Cincinnati welcomed Ralph Lemon
Cincinnati welcomed Ralph Lemon into the world on August 1st, 1952. (State of Ohio).
Early Life and Artistic Background
In Minneapolis, Minnesota, he was raised. He has been referred to as a variety of things, including an imaginary choreographer, an African American actual arts dancer, and a company director. He has also been praised as a skilled writer and visual artist by Western theater critics. Nevertheless, he selects the imagist or conceptualist label for himself out of all those attributions. Due to his upbringing in a religious setting, Lemon had a richer sense of imagination, which he channeled into artistic talent. He employed art painting as a primary source and medium of expression early in his career. He, later on, discovered dance as an expression, which he utilized its random body movements as a creative physical way of art expression. His performances are highly communicative of deep sentimental feelings of sadness, fatigue, ecstasy, and stillness. One of his major works includes; how can you stay in the house all day and not go anywhere. This paper will elaborate the various forms of art themes and creative styles that Ralph Lemons incorporated into his work just mentioned.
The Theatrical Themes in Lemon's Work
Lemon as a creative artist uses several theatrical themes to bring out his artistic message even without uttering words but random phonetics. In his work mentioned (how can you stay in the house all day and not go anywhere); he incorporates the power of random dancing to elaborate the daily routine of a typical person struggling to survive in the modern society. In this theatrical production, he asks several questions such as; how does one choreograph loss, which is filled with randomly quick yet barely audible events up to its eventful end? He appears to answer himself that there is no conceivable way to. However, instead of degenerating into despair out of one's inability to address loss, he presents a case study of juxtaposed relationships of three couples. They include his dying wife, Asaka Takami; that of another fictional couple in the film "Solaris," produced and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky; and lastly that of elder Walter Carter. Lemon uses the daily living routines of these three relationships to explain the common but also different regular dances that constitute their lives and relationships.
The Concept of Staying in the House
It's worth noting that Lemon deliberately uses random dances to exemplify the unpredictability of an ordinary day. Such a day could be planned well but there are some things that just happen by chance that displace the order of the day. He uses ordinary people dressed in costumes and casual clothes to bring out both effects of the ordered and the random events. The interplay between those two realities, he affirms evidentially occur during the running of an ordinary day. Casual dressing represents the random events and activities while costume dressing represents the planned for events.
Staying in the House as a Metaphor
In this theatrical play, he depicts how one can stay in the house both literally or in his inner conscience without going out. Lemon presents the production in two dimensions; the in-house stay represents the journey towards oneself without having to be what one is not. And the literal in-house stay without having to go outside the house. He explains that the understanding of oneself begins with the journey into the abyss of the self and staying still in there. Moreover, that one need not leave the house to find meaning outside of the world outside is awash with the forces or good and bad. He in effect leaves the views in the dilemma of what to do; whether to go outside and work to earn a living or stay in-house and contemplate the self. One has to work and make a living, therefore, leaving the house, yet he still wants to find meaning out of life which warrants him to stay in-house. Since staying in-house has the self-contemplative effects that bring meaning out of life, then the conflict between working and finding meaning presents a problem. That problem forms the title of his production; how can you stay in the house all day and not go anywhere. Lemon further elaborates the way to do, i.e., staying in one's own house without leaving could be then interpreted as mentioned (not leaving the house literally but as not leaving the emotional space one creates in the self). Lemon further asserts that if one could only choreograph an internal space or an emotional territory, then that space would constitute a house to which one would be stuck inside. Such stuck persons would not able to leave their house to go anywhere since they would have the meaning they earnestly seek by leaving the house. Insistently, lemon asserts that it's okay to be stuck inside one's emotional territory. Some of our more innate and powerful insights come real when we return to the core of our hearts and be still.
The Theatrical Styles in Lemon's Work
Lemon utilizes the theatrical styles familiar to a black box presentation which are active-passive and passively active. (A black box or experimental theater consists of a simple, basic and somewhat unadorned performance space. It is usually a large square room composed of black walls and a flat floor. It is a relatively contemporary innovation in theatre also known as a black theater. In these theatrical styles; active-passive incorporates the use of dances and random phonetics that are active yet seem to be empty and passive in that they are incoherent but communicate a given message. Passive-active incorporates those disjointed dance movements that appear vague in meaning to represent a reality in life that is active.
Symbolism of Dance Movements
In addition to those theatrical styles, Lemon carefully designs his active dance movements to indicate the struggle in life between the survival forces. He constitutes passive dance movements also to depict the diminished enthusiasm that renders one fatigued. He starts this creative theatrical production by eliciting within the audience's minds the passive dialogue inherent in their inner selves (as individuals) and the daily struggles that must either be met. Lemon creatively illustrates that through articulated body movements, each day begins with a dance. That dance question involves the activities of how to get out of the warm bed; will it be with a roll to the left or the right, an immediate spring, or a swat to the alarm's snooze button? In this dance idea, he presents the opposing active and passive forces that constitute the battle between the cold floor and the cold street, when one is just but a halfway woken up. He further depicts this active and passive debate as one that usually goes on in everyone's mind. According to Lemon, even though the self just wants to do nothing at all, not get involved in the ordinary dance of life that constitutes pain and struggle, it is still involved in the general dance of the household. The dance of the household is the daily routine of events that run in a typical household. Either way, he asserts, life is consistent of a dance of some sort either out in the cold struggling to earn a living or in the house doing nothing but still dancing to some random and active household routine.
Work, Labor, and Values
Moreover, Lemon in this production incorporates the values of work, labor, and values. He designates the three as consisting the daily routine of man's life impacting on his wellbeing. The dance that depicts work is dotted with random movements that indicate fatigue and pleasure, all running simultaneously and imitate the opposites evidential in a working setup. Labor is portrayed as the transcendental value of life that every human being must be involved in to get a decent life. Lemon exemplifies it as the counter variable against the idleness of life. He sees Idleness as consisting of the irony of; ‘doing nothing,' yet still doing something (participating in a household routine - dance).
Conclusion
Finally, after analyzing this theatrical production by Ralph Lemon, the following points are arrived at. Lemon is an imaginative artist that uses the somewhat unfamiliar art of dance to express his message. His theatrical productions are constitutive of the opposites of active-passive and passive-active. Lemon further views life as consisting of daily routines (dances) that one is continuously engaged in from waking up to later going to bed. He, therefore, is a contemporary theatric who continuously revolutionalizes the theatrical world by incorporating creative styles in his productions.
References
BojanaKunst, Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism
Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late capitalism and the ends of sleep. Verso Books, 2013.
Levine, Abigail. “Being a thing: the work of performing in the museum.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 23, no. 2 (2013): 291-303.
Nachbar, Martin. “Training Remembering.” Dance Research Journal 44, no. 2 (2012): 5-11.
Rainer, Yvonne. “Doing Nothing/Nothin’Doin’!: Revisiting a Minimalist Approach to Performance.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 37, no. 3 (2015): 46-49.
