Ralph Lemon - Geography Trilogy

Geography Trilogy

Over a ten year span, Lemon created a trilogy that uses choreography to present social and political issues in numerous collaborative projects. Lemon recently finished the ten year art project, Geography Trilogy, which investigated an apparent collision of cultures and searched for personal and artistic identity within a broader spectrum. During Ralph Lemon's ten year trilogy creation, he wrote two books entitled Geography: Art, Race, Exile to correlate to the dance Geography and Tree: Belief, Culture, Balance which relates to the dance Tree. The third part of the trilogy, Come Home Charley Patton, is not a book. He ended up creating these two books as a result of physicality, emotional conflicts, spiritual connections and specifically cultural contradictions that lead to the numerous collaborations and experiences he gained.

The overall synopsis of the Geography Trilogy is to create a link and understanding to other cultures histories while evolving and experimenting with his artistic works in three different continents. For example, Geography formulated in Africa, Tree originated in Asia, and Come Home Charley Patton brought Lemon back to the United States. Ralph Lemon's creative journey began with Geography in Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea. The journals he wrote gave insight into the life of an "American, African, brown, black, blue black, male, and artist." Embodying these characteristics, Lemon sought not only to create art about his culture but to connect with his heritage during the duration of his visit. Lemon then ventured to Asia for his next piece in the trilogy Tree. Tree is ritually structured through Buddhism, and reveals a conflict of cultural values pertaining to performance, race, identity, modernity and tradition. Lemon finished the trilogy in the US with Come Home Charley Patton, a piece that revisits a segregated time in history. The performance of Come Home Charley Patton shows 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."