Pilgrim's Progress.

Ralph Lemon set out to make a dance about Buddhism, but eight months in Asia left him mystified.

How perfectly Zen.

WHEN RALPH LEMON folded his dance company in 1995, many people saw it as a harbinger of worse things to come. The economy was still recuperating from a recent recession. The National Endowment for the Arts was under siege. If a troupe celebrated as widely as Lemon's could not survive, perhaps the whole company model was poised for extinction.

Lemon viewed it differently. A few days before his troupe's last gig, which featured a dance aptly titled Killing Tulips, he told me his decision to disband came in response to creative limitations, not financial or political pressures. "I was frustrated with business as usual," he reiterated over lunch recently near his home in Manhattan's East Village. "When you start with the same dancers, you often end up making the same dance. Yes, there's a refinement. Yes, you can create a style. But I began to question the relevance of a private language that no one outside my company understood. I'm not making any broad statements about the art form. I just needed to have a larger conversation."

And so he went out into the world, embarking on a journey of self-discovery that is loosely chronicled in Geography, his 1997 collaboration with a group of West African dancers and drummers. The piece, which one critic found both "mind-blowing and maddening," marked a turning point for Lemon, a postmodernist who had never really faced up to his questions about what it means to be a black man in America, let alone a black American in Africa.

Lemon, who won the $50,000 Cal-Arts/Alpert Award for dance last year, envisioned Geography as the first piece in a trilogy based on cultural exchange. This fall, he will return to the stage with the second installment, an ambitious sequel called Tree. Inspired by his recent travels in Asia, the ninety-minute spectacle couples traditional performers from India, China and Japan with practitioners of modern dance and hip-hop. (Part three, tentatively titled Home, will explore his roots in the American South.) After brief runs in Texas, Minnesota, Illinois and California, Tree will appear Oct. 24-28 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival.

Just as Lemon's race drew him to Africa, his affinity for Buddhism took him to Asia. "That's where I go spiritually," he said. Flush with grants from the Asian Cultural Council and other funders, he set off on a series of trips that traced the historical spread of Buddhism. "It started in India, traveled to Indonesia, then up into China ... and then to Japan, where it became Zen--the form I'm most interested in," said Lemon, 47. "Along the way I hung out, met people, did my research. But at the end of the day it had nothing to do with Buddhism. There's not one Buddhist onstage in Tree. It's like having a concept, beginning it and watching it fall apart."

It has the makings of a Zen parable, but for Lemon, a Midwesterner who took up meditation relatively late in life, it was often excruciating. At times, he felt the project was spinning wildly out of control. Along with language barriers, aesthetic differences and a fading sense of direction, he had to contend with a string of occupational mishaps. The clincher came when Cheng-Chieh Yu, who got her start with Taiwan's Cloud Gate Dance Theater, inadvertently struck Djedje Djedje Gervais, a Geography holdover from Cote d'Ivoire, in the head with a rock during a rehearsal and knocked him out.

There were also profound moments of discovery and connection, many of them purely serendipitous. Lemon recalled putting on a recording of Robert Johnson, the pioneering blues singer from Mississippi, while warming up one day with his fellow performers. Among them were Li Wen Yi and Wang Liliang, two Chinese musicians he had met during his travels. Suddenly Li, who also farms for a living, began warbling along to Johnson's plaintive falsetto. "It summed up this work in a way I could never have devised," Lemon said. "Here was this quiet little man from a village in South China who in some part of his body, spirit, soul or culture knew Robert Johnson and knew the Mississippi Delta."

Lemon was so charmed by the incident that he worked it into the closing scene of Tree. If nothing else, international casting has spared him the tedium of business as usual. "At the moment, I'm not a choreographer, only a catalyst," he once wrote in his journal after a fruitful workshop for Geography. "And this is not art but anthropology."

There was a time when Lemon would have balked at playing such a role. As a dancer and a choreographer he had always looked inward, favoring plotless dances that explored the intrinsic rhythms of the human body, especially the cadence of his own breathing. His first mentor was Nancy Hauser, a protegee of the German choreographer Hanya Holm, who in turn was heir to the streamlined emotionality of Mary Wigman. Like Wigman, Lemon viewed dance as a vehicle for personal inquiry, but he distinguished himself by cloaking his sentiments behind layers of formal abstraction. Upon launching his company in 1985, he quickly established his signature style. Smooth, organic and enigmatic, it soon won him a Bessie Award, a slew of NEA fellowships and a devoted following.

