Tell the History
By Katherine Profeta
Dramaturg Katherine Profeta has collaborated with and written about Lemon since 1997. In the run up to the premiere of Lemon’s Tell it anyway, 2024, at the Walker, as well as the exhibition Ralph Lemon & Kevin Beasley: Rant redux presented in tandem, Profeta reflects on the years-long journeys that led to the creation of this new work.
Tell it anyway: A performance event of short duration when measured against its long history. How far back do you want to go to trace its roots? You can go back four years, but understanding that time-frame might make you want to look back 10, which might make you look back 20, which might make you look back 30, which might make you look back 400. note 1
Tell it anyway: A family. A collection of people who share joy and grief and meals. A collection of people with a shared language and, increasingly, a shared not-having-to-say. A collection that is not a company, but rather an interweaving of relationships that morph slowly but decidedly over long years. Don’t try to keep it stable; instead, let it move. note 2
Tell it anyway: A collapse of past, present, and future within a cultural container that is “Black, American Black, whatever that is, and is not.” note 3
Tell it anyway: One more chapter in the beautiful 30+ year entanglement of Ralph Lemon and the Walker Art Center. note 4
Tell it anyway: A performance event that pushes against its chosen time and space. Making its way back to the proscenium, mistrustfully perhaps, after years of dodging it. A revisitation, but not a homecoming. Let’s see what can and can’t happen back here, back in this arrangement. note 5
Tell it anyway: Turn it up, turn it up loud. To a volume which grants permission for anything and everything to belong. A volume that renders moot the distinctions across grief, rage, joy. A volume that makes space for the wail. The wail that makes space for what we don’t even know yet. note 6
Tell it anyway: A paean to disassembly and reassembly. Falling apart and coming together. “Getting the band back together just one more time,” every time threatening to be the last. Repeat as needed. Also the human body, as it falls apart in violence, in grief, in ecstasy, only sometimes able to come back together. Who has to pick up the pieces, who gets to pick up the pieces, who can reassemble them? note 7
Tell it anyway: Trying to get lost. Trying to forget how to find yourself. And as you get lost, do you have less or more to give? Is the process one of exhaustion, or awakening? If both, how is it both? Also, if you get too good at doing this, how do you get back, or forward, to the place where you can scare yourself again? note 8
Tell it anyway: With its chorus that endures and transforms. Its chorus that replicates and recombines. Its chorus as index and throughline. Its chorus of getting lost. Its chorus which breaks and morphs and waxes. note 9
Tell it anyway: An encounter with the oceanic. A scale beyond the human body. And in that vastness, one cannot just breathe without thinking. One might have to learn to breathe underwater. note 10
Tell it anyway: Back to the image of the Black female pop idol. Scaffold Room took her music away, turned her songs into rants, her melisma to a scream, and yanked her backup singers and dancers into a separate room. Tell it anyway reunites her words with her music and her body with her chorus. Once again, disassembly and reassembly. note 11
Tell it anyway: The art of the curator. The art of the bandleader—not Duke in the ’30s, more like Miles in the ’60s. What does it mean for Ralph to create the frame but relinquish control over the contents? To build a container, not an arbitrary one, but one profoundly shaped by the energies it must hold? And within that container, each creator given a freedom to build their own performance? note 12
Tell it anyway: A generous refusal. note 13
Try to tell the story
Try
With terrible earnestness
It will all be for naught
Try to tell it anyway
Experience Tell it anyway, 2024 for yourself at the Walker, October 4 and 5, 2024. Learn more and get tickets here.
See the exhibition Ralph Lemon & Kevin Beasley: Rant redux on view Oct 3–13, 2024. Learn more and get tickets here.
01
Four years ago, milliseconds before the pandemic shut everything down, was Rant #3, a one-off pop-up music and movement event involving many of the same artists and ingredients in Tell it anyway, from which you are able to view archival video in the Walker galleries, as part of Rant Redux. Ten years ago was Scaffold Room, a two-hander for Okwui Okpokwasili and April Matthis; many of the lyrics they sing for Tell it anyway were developed first as monologues there, and the chorus had its second appearance in that piece’s epilogue. Twenty years ago was Come home Charley Patton, with its own epilogue titled “Ecstasy,” a generative experiment in getting lost and relinquishing choreographic control that has iterated and expanded into countless longer experiments, including the ones here. Thirty years ago was when Ralph Lemon decided to disband his modern dance company to begin making work with project-specific casts, beginning with the Geography Trilogy’s intercultural experiments — embodied conversations with artists from West Africa and Asia that, among many other things, broke down his habitual ways of moving and working, his Modern Dance frame.
Yes, we might apply this retrospective formula with the work of any artist, but with Ralph and his collaborators it seems to operate at another order of magnitude. Each work takes up the residue from the previous work, something that was not quite done yet, and burns it brightly in another iteration.
