CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Africa and Asia were the spiritual compass points for the first two parts of Ralph Lemon's monumental multimedia work "The Geography Trilogy." And now, for the last leg of the journey - and the final installment of his trilogy - Lemon puts his American homeland on the map with the world premiere of "Come home Charley Patton" Sept. 21-22 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.
The performing arts center is the lead commissioner of the work, which has been conceived, choreographed and directed by Lemon, who also performs in it with company members Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Darrell Jones, Gesel Mason, Okwui Okpokwasili and David Thomson. Co-commissioners are the African American Cultural Center, Pittsburgh; Arizona State University Public Events, Tempe; New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Newark; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Meet the Composer's Commissioning Music/USA.
Following its premiere at Krannert Center, the production travels to venues in Chicago, Dallas, Minneapolis, Newark, New York City and Pittsburgh.
Based on four years of intensive research, "Come home Charley Patton" took Lemon to the American South - from the homes of legendary blues musicians' relatives, where he performed impromptu "living room dances," to several unmarked lynching sites, which he responded to through highly personal exercises he calls "counter-memorials." The resulting evening-length production, which Lemon has titled in honor of "a great blues musician from the '20s," interweaves the art of dance, music, video, narrative and digital-imaging in an examination of its creator's ancestral roots - from personal as well as post-modernist angles.
Throughout, history and modernity collide, as stories of the past intersect and mingle with references to contemporary artists and displays of technological innovation.
Lemon said he decided to reference Charley Patton in the work's title because he "liked the idea of asking something from the past to come home."
"To come home to what? I know what that means, but at the same time, I don't," he said. "And what does Charley Patton represent? It's not just the blues; there is that ... and the incredible radicalness of that music. He becomes a real heroic figure ... mythic. We don't have a lot of that in America. He also represents that particular time - that really volatile time for black people in this country, where that kind of freedom seemed contradictory, because there was no freedom. And yet, that music was (freeing)."
For Lemon, who toured internationally for many years as a dancer, choreographer and founder of the Cross Performance Inc./Ralph Lemon Company, "Come home Charley Patton" and the entire "Geography Trilogy" represent a fresher, less myopic approach to making his art. This work-performance mode, in which he's been immersed for the past decade, acknowledges the fact that there's "this whole world outside my little, private dance studio," he said.
Prior to 1995 - when he disbanded his dance company, reconceived Cross Performance Inc. to explore new forms of performance and presentation, and began work on "The Geography Trilogy" - Lemon's artistic motivations were far more contained.
"I made movement that was purely about movement invention: molecules, bones, flesh, skeleton, energy, moving bodies through space, multiplying bodies, the relationship of sound and science. It was coming from a hard-core, purist, formalist point of view. So for me, this kind of work is very radically different."
Perhaps the most obvious way in which it diverges from Lemon's prior work is that the trilogy works are more about process than performance. And the key to that process, he said, is figuring out how best to share his research experience with audience members.
"The fieldwork seems profoundly important, and I relate to it on a very deep level in that it feels complete," Lemon said. "The great problem and challenge is how all that research relates to the stage. Of course, it does for me - personally - in my thinking, but for what an audience will see, it's going to be very different."
In part, Lemon has resolved that problem by introducing supplementary materials to the mix to make others privy to the full scope of his research. In addition to the touring production, the project includes an exhibit featuring video, drawings and photography from the entire three-part work; a Web site with public access to a database of Lemon's research materials; and a companion book, which will be published in 2006 by Wesleyan University Press (books on the first two parts of the trilogy, titled "Geography" and "Tree" are currently available through the Press).
Mike Ross, the director of the Krannert Center, said the opportunity to
co-commission "Come home Charley Patton" and co-produce it - along with Cross Performance Inc. and the MultiArts Projects & Productions (MAPP) - represented an "incredible privilege" for his staff and for the University of Illinois.
Because it is affiliated with a major public research university, Krannert Center is positioned in such a manner that its "support for the creation of boundary-pushing new work of potential breakthrough significance at the national/international level - an exemplar of which is Ralph Lemon's 'Geography Trilogy' - is equivalent to seminal exploratory research in the sciences," Ross said.
"Especially at a moment in our country's history in which neither private-sector nor public funding for such an endeavor is easily secured, and in which the broader post-9/11 environment for the support of exploration across numerous creative domains is shrinking and threatening our international standing as the leader of innovation, we believe that providing major financial, technological, facility and human resources support to projects illustrative of breakthrough-potential creativity such as Ralph's is of enormous importance."
And that critical support for the project emerged campuswide, in various forms, Ross said.
Human support was provided by numerous members of Krannert Center's own staff, as well as from several of the university's academic units, including the department of theater, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Beckman Institute and the Illinois Fire Service Institute.
Ross also credited the university's "enlightened leadership" for its encouragement and support of the project, with funding provided by College of Fine and Applied Arts and Office of the Provost through the Swanlund Fund Initiative for the Performing Arts.
A list of the production's many additional supporters, as well as performance times and program and ticket information, is available on the Krannert Center Web site.
More information about "Come home Charley Patton" and Lemon's other work is available online.