Ralph Lemon.

DECEMBER 10-13, 1997 REVIEWED BY ROSLYN SULCAS

Before disbanding his company in 1995, Ralph Lemon made eloquent, formal dances in which rigorously structured, sensuously textured movement was both a means and an end. In his most recent project, Geography, presented as part of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lemon makes an unexpected move away from pure form, toward a communal, theatrical vision that explores his own identity as an African American artist and the way in which context frames culture.

Working with seven performers from Guinea and the Ivory Coast, and the American Carlos Funn, Lemon has created a meandering, dreamlike display in which a series of poetically associative images are linked by a fragmented, allusive text (by Tracie Morris), percussive and electronic music (the latter by Francisco Lopez and Paul D. Miller), and exuberant dances.

At the start, a man in a long white robe kneels and pounds the floor with stones in abrupt rhythmic bursts. Another robed man enters and whispers in his ear, and--as if these high priests have conjured them up--a beautiful silvery curtain behind them rises, revealing another layer of Filigree threads through which two dancers are seen bursting into rangy, large-scale movement.

Lemon appears in a solo that is as much verbal as physical--a round of looping, repetitive phrases echoed by his curvy, slippery motion. Groups of men in loose, brightly colored linen suits dance with stamping, circling intensity, then reinvent themselves in the supple, complex Lemon idiom: later, Lemon and Kouakou Yao make the contrasts between these dynamics clear when they dance nearly identical solos, yet look entirely different while doing so.

These idiomatic differences--coming as they do from the dancers' divergent lives--are part of the interest of Geography, and the work would have been still more interesting if Lemon had built a coherent vocabulary from his sources, rather than merely juxtaposing styles. A sense of uncertainty--perhaps an uneasiness about appropriation of culture--seems to have prevailed, and the result is sometimes compelling but often vague: the incessantly episodic structure begins to feel like indecision rather than an aesthetic ploy, and the repetitive dance language loses its impact by the end of the piece.

Geography is nonetheless a remarkable work, not least for Nari Ward's beautiful stage designs: the curtain of bedsprings that acts as gateway and barrier, and a breathtaking vision of colored bottles, apparently suspended in midair--both lending an urban and poetic resonance to the work that perfectly mirrors Lemon's spare yet sophisticated sensibility. And superb performances from Djeli Moussa Diabate, Djedje Djedje, Nai Zou, Goulei Tchepoho, Zaoli Mabo Tape, Akpa Yves Didier, Yao, Funn, and Lemon, are moving testimony to the interior voyage that each dancer made in creating the work, and to the capacity of art to trace new maps of the heart.