As for 400 years ago… you already know. The start of events that have everything to do with the arrangement of our lives, and the historical weight felt here, the past of the past-present-future. ↑
02
Some artists in Tell it anyway have been working together for over 20 years. Some joined much more recently. The common thread is the sense of a group conversation that continues and expands over time, with ample space between iterations to step away. As Kevin Beasley puts it: “When I get the call, it’s not about whether or not we are going to do it. It’s just: All right, what are we doing this time? What’s the next thing?” ↑
03
The past: for Rant #1 (2019), at the Whitney Museum, Kevin invited Ralph to join him in crafting a performance within the drone of a cotton-gin motor, running continuously in a vitrine one room over. A reflection on an overwhelming sound of the past, its vibrational wake still heard today. Asking what is different now and what is not. Or, the work of the chorus, mining and transforming steps from old video of Motown backup singers and Soul Train. Well-worn kinesthetic patterns morphing ever so slightly over the years but retaining a profound connection, through muscles and skeleton, to generations past.
A future: The speculative vision of centenarian Walter Carter donning his silver spacesuit, or Okwui donning hers, blasting off to not only a new planet, but a new sense of time. These images arrived with How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere (2010) and Scaffold Room (2014), but their echoes linger in Tell it anyway. Also: the intense volume of Kevin’s synthesizers, which cannot help but concoct sounds never quite heard before, with their blinking lights and wires that remind us of that spaceship, and also promise a blastoff to a new planet and new sense of time.
Landing on present: The Now of the performance event. The even more pressing Now of the nightclub, the sweat, the exhaustion, the wail. The Now of the improvisatory, the not-quite-choreographed, the never-again-this-way. And the Now that must emerge out of any collision of past and future. ↑
04
Preface: Young adult Ralph in a Walker audience, watching some member of the Judson pantheon, intrigued, inspired, imagining a future. Also already starting to build that future on the Walker stage, as performer and co-founder of Mixed Blood Theater. Cut to adult Ralph, living in New York but making periodic returns to the hometown, bringing new art families back to where it began, measuring the distance from then to now. And always: the Walker’s reliable and generous support, Philip Bither’s reliable and generous support, helping to write all those chapters, titled Geography (1997), Tree (2000), Come home Charley Patton (2004), How Can You Stay in the House and Not Go Anywhere (2010), Meditation (2010), Scaffold Room (2014), and now Tell it anyway (2024). ↑
05
Ralph has created parallel works outside the proscenium as far back as the ’90s. And his Come home Charley Patton and How Can You Stay . . . ? seemed, each in its own way, to be trying to escape the proscenium that contained them. With Scaffold Room, he left it decisively, purposely building his own venue, a scaffold that both was and was not a stage, inside the Walker gallery. And never looked back—until now. After a decade of pop-ups in alternative spaces, this group of artists returns to the proscenium, to the McGuire Theater, to see what is possible. ↑
06
Ralph has explained that Rant’s extreme volume absolves him of the task of fitting traumatic research into a consumable performance container, as, for instance, he felt obligated to do in Come home Charley Patton, for which he researched anti-Black violence across the American South (and North). Instead, the extreme volume obliterates the imperative for any careful translation into an art frame—and guarantees that anything too neat, too understood, too resolved, is left far behind. ↑
07
I’ve written about this before. In a chapter about the Geography Trilogy for MoMA’s book on Ralph, I made much of the note he wrote supporters 30 years ago as he dissolved his modern dance company, saying, “I imagine the body having the choice to come apart at all of its skeletal connections bringing flesh, muscle, and blood along with the separation. And then coming back together again. That would make me happy.” A fantasy of ritual dismemberment, which he has staged over and over again. First in how he dissected his and his dancers’ hard-won technical expertise and asked it to fall apart in motion. Also in how he threatened that every performance would be the last to explore an impossible question, surely the very last word—mic drop—until several years later, when he’d reassemble a group to try one more iteration, one more time.
Pain and loss live here, too. Sometimes the body cannot come back together again; sometimes it’s not a metaphor. Many many ghosts haunt Ralph’s work—ghosts of harrowing anti-Black violence, ghosts of past collaborators no longer with us, ghosts of ancestors well known and unknown. The work puts profound grief next to ecstasy, puts them someplace where they might interweave. You might not know which is which, but still, neither one will dissolve into the other.
I must confess, this recent work threatens all my neat narratives about disassembly and reassembly. They might also fall apart. What I wrote in the past seems too tidy. Grief and longing and living are ragged. How can I dismember my own understanding?↑
08
Ralph has been trying for years to get lost, and get others lost, in performance. We could go back further, but perhaps the most focused experiment was the middle section of 2010’s How Can You Stay . . . ?, titled “Wall/Hole.” He asked the group of six dancers to try moving with no form and no style, such that through their furious motion the dance itself would (allegedly) disappear. And if they ever got too good at responding to his prompts, he would find a way to destabilize them once again. The same year he curated a Platform at New York’s Danspace titled “i get lost,” inviting a range of artists to perform and write around the loss of circumscribed self in performance. The practice of getting lost has continued in many forms, but perhaps its most dedicated practitioner is Darrell Jones, who has taken his longstanding conversation with Ralph and morphed it into his own practice, Low.↑
09
The chorus assembled here for Tell it anyway first appeared in Chorus (2015), collaging and reworking steps sourced from YouTube videos of Soul Train and Motown backup singers to a rhythmic soundscape mixed live by Kevin. Their work morphed and reappeared in the second iteration of Scaffold Room (The Kitchen, NYC) and again for almost all the Rants. With Rant #3 they were part of a 2020 Danspace Platform titled Utterances from the Chorus. The steps may evolve over time, the cast may shift over time, but the throughline is clear. For this iteration the chorus is made up of Dwayne Brown, Lysis (Ley), Paul Hamilton, Mariama Noguera-Devers, and Angie Pittman, all veterans of Chorus and Rant.
