Ralph Lemon

Ralph Lemon

Ralph Lemon is Artistic Director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation. Lemon's projects expand the definition of choreography by crossing and stretching the boundaries between Western, post-modern dance and other art forms and cultures. For each project, Lemon builds a team of collaborating artists-from diverse cultural backgrounds, countries and artistic disciplines-who bring their own history and aesthetic voice to the work. Projects develop organically, over a period of years, with frequent public sharings of work-in-progress, and the culminating artworks derive from the artistic, cultural, historic and emotional material uncovered in this rigorous creative research process.  

In 2005, Lemon concluded The Geography Trilogy, a decade-long international research and performance project that spanned three continents as it explored race, history and memory. The project featured three evening-length dance/theater performances: Geography (1997); Tree (2000); and Come home Charley Patton (2004); two Internet art projects; the publication of two books by Wesleyan University Press; and several gallery exhibitions.

Other recent projects include (the efflorescence of) Walter, a mixed-media art installation exhibited in NYC, Minneapolis and New Orleans; the three-DVD set of The Geography Trilogy; Konbit, a video collage about Miami's Haitian community; Three, a dance/film created with choreographer Bebe Miller and filmmaker Isaac Julien; and Persephone, a book with Philip Trager's photographs of Lemon's choreographic work, with text by Lemon and Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, and poems by Rita Dove and Eavan Boland.

In 2010, Lemon curated I Get Lost, a performance and discussion series for Danspace Project, NYC.   Lemon is the recipient of a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Work. In 2006, he was one of 50 artists to receive the inaugural United States Artists Fellowship. He has also received a 2005 "Bessie" (NY Dance and Performance) Award in recognition of The Geography Trilogy; a 2004 NYFA Fellowship for Choreography; and a 2004 Fellowship with the Bellagio Study and Conference Center. In 1999, Lemon was honored with the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts. Among his many teaching positions, Lemon was a 2009 Visiting Artist Fellow at Stanford University's Institute for Diversity in the Arts and has been artist-in-residence at Temple University in Philadelphia (2005-06); George A. Miller Endowment Visiting Artist at the Krannert Center (2004); and a Fellow of the Humanities Council and Program in Theater and Dance at Princeton University (2002). From 1996-2000, he was Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre. 

Living Legacy | March 29 – April 17, 2010

How Can You Stay In The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere?

In residence, Lemon and his exceptional cast focused primarily on the development of Wall/Hole, the second of three sections in the multimedia theatrical performance/installation/video How Can You Stay in the House and Not Go Anywhere? The work involved professional performers as well as residents, young and old, of Bentonia and Yazoo City, MS. Described as a “speculative fiction epic,” the project bridges the personal and the universal in an exploration of the possibilities of intercultural collaboration, the allegiances of race, and the power and unreliability of memory. This work has evolved from Lemon’s five-year collaboration with centenarian Walter Carter, a former sharecropper who has lived his entire life in Bentonia, MS.

The world premiere of How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? was held on September 10, 2010 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.

Collaborators in Residence: Rick Murray [Lighting Designer], Katherine Profeta, [dramaturge], Lucas Indelicato [Sound Designer], Jim Findlay [sets/projection designer], Mike Taylor [video designer], Okwui Okpokwasili, David Thomson, Gesel Mason, Djedje Djedje Gervais, Darrell Jones and Omagbitse Omagbemi [performers]. Slideshow photos by Kathryn Noletto Felis.