Ralph Lemon choreographed for and performed with his company, Ralph Lemon Company, from 1985 – 1995. The ensemble presented annual New York seasons, performed and taught extensively in the United States and internationally and received numerous commissions, grants and awards. It was presented by such venues as Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, MA; Kennedy Center, Washington DC; American Dance Festival, NC, Spoleto Festival/USA, SC; Cannes Festival, France; Vienna Festival, Austria; and Festival Internacional de Teatro, Columbia. Lemon has choreographed also for Lyon Opera Ballet (France), the Sydney Dance Company (Australia), Batsheva Dance Company (Israel), Geneva Opera Ballet (Switzerland), the Boston Ballet and LimŪn Dance Company among others. He has won eight Choreographer Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Art, two New York Foundation for the Art Fellowships, an American Choreographer Award, the Gold Medal in the 1988 Boston International Choreography Competition, and a 1987 New York Dance and Performance (BESSIE) Award. Lemon is currently an Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre.

In 1996 Lemon re-configured the company from a fixed group of seven dancers to a flexible group of diverse collaborators and performers. These collaborations in film, video, art publishing, theater and new technologies experiment in the intersection of dance with other art forms and social issues. Among the projects now available are Persephone, a dance book collaboration with photographer Philip Trager with poems contributed by Rita Dove and Eavan Boland, published by New England Foundation for the Arts & Wesleyan University Press; and Konbit, a video documentary collage about the Haitian community in Miami, which has been broadcast on Boulder Public Television and screened at the Florida Dance Festival, Arizona State University, Cornish College of the Arts (WA), Yale University (CT), and Ramapo College (NJ).

In development are a new media technologies project combining live performance with CD-ROM and Internet technology (a collaboration with Philip Mallory Jones and John Mitchell produced by Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University, Tempe); a film with choreographer Bebe Miller and film director Isaac Julien; What My Body Believes, a suite of short stories and drawings; and a book on the process of making Geography. Geography is the first of a trilogy of pieces Lemon is developing over seven years (part I Africa; part II Asia; Part III America). This trilogy is an investigation into the collision of cultures and a search for personal identity and cultural connection.

Last modified on January 16, 1999
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