the Krannert Center (Urbana, IL) in September 2010 and subsequently toured to Walker Art Center (Minnepolis, MN), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA), Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn, NY), Duke Performances at Duke University (Durham, NC), REDCAT (Los Angeles,CA), and On the Boards (Seattle, WA).
How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? is a four-part project consisting of live performance, film
and visual art which 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 and grace 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.
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. The film-talk includes
excerpts of an intimately staged film, created by Lemon in collaboration
with Walter Carter, a 102-year old
former sharecropper, carpenter, and gardener from Bentonia, Mississippi, 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 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.
The final chapter
of How Can You Stay... is a visual/film
installation entitled Meditation. Created in
collaboration with video designer Jim Findlay, Meditation reiterates the live
performance's themes using film projection, light, and shadow to create an
immersive environment. Meditation was seen at performance venues Walker Art
Center, Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts and also at The Kitchen in NYC. Other collaborators
include dramaturg Katherine Profeta, sound consultant Lucas Indelicato, and lighting designer Roderick Murray.
How Can You Stay has received funding support from: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation; Doris Duke Fund for Dance of the National Dance Project, a program administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts with funding from Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MetLife Foundation; National Endowment for the Arts; New York State Council on the Arts; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation.
It was co-commissioned by Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; Krannert Center for the Performing Arts/University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; On the Boards, Seattle, WA; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.
How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? was developed in part during a creative residency provided by the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at The Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL. It was also developed through creative and production residencies provided by Brooklyn Academy of Music, Walker Art Center, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and the Kitchen.