HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Ralph Lemon

Ralph Lemon
photo: Tara Fallaux

Ralph Lemon

Ralph Lemon b.1952
lives and works in New York

In 1995 postmodern American choreographer Ralph Lemon (b. 1952) dissolved his popular touring dance ensemble to redirect his energies toward an exploration of new forms of performance and presentation. Collaborating with artists from diverse fields, he has produced an impressive array of performances, films, exhibitions, publications, and workshops. After presenting and hosting residencies around the first two Geography components at the Walker Art Center, Lemon returns to begin work on the final stage of his large-scale trilogy. Unfolding over the course of nine years, this complex dance-theater universe explores global sociopolitical ideas and the search for personal and artistic identity within the broader world arena. Incorporating performance traditions from across the world, each episode of the trilogy is a multinational collaboration of dance, theater, visual arts, and music.

During his residency in 2002-2003, Lemon and his performer-collaborators from Africa, China, and the U.S. will further develop House, part three of The Geography Trilogy, a work that examines the complicated folk culture of the American South through Lemon's own African American family history, spanning the eras from segregation to integration.

The Walker commissioned House as a central component of its How Latitudes Become Forms performance activities. The finished work will premiere at the Walker in fall 2004.

Interactions/Intersections: Cultural Globalism and Educational Practice
Christi Atkinson, Susan Rotilie, Sarah Schultz, Kiyoko Motoyama Sims, Meredith Walters

on Uttar-Priyadashi.[2] This work could be perceived as traditional East Indian theater-dance from the Westerner's point of view, but from the East Indian's point of view it's a very contemporary interpretation of the traditional forms. It made me rethink how I might design programs with different resident artists and art forms that we bring in from around the world. When the Walker presented Uttar-Priyadashi, our solution was to invite a scholar of Indian dance and theater, Dr. Sunil Kothari, who was traveling with the company, to speak to students in theater and dance classes at Macalester College and also to have him give a talk before the show. It helped to frame the performance within a more nuanced context than simply traditional or nontraditional. It conveyed that these artists are carrying forward--and adding complexity to--longheld traditions, but using a contemporary vocabulary.

MW: Making those many vocabularies available is so important, and your solution is a perfect illustration of it. Westerners, Americans, anyone removed from that culture, really, have limited vocabularies for that form of dance. As you said, traditional and nontraditional are terms that don't illuminate anything and are in fact misleading. Audiences unfamiliar with these complex histories are forced to make analogies to what they do know--or think they know--about a foreign culture, which is usually a mix of news reports, a few facts from world history class, or artifacts seen in museums. In a contemporary arts context we had the opportunity to distinguish between flat representations of a culture and the actual artistic process of contemporary dancers from Manipur.

SS: I valued hearing about the various issues and challenges the committee members faced in their own communities surrounding the presentation of contemporary work. Walter Chakela, for example, is dealing with a particular history of revolution and apartheid in South Africa. He was struggling to convince his audience, consisting of primarily black South Africans, that their literature and theater are as good and as valuable as the works of Shakespeare and Chekov. Because European drama was all they ever read or learned about in school, Shakespeare is perceived as literature with a capital L, and they needed to be convinced that their stories, about revolution and apartheid, were equally "Literature." Though the details vary from locale to locale, in a strange way it was reassuring to discover that everyone around the table was wrestling with the challenge of overcoming audiences' preconceptions and apprehensions about contemporary art.

Christi Atkinson: One thing this initiative has reinforced for me is the power of certain words, such as global and globalism, and how those words can mean dramatically different things to different people. For example, one of our advisors felt that globalism was just a buzzword for the new American imperialism. And yet, no matter how strongly we all felt that these words were problematic, there were no agreed-upon, adequate alternatives to these terms. When our vocabulary itself is shifting, the intended discussions can't even be realized.

KMS: There is a connection between a person's perception of a word--such as globalism, community, local--and the cultural background and history that he or she grew up in. I'm working in an American institution, creating programs for an American audience, yet this process has made it clear that my ideas of internationalism or globalism stem from being Japanese and growing up in Japan. I have a double perception in a way.

I am sensitive to how Asian culture is often wrapped up into one big category, which hides all the unique qualities and differences within Asian cultures and art. Asia includes China, Japan, and Korea as well as the expanse of Southeast Asia, and we all have very distinct cultural and artistic traditions and histories, although we have a lot of things in common too. From the Westerner's point of view, the commonalties are often emphasized more than the differences. I am much more aware of the need to accentuate differences within Asian cultures, rather than to simplify them in one cultural category.

