After initially watching Ralph Lemon’s performance I wondered why on earth would he chose to produce something that would want to make the people he was performing for want to get up and just leave? After listening to what Ralph Lemon, Katherine Profeta, and the dancers David and Okwui had to say, I was finally able to realize that the piece wasn’t supposed to be about whether or not we liked it, it was about the process. We as the audience have to figure out how to watch this performance.
Normally when I watch something I try to figure out what the storyline is and why things are occurring. So naturally when I sat down to watch this performance I immediately tried to figure out what the story was. For this reason I think I left the theater very unsatisfied that night because I wasn’t able to figure out this story. But that’s exactly what Lemon wanted. “How Can You Stay In The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere” can be thought of as an “experiment”. Ralph Lemon didn’t want the piece to be about us, rather for it to be about the bigger questions, such as, is it acceptable to go to a performance and watch dancers just be? What is it now that is done on stage? What is dance, and what are its boundaries? How far can something go before it doesn’t belong in theater?
I guess another reason why when sat through this performance I didn’t enjoy it is because it wasn’t anything I was used to seeing. I was very disappointed when I walked in thinking I was going to see a dance, and then all of a sudden I saw a large screen on stage, and then when the dancing started it wasn’t the dancing that I had been expecting to see. “We’re not trying to do something that you recognize”. ……oooo, now I get it! I wish I had known that going into the piece. Now everything makes so much more sense. We weren’t supposed to know what was to come next, we weren’t supposed to recognize their movements. This is why their dancing appeared to have no form. It was child-like, which is what Ralph Lemon wanted to accomplish.
Something that Okwui pointed out which changed my view on the dancing was that she mentioned that the dance actually did have some form to it. Because it was a performance for an audience, it couldn’t just be 20 minutes of complete randomness, there had to be some structure to it. So although to me the whole thing just seemed like completely random movements, and during the performance I had no idea how something like that could possibly be planned, and that it just had to be completely made up on the spot, but after speaking to the dancers I now understand that there were moments where the dancers met, and these moments were prepared and very structured. So although there was no form to the dancing, it was still a very structured piece.
Through this piece, Ralph Lemon takes the opportunity to share a very personal experience with the audience, and through the performance he creates moments of wrongness and tension and in these moments of wrongness he sets the stage for a discussion. So now I finally realize that this Ralph Lemon performance wasn’t about the entertainment aspect, rather it was about how you view this piece, and what you are personally able to get out of it.
