About Geography

Directed and choreographed by Ralph Lemon with collaborating artists Francisco Lopez, Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid), Tracie Morris and Nari Ward

Geography will be an evening-length work of dance, theater and music directed and choreographed by Ralph Lemon, commissioned and produced by Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, CT. The work is also commissioned in part by 651 An Art Center at the Majestic Theater in Brooklyn, New York and the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts.

From 1985 to 1995 Ralph Lemon choreographed for and performed with his company, Ralph Lemon Company. The ensemble presented annual New York seasons, toured extensively in the United States and internationally, and was commissioned to create new works by such leading institutions as Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Colorado Dance Festival and the Columbia College Dance Center in Chicago. It celebrated its 10^th Anniversary with a widely acclaimed New York season at the Joyce Theater in October 1995. Mr. Lemon also has been commissioned to create works for Lyon Opera Ballet (France), the Sydney Dance Company (Australia), Geneva Opera Ballet (Switzerland), the Boston Ballet, LimÛn Dance Company and Joffrey Ballet among others. With the 1995-96 season, Mr. Lemon decided to move out of the standard dance company structure. He is undertaking new approaches to creating work which experiment in the intersection of dance/choreography with other art forms and social/political issues. These projects are currently taking the form of collaborations in film, video, art publishing, theater and new technologies. Mr. Lemon is currently an Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, CT.

Geography will be a major focus of Lemon’s activities during the 1996-97 and 1997-98 seasons. This work will intersect the performance boundaries of multiple and very different worlds: post-modernist formal dance and the performance and dancing of traditional Haitian and West African dance and theater. (The terms "traditional" "Haitian" and "West African" are presented here very generally and only represent a starting point in lemon’s search for specificity.) In Geography, Lemon also will explore perceptions of racial and cultural identities, and how an identity is translated, divide, subsumed and empowered by another, culturally foreign, aesthetic. Lemon is interested in how race, politics and cultural differences clash, inform and intersect with his own human and aesthetically formal concerns as a performing artist. His primary motivations in creating this work are the apparent African and post-African connections to his life as an African American and the realities of separateness that exist in completely different black worlds.

Project Description- Geography

As an African American removed from any obvious African culture by many generations, this project presents Lemon with an opportunity to spiral to some commonality-an intersection of his life and work with that of a subjectively perceived (perhaps romanticized) original source experience of African dancing and performing. In concept, these foreign artists bring to his modernism an almost inscrutable sense of purpose, a mysterious insight into the tradition of Pan-African dance and theater. What are the reasons for their dancing, singing and drumming? He hopes to break down these myths in his own aesthetic to find a language that brings this working group to a place that is not romanticized or overtly exotic but that is genuine and new in its form.

In 1995-96 Lemon directed a video documentary collage of Miami’s Haitian community. Through a research trip to Haiti and several intensive residencies in Miami, Lemon was introduced to Afro-Haitian culture and worked with a broad spectrum of artists and community members in the Haitian American community. It was this project, in part, that led to Geography as Lemon began to question the intersections or points of commonality of his African-American identity, already culturally subsumed through many generations, with those who share an African ancestry. Geography allows Lemon to continue this exploration. In August 1996 Lemon traveled to Cote d’Ivoire to meet with artists and identify musicians, dancers and actors for Geography.

Geography will be performed by a cast of nine men of African descent including dancers/actors and percussionists from CÙte d’Ivoire, Guinea and the United States. Lemon will work with a number of collaborators to build this work including New York visual artist Nari Ward, poet Tracie Morris and composers Francisco Lopez (from Madrid) and Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid).

About Ralph Lemon