Ralph Lemon began his artistic career as a dancer and choreographer, but since he disbanded his company nearly 30 years ago, his work has fit less and less into the conventional category of dance, even the experimental kind.
“Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon,” a major exhibition at MoMA PS1 through March, includes drawings, sculptures, photographs and video. And “Tell It Anyway,” the first in a series of companion performances, is so much an experience of sounds and spoken words that you could close your eyes and still get most of it.
That would be plenty. The work, which had its New York premiere on Thursday and repeats on Saturday, is capacious, confounding, cathartic. As is usual for Lemon, it draws on earlier pieces and is a collaboration with an artistic family of extraordinarily charismatic performers. The freedom he gives them is an almost tangible source of power.
Much of the text derives from “Scaffold Room,” a 2014 work in which Okwui Okpokwasili and April Matthis played with the personas of Black female pop singers. Versions of the monologues they recited then are sung here: Matthis speak-singing with the intimate looseness of someone reading a letter; Okpokwasili, her hair in rollers, channeling the growls and wails of Grace Jones, Tina Turner and Merry Clayton, who cried “Rape! Murder!” in the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.”
Later, Samita Sinha, in Amy Winehouse attire, takes fragments of Bob Dylan lyrics and dialogue from Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville,” and spools it out in long lines of song, often starting below a pitch and bending up to it. In the middle of the work, Lemon recounts two dreams — calmly, except when he shrieks “Mommy!” over and over.
Throughout, the composer Kevin Beasley holds everything together, mostly with spare and supporting contributions from his synthesizer and electric bass. At the end, he turns up the volume on a dance party or rave, as the screams of Okpokwasili, Sinha and Mathis rise and converge in a sonic cloud. But the most startling noise in “Tell It Anyway” comes earlier, when the mild-mannered Lemon, having written words on a board, stands it up against a wall and hurls bricks at it with the intentional force of someone throwing balls at a dunk tank. Whack! Whack!
There is dancing in “Tell It Anyway.” At intervals, the other cast members — Dwayne Brown, Angie Pittman, the ebullient dancer known as Lysis or Ley, and the great Paul Hamilton — sashay through, toss themselves around and sample moves from Motown backup singers and “Soul Train” participants. They also serve as a vocal chorus or congregation. The final section lifts off when they snap from simultaneous, improvisatory solos (as in a club) into a unison line dance of exhaustion that’s as ecstatic as catching the spirit in church.
During a press preview of the exhibition earlier in the week, Connie Butler, PS1’s director — who curated the exhibition with Thomas Lax — helpfully described how Lemon’s work “draws you in and keeps you out.” That’s more intensely true of the performances.
The sometimes collagelike text is elliptical and eloquently elusive, then raunchy or stunningly direct. “He refused to tell the straight story” is a self-descriptive line from the self-critical title song, but among the words Lemon wrote on the board on Thursday was “We don’t stand a chance.”
A recurrent subject here is Black music, which Lemon calls a perfect metaphor for the lineage and ongoing process he’s after. Beyoncé (“the pope with an ass to truly worship”) is a touchstone. The monologues are shot through with love and loss, surrender and a search for freedom that pushes past words into an open-voweled howl.
For years, Lemon has been fascinated with trance dancing, with getting lost. The cast members of “Tell It Anyway” don’t fully enter that state, and expecting them to do so would be asking too much. Okpokwasili has such great fun with her role that she skirts parody. She and the others are performers, not initiates, and they generously offer their presence in a ceremony out of the air in which the audience can float. Lemon refuses to tell the straight story. They tell it anyway.
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