Fashion
Review: In ‘Tell It Anyway,’ Freedom Is Power
This Ralph Lemon work, part of a MoMA PS1 exhibition, is an experience of sound as much as dance. His collaborators can lead an audience to ecstasy.
Ralph Lemon began his artistic career as a dancer and choreographer, but since he disbanded his company nearly 30 years ago, his work has fit less and less into the conventional category of dance, even the experimental kind.
“Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon,” a major exhibition at MoMA PS1 through March, includes drawings, sculptures, photographs and video. And “Tell It Anyway,” the first in a series of companion performances, is so much an experience of sounds and spoken words that you could close your eyes and still get most of it.
That would be plenty. The work, which had its New York premiere on Thursday and repeats on Saturday, is capacious, confounding, cathartic. As is usual for Lemon, it draws on earlier pieces and is a collaboration with an artistic family of extraordinarily charismatic performers. The freedom he gives them is an almost tangible source of power.
Much of the text derives from “Scaffold Room,” a 2014 work in which Okwui Okpokwasili and April Matthis played with the personas of Black female pop singers. Versions of the monologues they recited then are sung here: Matthis speak-singing with the intimate looseness of someone reading a letter; Okpokwasili, her hair in rollers, channeling the growls and wails of Grace Jones, Tina Turner and Merry Clayton, who cried “Rape! Murder!” in the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.”
Later, Samita Sinha, in Amy Winehouse attire, takes fragments of Bob Dylan lyrics and dialogue from Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville,” and spools it out in long lines of song, often starting below a pitch and bending up to it. In the middle of the work, Lemon recounts two dreams — calmly, except when he shrieks “Mommy!” over and over.
Throughout, the composer Kevin Beasley holds everything together, mostly with spare and supporting contributions from his synthesizer and electric bass. At the end, he turns up the volume on a dance party or rave, as the screams of Okpokwasili, Sinha and Mathis rise and converge in a sonic cloud. But the most startling noise in “Tell It Anyway” comes earlier, when the mild-mannered Lemon, having written words on a board, stands it up against a wall and hurls bricks at it with the intentional force of someone throwing balls at a dunk tank. Whack! Whack!
