How Can You Stay In The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere?

About This Performance

Date
November 19, 2010
Venue
On the Boards | Seattle, WA
Duration
85 min

A multimedia performance including film, live narration and dance, How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? explores loss and transcendence experienced in human partnerships. Reflecting on his relationship with 102-year-old former sharecropper, carpenter and gardener Walter Carter as well as Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction classic, Solaris, Lemon and 6 dancers create a performance which arcs from turbulent physicality to restorative grace.

Cast & Credits

Role Name
Conceived and directed by Ralph Lemon
Dramaturg Katherine Profeta
Co-created and performed by Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Darrell Jones, Ralph Lemon, Gesel Mason, Okwui Okpokwasili, Omagbitse Omagbemi, David Thomson, Walter & Edna Carter
Sunshine Room film Ralph Lemon
Video Designer Jim Findlay
Lighting Designer Roderick Murray
Sunshine Room film Editor Mike Taylor
Sound Designer Ralph Lemon
Sound Consultant Doc Davis
Costume Designer Anne de Velder
Lighting Director and Production Manager Christopher Kuhl
Company Videographer Shoko Letton
Stage Manager and Company Manager Kate Danziger
Web Designer Marina Zamalin
Video Editing Assistant Josh Higgason

About The Artist

Ralph Lemon

Ralph Lemon is a choreographer, conceptualist, director, writer, and installation artist who is artistic director of Cross Performance, Inc. He develops intellectually rigorous and experimental performances that are as socially and politically resonant as they are personal, including the multimedia collaboration How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? (2010); a commission for the Lyon Opera Ballet, Rescuing the Princess (2009); and the epic cycle, The Geography Trilogy (1997-2004). Lemon builds teams of collaborating artists - from diverse cultural backgrounds, countries and artistic disciplines - who bring their own history and aesthetic voices to the work. Projects develop over a period of years, with public sharings of work-in-progress, culminating in artworks derived from the artistic, cultural, historic and emotional material uncovered in this rigorous creative research process.

His honors include the Alpert Award in the Arts (1999), a Creative Capital grant (2000), the inaugural USA Prudential Fellowship (2006), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009) and in 2012, Lemon was honored with one of the first Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards; From 1996-2000, he was Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre. He has also been artist-in-residence at the Krannert Center and Temple University. In 2009, he was an IDA fellow at Stanford University. For the fall 2011 semester he was a Visiting Critic with the Yale University, School of Art, Sculpture Department. Currently he is the 2014 Annenberg Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art.

"The Beautiful and Baffling Ralph Lemon" - The Stranger