cover image Geography: Art / Race / Exile

Geography: Art / Race / Exile

Ralph Lemon. Wesleyan University Press, $34.95 (208pp) ISBN 978-0-8195-6443-6

The downtown New York City choreographer and dancer Lemon investigated the African side of his African-America creative identity, traveling to Cote d'Ivoire in the mid '90s and assembling a dance troupe there. This book is Lemon's searching, brutally frank travelogue, a cross-genre combination of journal entries, photographs, drawing and a variety of performance plans--plans Lemon and his eventual troupe collaborated on and subsequently performed throughout the U. S. to critical acclaim. In Orestes-like fashion, Lemon probes the trip, his creative process and his ideas about himself in direct and unstinting prose: ""I think of what it will be like to let seven blue-black Africans into my hermetic interior... I cannot come up with anything that seems immediately useful to them or me. I am not particularly in love with African dance. I am not particularly in love with any tradition."" The book is most powerful when Lemon hones in on the physical, spiritual and cultural contradictions inherent in his attempts at placing the rhythm-based sensibilities of the African dangers into formal Western structures, making the book an informally paradigmatic case study of cultural collision and collaboration. (Dec.) Forecast: This book requires a certain familiarity with and sympathy for the vicissitudes of the art world, but Lemon's reflections will speak to anyone who has attempted to confront the myriad meanings of multiculturalism. The multi-median presentation will make the book appealing to the visual art enthusiasts, while the prose's tonalities will be familiar to fans of poets like Bill Luoma and should broaden the book's appeal beyond the dance and race smart sets.