Krannert Center . The following are the thoughts of Ralph Lemon, director and choreographer, on Tree. Fed by West African traditions, religions, and modern sensibilities, the all-male cast performed a passionate theatrical piece that, by conception, explored the nature of race and unexpectedly evolved into a highly integrated work of spirituality. What I found was, again, unexpected.
Tree also explores the complexity and perceptions of cultural gender roles.
But above all, Tree is a play on the idea of metacultural performance, shaped by a series of episodes composed of fractured questions. It's a directorial and cast experiment that represents traditions' refinement of order and my modernity's operation to disrupt harmony and then to reconstruct it. I'm licking my wounds from the amazing onslaught of being in faraway places for the past five years, experiencing how little of my art past is relevant to the world, and of how I can never know another language or culture deeply. But also how essential and common are bodies moving together and laughing. Like Geography, Part I was supposed to be about race, which it turned out not to be.