I love his voice. Hearing Ralph Lemon speak today brought me back to the performance at BAM when he read the film talk. He has this thoughtful tone to his voice, and his diction makes him seem like he is reciting poetry.
But his voice is just the cherry on top. I thoroughly enjoyed the dialogue between Ralph, Katherine and the dancers. Actually, Okwui is not even a dancer; she is an actress, which I also loved. I have too much love to give.
Sometimes I get too passionate. Like, I will have all these ideas in my head after listening to people explore their own ideas or after reading a really great thought provoking essay, and I feel like I’m going to explode from all the connections and new thoughts that they have helped generate in my head.
This kind of explosion of excitement began, when they started talking about non-form, of trying to break the patterns of dance and create their own language. This semester in my philosophy class, my teacher keeps trying to get my class to think for ourselves. To realize, as Socrates says, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” We are brought up with fixed categories, but instead of questioning these stereotypes and brandings, we accept them as truth.
Professor Rosenberg would love Ralph Lemon, for he also tried to break the norms and protocols. With this production, he wanted to find realms beyond his consciousness. Beyond what is fixed right and fixed wrong. Beyond what is beautiful and what is ugly. To see, “what happens when you get lost in your body?”
I could probably answer this question of what happens when you get lost in your own body. I’m not really a great dancer. I have rhythm; I am just not the greatest multi-tasker. My feet and hands just are not capable doing two different things at the same time. Yet, I know the feeling of when a really great song comes on and you feel it travel through your veins, all over your body, until it is not possible for you to sit still. Then you just get up, and start moving. Jumping. Prancing. Shaking. And it’s the most freeing and exhilarating thing. To others watching this may look very wrong. VERY WRONG.
Ralph Lemon spoke of this “wrongness”. Not mine, but his production. How it was full of moments that expose a tension from this wrongness. How it was suppose to create a debate as to what we now do onstage. This again, goes back to the idea of a set framework. Where do the borders end? How far can you push until the frame breaks? Maybe I want to break the frame.
This reminded me of a painting I analyzed for a formal analysis paper in Art History. It was Van Gogh called Oleanders. In the painting, the composition is really interesting. It is of a book and vase of flowers on a table. Yet the book is all the way on the left, half off the table, and the vase is towards the right back corner of the table. When you look at it, you feel a tension emanating from the painting, for things are not, “where they belong.”
The idea of things not being where they belong, or how they are “suppose to be,” connects to the idea Ralph was speaking of at the end of the session. (I promise this is my last point)
At the end he spoke about this performance as memory and memorial, him, “Coming to terms with my own life.” It was like a catharsis. Most people see sadness and grief as something terrible, and wish it would just be absent from their lives. Someone commented that she really appreciated him stepping into his own sadness and sorrows and fully taking them in and creating something from them. I could not agree more. I think there is something simply beautiful about contemplating life and sadness. Sorrow and loss can create a sense what of it means to be alive and a human being. In this piece, Ralph Lemon took his grief and tried to get to elements of joy and grace and ecstasy. In the film at the beginning of the BAM production Ralph declares, after his partner dies, “I will ennoble this loss…the remarkable and confounding absence.” I believe he did exactly that.
