Ralph Lemon, the kind of artist for whom deterrents are provocations, isn’t easily pinned down. He’s a choreographer and a visual artist. He’s written books. He’s received a MacArthur “genius” award. In certain circles, the name Ralph — no Lemon necessary, like Merce or Madonna — is all that’s needed to light up a room. For others, he’s an unknown. You get the feeling Lemon doesn’t mind. He once told Philip Bither, the senior curator of performing arts at the Walker Art Center, that he aspired to be only a rumor.
Can Lemon, 72, really pull off being “only a rumor”? He’s the subject of a major exhibition, “Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon,” opening at MoMA PS1 on Nov. 14. What does it mean for an artist who likes to evade institutional containers to expose himself in one of the most prestigious the city has to offer?
“Even with this PS1 show, there’s a big part of me that feels like I don’t belong here,” he said. “As an artist, not belonging is really incentive.”
Perhaps the more successful Lemon becomes, the more he needs to find ways to block out the noise. He is a puzzle, an artist of many pieces. One draw of “Ceremonies” is in how much of his artistry will be present: visual artwork, as well as performances, including the New York premiere of his most recent one, “Tell it anyway,” commissioned by the Walker in Minneapolis, on Nov. 14 and 16.
There is also “Rant redux” (2020-24), a four-channel video and sound installation created with the artist Kevin Beasley based on the “Rant” performance series in which dancers take sound, movement and voice to a feverish place. A live “Rant” — “Rant #6” — is planned for March 22.
Organized by Connie Butler, director of MoMA PS1, with Thomas Lax, a curator in media and performance at MoMA, “Ceremonies” features more than 60 pieces of Lemon’s art: drawings, photographs, sculpture and paintings, including drawings and explorations with Walter Carter, a former sharecropper from the Mississippi Delta who informed much of his recent work.
“Ceremonies” is Butler’s first exhibition since coming to PS1 last year. When she was the chief curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, she tried, unsuccessfully, to lure Lemon there. At PS1, she needed to put together an exhibition quickly and ran with an instinct: Lemon might be more receptive, she said, “because he tends, in his mercurial way, to sort of disappear sometimes.”
Butler wanted to organize an exhibition that was full of life, that had energy. “Also top of mind for me is really tapping into a very New York community and audience,” she said. “Ralph has such amazing collaborators who are all powerful artists in their own right, and each of them comes with a community.”
The breadth of Lemon’s artistry speaks to something else. He doesn’t play by the rules, and because of that, he continues to grow. In 1995, when his dance company was still going strong, he did something incredible: He disbanded it. “I felt I was losing the love,” he said. “I disbanded with, like, nothing to do.”
He added: “I thought the abstraction — at least the way I was experimenting with it — was the best way to be thinking about modern dance. And I feel like it began to disappear.”
The “it” in question was the dance. Lemon said it was as if he didn’t know what he wanted to look at anymore. “Not that it became meaningless, but that it lost its soul for me or something,” he said. “I was just thinking about movement and movement invention and sound and or music. It became really pure, which is where I wanted to be going. But it just got so purified that it got diffused and not so interesting.”
Lemon struck out on his own, devoting himself to a new artistic exploration. After immersing himself in communities in Africa, Asia and the American South, he produced “The Geography Trilogy” (1996-2004), which resulted in three performance works along with books and video work. Since then, he has continued investigations into race and culture, spirituality and artistic communion. The exhibition delves into all of that, too. Its title comes from a line in Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”: “Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.”
Lemon, who chose the title, said: “My translation is finding a way to celebrate or live or find joy or some kind of ceremony in a life that is on the verge, which I think is important for this time we live in. It feels very fraught. And I think about this as an artist. I’m not an activist.”
Lemon was born in Cincinnati and grew up in Minneapolis, where he started dancing in 1975. While majoring in English literature and minoring in theater arts at the University of Minnesota, he made his way to the studio of Nancy Hauser, a modern dance teacher and choreographer. There, he felt like he “started to become a dance artist through that work because it was very experimental,” he said. “It was old — Mary Wigman, Hanya Holm, Germanic modern dance. But that was, I think, a remarkable way for me as a young dance artist to begin.”