Yet Lemon's training was broader than he often let on. He only began taking dance classes as a teenager, channeling his earliest creative impulses into drawing and other forms of visual art. Later, at the University of Minnesota, he explored the use of narrative, earning a bachelor's degree in English literature and theater arts. After graduating in 1975, he helped found the Mixed Blood Theater Company, which uses nontraditional casting to spark dialogue about racism and cultural identity. In 1979, he settled in New York, where he cut his teeth with Meredith Monk's ensemble of dancers and singers.

Lemon's grasp of these various art forms has aided his pursuit of independent projects that allow him to engage other cultures and media. Among them are a short film, Three, made with the choreographer Bebe Miller and the filmmaker Isaac Julien, and a DVD, Mirrors and Smoke, which he is making with the video artist Philip Mallory Jones and the composer John Mitchell. This fall, Wesleyan University Press will publish Geography, a book of drawings, photographs and journal entries about his first foray into cross-cultural performance.

Lemon began making Tree during a pair of workshops last winter in San Francisco and Austin, Texas. But like Geography, the piece really took root at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Connecticut, where Lemon landed a position as associate artist in 1997. The theater provided rehearsal space and housing for all twelve performers for three months, culminating with a three-week opening run last spring.

The Yale Rep also supplied a dramaturg, Katherine Profeta, who moonlights as a choreographer and co-founder of the Elevator Repair Service, a cheeky theater troupe in New York. Lemon had planned to incorporate excerpts from his journal in Tree, but Profeta, who also worked on Geography, talked him out of it. Instead, she turned up some more evocative texts, including a first-hand account of the Great Kanto Earthquake, which rocked central Japan in 1923 and set off a series of conflagrations that killed 140,000 people.

With his initial theme of Eastern spirituality slipping away, Lemon turned to belief systems in general and then to natural disasters and ecological renewal. The title, he said, alludes to all of these meanings.

For the set, he once again enlisted Nari Ward, the Jamaican-born installation artist who created a stained-glass window from bedsprings and glass bottles for Geography. This time Lemon asked for a temple. Ward, who lives in Brooklyn and favors cast-off objects, came back with a towering grid made of wooden pallets and Plexiglas stained with burned sugar. The installation is meant to resemble a loading dock, Lemon said, a place of transition for enlightened souls.

As a Westerner and a postmodernist, Lemon has found that his greatest challenge was figuring out how to embrace ancient performance traditions without stripping them of their dignity or engaging in cultural imperialism. "With Tree, I knew the tendency of the work was to be a series of juxtapositions," he said. "Real synthesis was going to be impossible, given our time frame, and juxtaposition seemed too easy, too obvious."

When the piece had its premiere last spring at the Yale Rep, that tension was most vivid in Lemon's treatment of Odissi, a classical dance form that was reconstructed in the 1950s from temple sculptures in eastern India. One scene had Manoranjan Pradhan and Asako Takami performing a pallavi, a lyrical Odissi dance distinguished by flexed feet, a shifting torso and symbolic hand gestures. Behind them, Yeko Ladzekpo-Cole and Cheng-Chieh Yu did a postmodern riff, lifting phrases of Odissi and fashioning them into a formalist duet. David Thomson and Wen Hui completed the tableau by acting out a theatrical variation. The scene, with its layered perspectives, seemed to suggest that tradition and modernity might somehow be reconciled, and that different cultures can coexist--even learn from one another.

Yet Pradhan, who nearly steals the show with his sublime way of shifting weight, wanted nothing to do with the project at first. Both as a traditional artist and as a Hindu, he considered it an abomination to edit or adapt Odissi. "No, this is bad," he remarked after watching a videotape in which Lemon stood behind Takami doing a postmodern improvisation based on her Odissi movements. "My guru would never let me dance around people that way. This is not Odissi anymore."

Lemon understood Pradhan's reluctance. "When some of these artists perform back home, it's not about being creative like I know creative," he said. "They're learning a tradition. It's codified and it's thousands of years old and it's sacred. To experiment is a completely new equation.

"What I struggle with," he added, "is trying to maintain a sense of respect for how I'm manipulating these forms."

It took nearly a year of discussions with Lemon and Takami, a Japanese dancer who had studied with the same guru in India, before Pradhan agreed to participate. During the course of the project, he even took up club dancing. Following a performance of Tree last spring, he described the pallavi scene as a metaphor for the enduring power of traditional art forms. "It doesn't matter if others come on stage and mingle with my style," he said. "The tradition continues."-.

Christopher Reardon writes about dance for The New York Times and The Village Voice.