Saidiya Hartman: “The chorus bears all of it for us. The Greek etymology of the word chorus refers to dance within an enclosure. What better articulates the long history of struggle, the ceaseless practice of Black radicalism and refusal, the tumult and upheaval of open rebellion than the acts of collaboration and improvisation that unfold within the space of enclosure? The chorus is the vehicle for another kind of story, not of the great man or of the tragic hero, but one in which all modalities play a part, where the headless group incites change, where mutual aid provides the resource for collective action, not leader and mass, where the untranslatable songs and seeming nonsense make good the promise of revolution. The chorus propels transformation. It is an incubator of possibility, an assembly sustaining dreams of the otherwise.” (Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 2019) ↑
10
Kevin: “It’s very oceanic. Now, the practical nuts and bolts is that I’ve been making music compositions, and the compositions have been structured. I have been thinking a lot about structure. Thinking, Oh, there’s a rhythm pattern that enters at this point, or I have a little synthesizer that gets played here, or a little bass line that lands here. So in terms of music making, there are very clear points you can you can identify . . . yet it does feel very vast. There’s space for all the other performers, space where everyone can come at it very differently. I’ve kind of created an ocean, seeing my role in all of this as having constructed the ocean. It’s how we describe it in the studio. I don't know if we’re relating it to some kind of transatlantic or ancestral movement—I don't want to pin that on it—but that’s the natural language that’s come out. We may be saying all these different things. And I think we're just not at the stage yet to say what it is, because we’re still in the middle of it. We can only call it the ocean because it feels big."
Some of Okwui’s words for the ocean: Border. Rupture. Womb. Grave. Mother. Memory. Enormity. Purification. ↑
11
Okwui and April, in extended Scaffold Room monologues, explored the image of the Black female pop idol (among quite a few other things). They spun thoughts about her singing without much actual singing. Now those monologues have been set to music, becoming lyrics, becoming song, for Tell it anyway.
Okwui: “There’s a lineage of Black female performance that brings some liberation to a society where there was very little . . . and a particular trajectory in terms of power. They have agency, and they have sexual agency, and they are not confined to the domestic sphere. They’re the ones who own it, they’re the ones who claim it for themselves."
Samita Sinha, who joined for Rant, exploded and expanded Scaffold Room’s image of the female vocalist. She departs from her training in Hindustani classical and Bengali Baul folk traditions, decomposing and recomposing those forms, lingering in ruptures and vibrations, finding where sound meets space meets flesh. Her own practice of freedom.
Rant originally spun off Scaffold Room, delving much deeper into the work of the female vocalist. Now Tell it anyway reunites material from Scaffold Room and Rant, folding the work of these three formidable women, as it has elaborated over the last decade, back towards its source. ↑
12
As of this writing, only Ralph and Kevin hold all the parts of Tell it anyway in mind. Rehearsals have occurred between Ralph, Kevin, and Okwui; Ralph, Kevin, and April; Ralph and Samita; Ralph and the chorus; Ralph and Darrell. But none with everyone until they all arrive at the Walker.
Ralph, on the shift in his way of working: “I don’t give notes to people. With Scaffold Room I would still say things like ‘take a pause here’ or ‘not so fast with that line.’ Now I might give opinions, or tell you what I’m seeing or hearing, but I don’t say it should be this way or that way. I just leave folks alone, and know from night to night it’s going to be different, because they have to see how they feel when they do it, right? So there’s so much trust. And where they go with this stuff is just, like, mind-blowing. The talent is all there, everyone does what they do, and I trust that.
“What I’m doing now that I haven’t done since I was a young choreographer is composing the thing on paper. So that by the time we get to the Walker, everyone knows how they fit together. The fluidity of all the different components means that the container has to be that much surer. And I don’t want to just traditionally frame them; but rather to use how great they are to create a different kind of frame. Every part of what they’re doing is to the point. And I want folks to watch it that way, as if they are watching a concert."↑
13
Kevin: “Ralph operates out of a kind of generous refusal. He has the utmost interest in working through something in the most fruitful way possible, and that way requires refusal. It requires an acknowledgement of the resistance in the electrical path. In some instances, it can come off as being overly difficult, or overly challenging, . . . but I think there’s something here about generosity, together with this very difficult refusal. When something comes up, and we say ‘it should be like this,’ [and he says] ‘No…’ it then requires clarity. And then that clarity tells us, Yes, actually, this is what it is. Because he has refined it in a way that allows for a certain kind of specificity. And in that specificity, it becomes a vast and open space. And we don’t realize it until we’re in it.”↑
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