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Ralph Lemon: The New Romanticism
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19663 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
1,982 Words |
| Author
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Gary Parks
Gary Parks is the news editor of Dance Magazine. |
"Rhododendron, salvia, tulip, lilac, wisteria, azalea, begonia, camellia, dogwood, eucalyptus, gladiolus, heliotrope." How do I love thee? In Ralph Lemon's newest dance, Persephone, the good of the underworld counts the many ways he loves the goddess of spring by reciting a sweet litany of blossoms. Then he rapes her.
The thirst for intimate relationships, together with the violence that often arises from them, is never far from the surface in Lemon's work. Over the past several years, Lemon, thirty-eight, has emerged as one of the most interesting American modern dance choreographers because he's one of the most humane. His dances are tough but tenderhearted. From the shimmering Boundary Water, created in 1984, through Sleep, a deeply moving work from 1989, to Persephone, which premiered at New York City's Joyce Theatre in May, he has explored the promise, and the broken promises, of love.
In the works he creates for his troupe, the Ralph Lemon Company, this choreographer practices a new kind of romanticism, one that doesn't leave stars in your eyes. Yet no matter how bleak a picture he paints, you never get the feeling that Lemon is cynical. He may be looking for love in all the wrong places, but he's still looking.
Lemon makes his quest in novel ways. In Persephone, as in many of his other works, a narrative is implied but never spelled out. According to ancient Greek myth, Persephone, goddess of spring and daughter of the fertile earth goddess Demeter, is abducted by Pluto, the lonely king of the netherworld. Demeter grieves for the loss of her beloved daughter and, deprived of her role as the nurturing mother, plunges the world into famine. But a bargain is struck on Olympus. Persephone is allowed to return to her mother each spring and remain with her until the harvest, when she must return once again to her underworld home.
Lemon takes the ancients' explanation of the cycle of the seasons and uses it as a metaphor for relationships between the sexes. His version of the story is apparently inspired in part by the prose poem of the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, in which Persephone is depicted as a prostitute and Pluto a pimp, but little of this is evident on stage. More important is the fact that the roles are triple cast: Three women dance Persephone and three men portray Pluto, each pair appearing simultaneously in a slightly different but complementary way. Lemon himself appears briefly as Demeter. In the hands of a less skillful choreographer, this arrangement might have come across as needlessly complicated, but
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