Artists & Projects Directory
Ralph Lemon/Cross Performance
Tree: belief/culture/balance
Tree is the second installment in Ralph Lemon's
critically acclaimed performance trilogy and documents his travels through India, Indonesia,
China and Japan as he retraces Buddhism's
migration map. More artistic sociologist than mere traveler, Lemon kept
journals, sketched, collected ephemera, conducted informal interviews, and took
photographs as he explored performance traditions and met the performers with
whom he would eventually choreograph an evening-length work. In the process, he
worked through his own preconceptions and misconceptions about the people and
places he encountered. Tree: belief/culture/balance is richly
structured, revealing a collision of cultural values pertaining to performance,
race, identity, modernity and tradition. The book is exquisitely designed and
lavishly illustrated to allow the reader to follow and interpret Lemon's
observation and his creative process. Published by Wesleyan University
Press (2004).
Geography: art/race/exile
Geography, a rich tapestry of journal entries, choreographic scores,
drawings, and photographs, leads us through the creation of the evening-long
dance work, a collaboration about being American, African, brown, black, blue
black, male and artist. The intimate, keenly observed passages in Ralph Lemon's
journal give us extraordinary insights on the process of dance-making-from the
discovery of specific movements to the sometimes uneasy relationships between
the dancers. At every juncture the collaboration posed difficult questions
about representing African dance and culture within the context of modern America's
post-slave heritage. The book beautifully documents Lemon's ability to
negotiate different dance traditions without either erasing or cementing them.
Published by Wesleyan
University Press (2000).
Persephone
This book is a synthesis of dance, photography and poetry-of kinetic
energy, the documentary image, and the evocative use of words. The result of a
collaboration between choreographer, photographer, and dancers, Persephone reexamines a dance by the same name originally created by Lemon for the stage
in 1991. It features photographs by Philip Trager, poems by Eavan Boland and
Rita Dove, and text by Lemon and Andrew Szegedy-Maszak. Published by Wesleyan University
Press with the New England Foundation for the
Arts (1996).
For more information or to order books, please contact Liz at liz@mappinternational.org or
646-602-9390.