Creator of Hybrid Performance Ralph Lemon Explores Art, Race, and Identity
The Geography Trilogy Screening with Ralph Lemon and special guests follows on Saturday, February 3, from 1 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. in Hepburn Teaching Theater, Goodhart Hall. Lemon’s The Geography Trilogy is a profound, and worldwide, 10-year inquiry into the social gravities of art, race, and identity at the turn of the 21st century. The Series video screening will feature the complete Trilogy: Geography (1997), Tree (2000), and Come home Charley Patton (2004), with commentary and readings by Lemon and close collaborators Katherine Profeta (dramaturg) and David Thomson (performer).
EVENT SCHEDULE AND TICKET INFORMATION
Buy tickets here. (Free for Tri-Co.)
Ralph Lemon
Ceremonies Out of the Air (a lecture/performance)
Friday, February 2, 8 p.m.
The Geography Trilogy Screening
Saturday, February 4, 1–7:30 p.m.
Screening Schedule for The Geography Trilogy:
1 p.m. Geography (1997)
3:30 p.m. Tree (2000)
5:45 p.m. Come home Charley Patton (2004)
Audience members will be welcome to come and go during this six hour marathon. See below for details on the films.*
All events will take place in Goodhart Hall, Bryn Mawr College, located at 150 N. Merion Avenue in Bryn Mawr, PA.
Ralph Lemon Special Pricing
Single Feb 2 OR Feb 3
$15 Single or senior tickets
$7.50 Students with ID
$2.50 Children 12 and Under
Combo Feb 2 AND 3
$25 Single or senior weekend pass
$15 Students with ID weekend pass
$5 Children 12 and Under weekend pass
Flex subscriptions of five tickets to remaining series events are $90 each, $75 for seniors.
Tickets, subscriptions, group sales and more information are available online through Brown Paper Tickets, at https://www.brynmawr.edu/performing-arts-series or by calling 610-526-5210.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ralph Lemon (Creator, Choreographer and Director) is a director, choreographer, writer, visual artist and curator, and the Artistic Director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation. His most recent works include Scaffold Room (2014), the innovative dance/film project Four Walls (2012), and How Can You Stay in The House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? (2008-2010), a work with live performance, film and visual art that toured across the United States. The immersive visual art installation, Meditation, which was part of How Can You Stay… was purchased for the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center in 2012. In January 2011, a re-imagined section of How Can You Stay… was performed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in conjunction with On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century. Lemon curated the fall 2012 performance series Some sweet day at MoMA, and the acclaimed 2010 performance series I Get Lost at Danspace Project in NYC.
Lemon’s visual art work was shown in a group exhibit When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South at the Studio Museum of Harlem (summer 2014). His solo visual art exhibitions include: 1856 Cessna Road at The Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC (2012); How Can You Stay In The House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2010); (the efflorescence of) Walter, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008), The Kitchen, NYC (2007) and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2006); The Geography Trilogy, Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (2001); and Temples, Margaret Bodell Gallery, NYC (2000). His group exhibitions include: When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination & the American South, The Studio Museum in Harlem; Move: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery, London, UK and The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC. Lemon’s book, Come home Charley Patton, the final in a series documenting The Geography Trilogy, was published in 2013 by Wesleyan University Press.
In 2015, Lemon was honored with the National Medal of Arts, presented by President Barack Obama. In 2012, he received one of the first Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards; he was also one of the first artists to receive the United States Artists Fellowship (2006). He is recipient of two "Bessie" Awards (1986, 2005); two Foundation for Contemporary Art Awards (1986, 2012); two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (2004, 2009); a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship; a 2004 Bellagio Study Center Fellowship; and the 1999 CalArts Alpert Award.
Lemon has been an IDA Fellow at Stanford University (2009); artist-in-residence at Temple University (2005-06); Miller Endowment Visiting Artist at the Krannert Center (2004); Fellow of the Humanities Council and Program in Theater & Dance at Princeton University (2002); and Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre (1996-2000). For the fall 2011 semester he was a Visiting Critic with the Yale University School of Art’s Sculpture Department. He also served as the 2013-14 Annenberg Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, where he curated a series of “performance essays,” titled Value Talks.
*ABOUT THE GEOGRAPHY TRILOGY
In 2005, Ralph Lemon completed The Geography Trilogy, a 10-year project that was a profound self-examination and a sustained inquiry into the social gravities of art, race and identity at the turn of the 21st century. The Trilogy developed a global performance and visual language that was simultaneously modern and traditional, East and West, light and dark, formal and free form. The three evening-length performances that made up The Geography Trilogy featured performers and collaborators from the U.S., Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, India, Japan, China and Taiwan.
The primacy of process, and the richness of materials that process uncovered-- artistic, emotional, historical-- created profound questions for Lemon as to how best to “translate” the process and “control” the materials in order to bring a work for audiences to the stage. The ongoing struggle between process and production created a tension that became a vital element in the Trilogy works, which ultimately included dance/theater performances, books, video journals, web projects and gallery exhibitions.
Part 1: Geography (premiered 1997), begins with Lemon's exploration into apparent African and post-African connections to his life as an African American. The cast includes nine men of African descent from Cٴe d'Ivoire, Guinea and the U.S.
In Part 2: Tree: (premiered 2000), Lemon directed his inquiry to Asia, following his attraction to Buddhism and how it might generate an art aesthetic. Tree places the energy and sound of the "Africa" of Geography next to a perceived Asian "quiet," while exploring the collision of tradition and modernity through contemporary performance. Performers include male and female dancers and musicians from Cٴe d'Ivoire, China, India, Japan, Taiwan and the United States.
For Part 3: Come home Charley Patton (premiered 2004), Lemon returned to America. Here, he visits charged sites from the volatile history of the Civil Rights period, performed ritual "counter-memorials" at lynching sites, and danced in the living rooms of relatives of early blues musicians from the Mississippi Delta. Lemon also weaves ideas from a mix of iconoclastic artists of contemporary literature and performance art, from James Baldwin to Bruce Nauman, into this historically charged research of rural America. Come home Charley Patton investigates how different generations remember the same critical events and places; what kind of narratives do justice to traumatic memories; and what form memories can ultimately take through the aesthetic works of this project. The exploration of these elements contributes to a performance where documentary footage and autobiography shares the stage with the abstraction and fiction of contemporary dance/theater.
Audiences for the live Geography Trilogy had to wait two to four years between performances – the time it took for Lemon's research trips and intensive rehearsals as he worked with collaborators to grapple with the impossible tasks he had assigned himself.
The 2017-2018 Bryn Mawr College Performing Arts Series receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
PRESS NOTE
For further event coverage coordination, please contact Phil Sumpter, Freelance Publicist, at psumpter.studios@gmail.com or 215.287.1179. For further institutional information, please contact the Office for the Arts at reservations@brynmawr.edu or 610-526-5210, or visit www.brynmawr.edu/arts.
MEDIA KITS
Ralph Lemon
