Through the Open Window: Ralph Lemon and the Legacy of Dance at MoMA PS1
- Writing
The choreographer, writer, and visual artist Ralph Lemon has likened the presentation of dance within a contemporary art museum to the event of a bird flying unexpectedly into a house through an open window. There is a disorienting change in air pressure and temperature from the perspective of the bird, and a dizzying disruption of atmosphere for those already in the room. A potentially productive meeting arises from two very different positions.
On the occasion of Lemon’s major solo show at MoMA PS1, Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon, exhibition curators Connie Butler, T. Lax, and Kari Rittenbach placed equal emphasis on the drawings, films, sculptural objects, and remnants made by Lemon and his collaborators, and the ambitious program of performances rehearsed on site and staged monthly for museum audiences. The ebb and flow of Lemon’s ceremonies engage with the material traces occupying the very same building. In some cases, art objects and sonic elements even travel between the porous realm of live performance and the secure climate-controlled room—virtuosically upending the values conventionally held in either setting.
From its founding (as P.S.1) in 1976 as an experimental, non-collecting art museum, MoMA PS1, housed in a 19th-century school building, has highlighted performance. Its capacious classrooms were more immediately suitable for the scale and energy of dance works than they were supportive of precious or rarefied works of art. This early engagement roughly coincided with the founding of other movement spaces at the time in New York—including Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop (now New York Live Arts), The Kitchen, and P.S. 122 (now Performance Space)—in the era just following the Judson Dance Theater’s famous workshops, and at a moment of experimentation within postmodern American dance.
Across five decades, the avant-garde and interdisciplinary approach to exhibition-making at MoMA PS1 has included a commitment to dance-as-form. Ahead of the final weeks of Ceremonies Out of the Air and the culminating ensemble performance of Rant #6 on March 22, we’re revisiting a selection of key moments and experimental projects.
Read the full essay at the link below.
