Ralph Lemon Company. - Joyce Theater - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1996 by Bill Deresiewicz

This season marked the end of the Ralph Lemon Company after ten years of existence. Lemon, who will continue to accept choreographic commissions in addition to pursuing a new interest in the recorded image, has been - or, I must say, was once - one of the freshest voices in modern dance. The "narrative" (that is, overtly situational or character-based) works that first brought him to wide attention had a directness, a strength, and a sense of conviction that bespoke an artist of unusual sincerity and emotional capacity, a warm, generous courageous human being.

But it seems to have been those some qualities of character that led him, about four or five years ago, to make what I believe to have been a serious artistic error: the abandonment of narrative for a more abstract, exploratory approach. Lemon now produces movement through a primarily inward, intuitive process, seeking to allow feeling and form to emerge spontaneously from this rawer material. But instead of achieving a more genuine self-expression, the new approach has only taken the man away from us, and has made his choreography far weaker to boot.

The problem is that feeling and form do not emerge spontaneously from the material that Lemon presents. True, Their Eyes Rolled Back in Ecstasy (1992), the better of the two major works presented this season, does contain passages where structure holds together long enough for emotion to begin to gather. Unisons appear from amidst a swirl of individualized phrases. A quiet duet, amplified and offset by the presence of a third dancer, gives way to another and then another. Images recur: a hand held softly before the face; a thudding, double-footed jump. Through repetition, the common-place kindles into beauty. But coherence is the exception here. Emotions dissolve before they can come into focus; situations remain generalized. The title suggests a theme as well as a mood, but very little of what we see appears to have much to do with either one.

Killing Tulips (1993-95), a New York premiere, only exacerbates the problems. The new work is as incoherent as Their Eyes but with less sensual force and a greater degree of fragmentation. The dancers generally stay farther apart from one another and remain onstage for shorter lengths of time. Although each is technicially proficient (most notably Alissa Hsu and Nicholas Leichter), all seem swallowed up by the large, dim space. Only in Lemon's own performance do his admirable qualities remain visible. Wonderfully focused and calm, his dancing possesses spiritual even more than it does physical beauty, radiating a sense of body and soul in attentive integration. Every joint and muscle seems to live a life of its own, to listen and speak. Most remarkable are his feet and hands: feet big and knobby; hands exquisitely delicate and sensitive.

Tellingly though, Lemon's dancing is now almost always compartmentalized in solos. This was substantially true even in the duet Threestep (Shipwreck), a New York premiere created and performed with Viola Farber, Lemon's former teacher and by now a matriarch of the avant-garde. Austere and indomitable, Farber was as compelling a presence as her lush and youthful partner. But for the most part the two didn't so much dance together as dance at the same time, resorting at the end to some fairly clumsy gestural material to seal their points about endurance and vulnerability.

So while the Ralph Lemon Company has fallen victim to the increasingly Darwinian economics of American dance, there seems to be an impasse of expression, of communication, at issue as well. It was encouraging in this respect that Threestep cast Lemon as an emblem of youth: we have reason to hope for further growth.