Lemon's 'Tree' spreads its international limbs

The Herald sat down with world-renowned choreographer Ralph Lemon to discuss his latest project, Tree: Part 2 of the Geography Trilogy, a piece incorporating traditional and cutting-edge forms of international dance, music, and storytelling with dancers from across the globe. Its world premiere is this Thurs., Apr. 20, at 8 p.m. at University Theater.

The Yale Herald: What was it like to go around the world and find these dancers?

Ralph Lemon: I went to India and then to Indonesia, and then I went to China, and then I went to Japan, and in visiting all these places I would meet people and just hang out. I wasn't actually going with the direct purpose of finding people—travelling was to try and observe as much as I could. Through the travelling, I would meet people whom I would invite back with me. I would make my choices by engaging them on these energetic levels of dancing and music. There are some farmers, you know, in the south of China, who play these homemade instruments, and it's wild—it's chaos, musically, to me, so I can relate it to jazz. They improvise and they go on for hours. And Indian forms of music and dance are 4,000 years old. They're so refined and complex, and that's how I think about my more modern work. It's about layering and the complexity of form. That explains a little of the process I'm into and my attraction to performance, and who I choose to invite. And a lot of it is about the unknown, not being sure what is going to happen, creating friendships first. Going to meet these people in really rural settings, and sharing food, and these really basic human things that are much more important than an "audition."

CAYTE PUSHKAREVA/YH Ralph Lemon (far right) finds a common language of dance.

YH: How much does the experience of the audience recreate the experience that you had?

RL: Very little. This trilogy process—this project—is very grand. It's vast, and because there's so much involved in it for me, I had to attack it on a number of different levels. I'm writing a book about each part. I do these visual images of each part. I have photographs about each part. The theatrical part is maybe a fourth or a fifth of the actual process. It's so much more anthropological than it is theatrical. This is two-and-a-half years of my life, and an audience will come in and see an hour-and-a-half of it. But hopefully, within that, there is a level of communication that has everything to do with that two-and-a-half years of my life.

YH: How do you feel about doing this at Yale's University Theater?

RL: First of all, they're bringing in this very experimental, unknown environment, this process—it's quite different, I think, from what they usually do. Above and beyond everything else, I'm a choreographer. Yale Drama School's really much more about theater, so I'm an outsider in that sense as well. As a choreographer, you make your work in the studio with the dancers, and then you have your lighting designer and costume designer come to see it a few days before it premieres. You go into the theater for a day, and then you're on the road. It's a much more immediate kind of situation. So what's great about this particular relationship is that this is so much of a hospice. With Yale's support I've been working on this for two-and-a- half years. This piece is so bold in its potential that it needs more time.

YH: How did you pare it all down to an hour- and-a-half performance?

RL: One essential level is the structure of it, how I'm composing it. As the choreographer/director, I'll be experimenting with how all of these forms fit together, so there's a lot of play with juxtaposition. How "post-modern" American dance form fits with the rural folk tradition—the energy of Africa verses the energy of urban modern America verses the energy of Japan.

YH: In the end, to what degree does this performance preserve the native experiences and backgrounds of the performers, and to what degree is it more of a human or artistic comment?

RL: I think I'm being really pushy in the American modern art sensibility. Because that's what I've always done. I'm trying to be really respectful of what these people bring, that they don't have a clue about my kind of modernity. So it's survival for me to maintain who I am and not to pretend that I'm trying to make this really beautiful global experience for us. I'm not interested in that. I'm trying to maintain who I am and what interests me as an artist. And at the same time, I've brought in performers from all these different places who can't translate a lot of what I'm interested in. And that's why I'm doing this—so that my idea of control continues to be challenged. So I have to find these other ways to think about things.

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