Hauser’s studio, the Guild of Performing Arts, was also a space where postmodern choreographers from New York would come to teach workshops. And Lemon also had the Walker, where he discovered Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Meredith Monk.
“I moved to New York because of Merce Cunningham,” Lemon said. “That work. I don’t know if I wanted to be in that company, but it was like, Merce is in New York, I’m going to New York. I want to be closer to that. But once I got there, I took not a single class. It terrified me.”
His misgivings, he realizes now, had more to do with how remarkable he thought Cunningham’s dances were. “I think there was an element of, I want to keep that work at bay because it just seems so exceptional to me,” he said.
He landed in New York in 1978 and joined the House, Monk’s company, before forming his own group in 1985. He studied ballet every day; he was after technique and the ability to point his feet. He regrets that he missed out on the more experimental contact improvisation scene, but his focus gave him a different kind of ability. “I felt like I really learned how to choreograph as best as I wanted to,” he said. “And I felt like I learned enough about technique that served me and that also allowed me to let it go.”
It also gave him a wider perspective, and the realization that he could, he said, “have an argument with this form.” Lemon occupies a particular place in dance: Though he started in the ’80s, he is somehow seen as a ’90s choreographer; even so, he’s not nailed to that time or any time.
There is a kind of artistic freedom in his ability to slip through artistic worlds and generations. What he produces is part of a big constellation and that includes his work in visual art, which he first studied in high school. Drawing, he said in an email, is now a “purposeful meditation” and a “core practice.”
For years his visual art was more private than the performance side of his career. But that changed, he said, after he disbanded his company and had more time “with myself and with the world around me.”
Lemon, who works in Philadelphia and New York, employs many forms, including diaristic drawings and video pieces. His continuing series of works on paper, “Untitled (The greatest [Black] art history story ever told. Unfinished),” references and refracts art history through a Black perspective. (A collection of those drawings cover the exhibition’s publication and, when unfolded, turns into a poster.) His “Spaceman Drawings,” also included in the show, came out of his time working with Carter. He blurs boundaries between art forms so that there is, as he put it: “No hierarchy. And so far, so good.”
Still, he added, there is “nothing like being in a room or studio with a few collaborators negotiating some kind of agreement.” Lemon isn’t interested in telling people how to move. It’s more about building a connection, fostering an exchange of emotions: “It’s like, how do we do this together?” he said.
The premiere of “Tell it anyway” at the Walker last month was his first proscenium performance in years. At PS1, it will be different. “Now we kind of take it apart and find a new way to look at it,” Lemon said.
To Bither, the Walker’s senior curator, it was full of tension, rage, joy and ecstasy and, by the end, an electric collective energy. “You could feel the waves coming off the stage and between the audience and the performers,” he said.
“Tell it anyway” is a continuation — as are all of Lemon’s works — of what came before. Featuring music by Beasley — Lemon described it as a “sonic sculpture” — it is a testament to his spectacular cast. Lemon’s job, as he sees it, is to create a frame to let his performers fly: “Part of the conversation is Black culture, but also Black culture as a kind of capacious space that’s about life and joy and pain and also about kind of being vitally on the margins.”
There is text and ecstatic, full-out dancing that ends with a section that pushes the body to extremes. What comes after exhaustion? How do you keep going? Even when he was younger, he had an interest in the idea of taking the body apart and putting it back together. But that was more of a playful notion than a physical one. Now he works with collaborators who are willing to actually go there.
It’s been a process. After disbanding his company, Lemon traveled to Haiti and saw trance dance; he then went to West Africa, meeting performers who could go into trance dance, but refused. “They needed to check in with their teachers,” Lemon said. “They expressed how dangerous it was and that if I wanted to incorporate that into my more modern-postmodern work frame, I wouldn’t be able to control it. So I was in wonderment of it, but also hands off.”
“Tell it anyway” is his version, he said, of trance experimentation. “I find it beautiful and amazing and compelling because I don’t know what it is,” he said. “I still can’t describe what it looks like or how to get there. There’s no technique for it other than a kind of physical practice.”
Lemon may no longer have a dance company but he has assembled a pickup group, loyal, over many years. “I feel a deep, spiritual and emotional connection with everyone,” he said. “I feel an exchange. With this ‘Tell it anyway,’ I have the family back.”
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