SS: Do you think there is a tendency in America to lump everyone from one country or continent together?

2 Uttar-Priyadarshi (The Final Beatitude) is a music-theater-dance work conceived and directed by Ratan Thyiam, a leading East Indian director, and uses stylized movement and vocal techniques that reference traditional performing and martial arts of Manipur. Uttar-Priyadarshi was performed by the Chorus Repertory Theatre of Manipur, India, which was established by Thyiam. It was copresented by the Walker Art Center and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts at the Ordway Center, St. Paul, Minnesota, on October 2, 2000.

The Local Tango and the Global Dance
Vasif Kortun, Cuauhtémoc Medina

To talk about today, I am at pains to understand the situatedness of the practice from "out there," and the way it displaces itself from the local tango of cultural economy. Twice-displaced critics and curators that we are, we claim to transport knowledge about a conversational and convertible art practice situated within the local dialect. You spoke so eloquently about this situation--when the Mexican and the Turk met up in a nouvelle Japanese soup joint in Helsinki--in the context of the contemporary art practice as it operates outside the local tango and divorced from the humanist disciplines of culture. That weak layer you speak of is the very community that sustains me, although we betray each other now and then.

Having just visited the Seventh Biennial here in Istanbul and comparing it with the ARS 01 exhibition[4]--the way the former is laid out haphazardly, creating an ambience rather than a reading, using large spaces around which works are scattered in a directionless way--forces me to respond to your question in an honest way. I don't think I can ever attain the level of Kiasma in my little institution, and I will never be able to provide the care for the works that they do, or that kind of stability. Proje4L does not represent accurately what is happening in Turkey. It is biased toward contemporary expression, forever facing the risks of its own volatility.

You know how hard it is to pursue this line of work when one is both a cultural critic--an active agent in the contemporary visual arts field--and a museological interpreter. I cannot see anything of this sort being possible in the great Middle/Northern Europe and North America today; perhaps once, but not today.

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Dear Vasif,

I write to you today while bombs are falling in Afghanistan. I find it interesting to transpose our discussion of "out there." Perversely, it is the notion of "the center" that most likely seduced the Muslim fundamentalists to stage their fears of globalization by crashing airplanes into skyscrapers. They could not restrict themselves to creating a purist Muslim kingdom amidst the mountains and the valleys of Afghanistan. Good children of the religions of "the book" (which in my view involves the idea of the West after all), they thought they could symbolically defeat the Americans and at the same time provoke them into attacking "the Muslim world" so as to induce an overall Muslim reaction against the West. I mean, they could not be so naive as to imagine they would not be attacked in response. On the other hand, American statesmen will ultimately profit from the fact that they have finally restored the idea of a "radical other," reviving their sense of civilizatory uniqueness and their duty to forcibly modernize the rest of us. Ultimately, even though the Taliban bans TV, photography, and cinema for its population, Bin Laden needs CNN to broadcast his call for a universal Jihad against Jews and Christians and against all of those who live under Jewish and Christian rule. Likewise, American and British governments have trained their "special forces" to parachute into the middle of the desert relying on something you could call "applied social anthropology," for they are trained in the local languages, technologies of cultural exchange, and the management of local systems of power. Here you have a perfect illustration of the complicity between the center and the edge: both of them are required to advance their positions by means of an efficient administration of their mutual instability. It is hard to even focus one's mind on the so-called collateral damage in such a situation. I admit that rather than making me feel alienated, this whole global tragedy simply proves to me how futile my personal political mores are in the present situation, not only in terms of signing petition letters circulating in cyberspace but also in terms of how these mores relate to the very banal questions of art and art criticism. This recent crisis highlights something we have been experiencing for a long time: the difficulty of working out modestly effective political goals and strategies. We are doomed to operate blind to the outcome of our provisory assumptions.

Having said that, I find two really challenging issues in your letter. The first is the image (or should I say mirage?) of something you call whole emancipation. I find this notion really unfathomable. I guess the first thing I will ask you to clarify is how you define "emancipation" in this case: Do you mean the pursuit of fairness

4 The Seventh International Istanbul Biennial took place September 22-November 17, 2001; ARS 01 was presented at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, September 30-November 17, 2001.

