Cross-disciplinary artist Ralph Lemon returns to Walker Art Center with 2 new commissions

Ralph Lemon’s experimental explorations are expanding and garnering national attention.

Ahead of a major exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York’s Queens borough in November, the choreographer and interdisciplinary artist, who began his career in Minneapolis, premieres two new commissions at the Walker Art Center as part of his 30-year history with the museum.

“Ralph Lemon: Ceremonies Out of the Air” will debut at MoMA PS1 Nov. 14. Composed of drawings, photographs, sculptures, paintings and a program of six collaborative performances, the show highlights Lemon’s work from the past decade. The exhibition will include the four-channel video installation “Rant redux,” one of the Walker-commissioned works that will have its world premiere Thursday at the Minneapolis museum.

On Friday, the Walker premieres Lemon’s “Tell it anyway,” which draws on material garnered from “Scaffold Room,” a piece first shown at the Walker’s Burnet Gallery 10 years ago.

Known as a key figure in the New York postmodern dance scene, Lemon got his start in Minnesota. Born in Cincinnati, he moved here in 1963 and attended Washburn High School and then the University of Minnesota, where a theater professor encouraged him to pursue dance.

After learning from and then dancing with Nancy Hauser’s company and performing at Mixed Blood, he eventually made his way to New York and formed his company in 1985. Over the years, he’s worked with legendary interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk, Limón Dance Company and Alvin Ailey’s Repertory Ensemble, establishing a reputation as a keen, thoughtful maker and innovator.

Connie Butler, director of MoMA PS1, said she worked with Lemon when the trend of hosting dance performances inside museum galleries was growing. A piece created by Lemon was performed in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in 2011.

“Ralph is one of the key interlocutors around that subject,” she said. When she took a new role as director last September, she knew she wanted to show Lemon for the polymath that he is.

“On a personal level, he has been incredibly important to me as a thinker about dance and the institution and also about how dance can make political and social meaning and commentary,” she said. “Speaking to the historical level, he’s one of the most important artists coming out of the ‘90s who really changed the parameters of modern and contemporary dance.”

Lemon intervenes in that history, Butler said, as he brings content of Black histories and contemporary culture into the meaning and context of his dance works.

The video piece “Rant redux” incorporates footage from a series of performances Lemon conducted called “Rant,” which were wild, rave-like performances that juxtaposed media artist Kevin Beasley’s high-intensity sound score with Lemon shouting texts by Black liberationist writers like Fred Moten, Angela Davis and Saidiya Hartman, and postmodern scribe Kathy Acker, along with Lemon’s own text.

Thomas Lax, curator of media and performance at MoMA, said that seeing “Rant #4″ conjured a sense of elemental sound and physicality pushed to its limits.

“It was at the same time joyful and ecstatic, and able to tap into a well of grief all at the same time,” Lax said.

The performance, according to Lax, called up through sound and gesture an oscillation of different states like going to a dance club, a religious experience and even sex.

“The places you feel that intensity of feeling, that loss of self, where you can’t quite separate yourself from people,” Lax said.

The 72-year-old Lemon sees both “Rant redux” and “Tell it anyway” as parts of the same conversation.

“‘Rant’ has really become ‘Tell It Anyway,’” Lemon said. “There’s this interesting circular cosmology of circling back to ‘Scaffold Room.’”

He added that even “Scaffold Room” related to his previous works. In his process, Lemon often draws on archival material because of questions that come up in the creation process.

“One work becomes a question that demands another question,” he said.

He also sees both pieces as work by his collaborators as much as they are by him. “‘Rant’ is not a Ralph Lemon work, it’s a Kevin Beasley and Ralph Lemon work,” he said. “And these other amazing collaborators, like Okwui [Okpokwasili] and April [Matthis].

“Wild and wooly” is the way Okpokwasili described her 20 years of working with Lemon, adding that they moved through many levels of loss, grief and joy.

“So, I just am trying to stay open to all of the registers of memory and history that emerge,” she said.

Ten years after the world premiere of the “Scaffold Room,” the Walker also purchased the memory of the performance by the people who were involved with it. Okpokwasili said each of the collaborators are part of what that means.

“We’re all kind of holding very distinct pieces of that,” she said. “This work is perhaps also a manifestation of that memory acquisition.”

“Tell it anyway” continues explorations begun in 2014 about memory, impermanence and the history of America.

“We thought, given that it was so steeped in history and memory, what if we revisited in some way, not the work, but where Ralph is as an artist, exactly 10 years after ‘Scaffold room,’” said Philip Bither, the Walker’s performing arts curator.

Bither said Lemon is at once under-recognized and at the same time deeply influential.

“He’s won every award you can imagine, and he’s really been embraced by the visual art world, but he doesn’t care about attention,” Bither said

The curator said earlier this year he learned that Lemon would be featured in a major exhibit at MoMA PS1 and that would include the Walker-commissioned “Rant redux.” That the Walker played a role in supporting Lemon’s latest explorations that now is getting a much wider audience is all a part of the institution’s understated but important mission.

“It’s just an example of our being a bit ahead of the curve,” Bither said.

What: “Tell it anyway”: 7:30 p.m. Fri. & Sat. $15-$35; “Rant redux”: Thu.-Oct. 13. Free with $18 admission.

Where: Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Mpls. 612-375-7600, walkerart.org