jb casino Something in the Air? Moonwalks and Mandalas in Ralph Lemon’s Show

For anyone still mired in post-election fatigue, there’s a quick picker-upper at MoMA PS1 in Ralph Lemon’s body-and-mind-blaster of a performance video called “Rant (redux).” In it, eight stellar dancers leap, dive, writhe and vogue to a high-decibel score by the artist Kevin Beasley, while Lemon himself, the work’s choreographer, shout-reads words by Angela Davis and other liberationist thinkers.

The four-channel video, filmed on the cusp of the Covid lockdown in 2020, doesn’t have a set narrative, political or otherwise, at least that I can discern. But it certainly has an emotional through-line, one composed of equal parts anger, grief and exultation, specifically as these are expressed through Black bodies. It’s a thematic mix that has recurred, at varying intensities, throughout Lemon’s influential but branding-resistant career.

VideoRalph Lemon and Kevin Beasley, “Rant (redux),” 2020-24 at MoMA PS1.CreditCredit...George Etheredge for The New York Times

He’s most widely known for his experimental choreography, and the exhibition’s curators are smart to start off with this rousing, engulfing example of it. But the surrounding galleries in this compact show take other directions, into painting, drawing and sculpture, before coming around to performance again.

Born in 1952 in Cincinnati, Lemon grew up in Minneapolis in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Detaching himself early from that exacting church, while retaining a touch of its exhortative spirit, he developed an interest in dance. In 1979 this took him to New York City. There he experienced, firsthand, the work of path breakers like Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Meredith Monk. And in 1985 he formed a company of his own.

Then, a decade later, he had another departure from faith, this time from a belief in the continuing viability, at least for himself, of dance in its traditional Western commercial form: as an evening-length “show,” contained in time, confined to a stage, and conceived primarily for a white audience, the last factor being of particular importance to a Black man who had grown up to the atmosphere of American racial violence and resistance in the 1960s.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.jb casino

• in
• The
• jb casino
• Something
• Air