Revolt, Dysfunction, Dementia: Toward the Body of “Empire”
Otori Hidenaga

From Dysfunction to Dementia in Theater and Dance
After 1995, our body came to experience a more difficult state than simply being dysfunctional. Being dysfunctional means that there is something wrong with the function, but it is somehow still functioning. It was possible, therefore, for Furuhashi, with his own dysfunctional body, to create S/N. His death seemed to herald a shift in which the world was not even dysfunctional anymore. Something more drastic than being dysfunctional has arrived, and at least in Japan, bodies are behaving very strangely in the streets. This is what Kayama was referring to in her essay on Murakami. And I would call these bodies, "bodies of dementia," which came after the representation of the dysfunctional and are now emerging in representational genres. But if those representations are emerging as something lacking any sense of critique, the bodies themselves are, in a sense, in a state of dementia by lacking any circuit for self-examination. That is why, even if the bodies in J-theater practices are "bodies of dementia," they are only simplistic reflections of the bodily dementia that we are experiencing in Japanese culture at the moment. I would take Uchino's analysis to mean as much. In fact, not only in theatrical expressions but in our everyday lives, more and more people are satisfied simply with having their desires fulfilled, without any consideration for self-reflective thinking. In such a state, the status quo is silently affirmed, and those desires are never articulated in terms of history, culture, and society.

We can understand the emergence of this kind of non-self-critical circuit by looking at Paul Virilio's analysis of acceleration. He writes in Politics of the Very Worst (1996) that in contemporary society, which was made possible by the extreme progress of speed, human beings lack the ability to respond to the emergence of absolute speed:

Because the nature of absolute speed is also to be absolute power, absolute and instantaneous control, in other words an almost divine power. Today, we have achieved the three attributes of the divine: ubiquity, instantaneity, immediacy; omnivoyance and omnipotence. This is no longer a question of democracy--this is tyranny. Multimedia confronts us with a question: will we be able to achieve a democracy of real time, live time, a democracy of immediacy and ubiquity? I don't think so, and those who are quick to say yes cannot be very serious.[26]

According to Virilio, there is a loss of space and time in the globalized world, and the lack of distance not only oppresses us with its instantaneity but deprives us of our self-critical circuit since we have to think with our bodies. But we humans do not know how to respond with our own bodies, and we can only go mad in such a situation. It must be noted, however, that what happens here is not that our minds go mad. Dr. Caligari's madness in the 1920s, for instance, can only be nostalgic. What goes mad are our bodies, and this occurs without being filtered through our minds. Freud once said that to realize the pleasure principle we need a certain amount of oppression of our libido, but in the current situation, libido is completely oppressed, and when it is completely oppressed, it looks for an extremely violent burst to the surface. In such a scenario, the system of the symbolic is completely destroyed, and the body transfers itself from the dysfunctional to the demented.

It is so easy to lose a sense of history and geography when there is a lack of distance. Many have described postmodernism as the end of history, but if the world is in the state that Virilio outlines, then what we have been experiencing is not the end but the loss of history. Of course, geography is lost as well. I refer to this latest phase of globalization as the emergence of "Empire," following Hardt and Negri. In this absence of outside (there is no distance, so there can't be an outside), in this singular dominance of power (in which otherness is lost as well as the possibility of dialogue), there is still an attempt at restoring history and geography by discovering a circuit for self-reflection--a process of restarting our memory. Walter Benjamin wrote about the notion of "awakening," and this concept is useful as we struggle to devise a strategy for deconstructing the contemporary myth that, in our discussion, is none other than globalization and Empire. Benjamin asserts the importance of "awakening" as an action for restoring history:

Here it is a question of dissolution of "mythology" into the space of history. That, of course, can happen only through the awakening of a not-conscious knowledge of what has been.[27]

26 Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, trans. Michael Cavaliere (New York: Semiotext[e], 1999), p. 17; originally published as Cybermonde: la politique du pire (Paris: Editions Textuel, 1996).

27 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin (Cambridge, Mass., and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 458.

Ralph Lemon

[The Uttar-Priyadashi] could be perceived as traditional East Indian theater-dance from the Westerner's point of view, but from the East Indian's point of view it's a very contemporary interpretation of the traditional forms.

You know how hard it is to pursue this line of work when one is both a cultural critic—an active agent in the contemporary visual arts field—and a museological interpreter.

Something more drastic than being dysfunctional has arrived, and at least in Japan, bodies are behaving very strangely in the streets.