Rant and Rave

“TODAY . . . I’M SHATTERING INSIDE.” So begins Ralph Lemon’s Tell it anyway, 2024, the performance that inaugurated his MoMA PS1 retrospective, “Ceremonies Out of the Air.” On the show’s opening day, the song was spun by the performer Okwui Okpokwasili, who lets the words trickle out of her mouth like filaments of a larger world. “Where are we? In the Outlands? Not yet.” A delicate breakdown and a question unanswered: These are conceptual impulses that permeate the soaring breadth of Lemon’s work. Across painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and performance, Lemon offers myriad “argument experiments,” a phrase he uses in the show’s catalogue in reference to his earlier performance Untitled [2008], but that could also describe every work on view at PS1. Lemon’s first home was dance, and no matter how many times the artist has declared his estrangement from it, dance formed the fabric of “Ceremonies Out of the Air.” An argument and an experiment are both movements, after all: ones that leave point A without knowing where point B is, or even if it exists. In Lemon’s case, as he says in the 2010 stage work How can you stay in the house all day and not go anywhere?,“the question is, of course, the answer and the form in which the answer exists.”

A rant is both: an experimental argument, departing certainty’s firm ground to wade through the unstable muck of thought and feeling. For as long as we’ve been living, we’ve also been ranting. Occupying the first and largest gallery of “Ceremonies Out of the Air” was the four-channel video installation Rant (redux), 2020–24, made in collaboration with the sound and multimedia artist Kevin Beasley. Crafted from footage of a live performance at the Kitchen in 2020, Rant (redux) depicts a group of performers engaged in the physics of extreme breakdown. They move through the ruins of recognizable movement to the sound of Beasley’s beats, skin taut and shiny with liquid effort. Rant: the ritual eruption of feeling. Rant: a calibrated destruction. Rant: no tears left to cry but the sweat dripping down a dancer’s neck.

Choreography is Lemon’s ambivalent home, the dwelling he has spent over four decades both embracing and running away from. This was reflected in the structure of the exhibition itself: Curated by Connie Butler and Thomas J. Lax with Kari Rittenbach, “Ceremonies Out of the Air” traced a sideways path through Lemon’s body of work, presenting his paintings and drawings alongside videos, sculptural props, and other performance ephemera, accompanied by a richly considered program of six live performances. Yet even his “static” works are studies in gesture, arrangement, and performativity: in short, the bones of choreography. 

I attended three out of the six live offerings: Tell it anyway; In Proximity, 2022–25; and Rant #6, 2025. Across all three performances, certain actions kept reappearing. Texts—by writers ranging from Kathy Acker to Albert Camus to Lemon himself—were whispered, shouted, and sung on the tightrope between sincerity and disillusionment. Objects and costumes from ordinary life were remixed in faintly risible ways: In Tell it anyway, Okpokwasili has her hair in curlers, while a brass band wearing animal onesies plays briefly at the end of In Proximity. In both Rant #6 and Tell it anyway, wails tore from the throats of Okpokwasili, Samita Sinha, and April Matthis across ten or twenty minutes, building virtuosic walls of sound that I felt crash into my body. The performances often erupted in multiple directions at once, actions piling up in a delicate game of dramaturgic Jenga.

Over the past twenty years, Lemon and his dancers have been wrestling with an impossible pursuit—a dance that refuses to materialize into identifiable steps and rhythms. The swipe of an arm rots before completion, and the swing of a hip careens into a stamp, birthing a groove unmoored from the dock of the beat. This “no form” dance rebels against the drive to cohere that supposedly defines choreography: the need to herd movement into recognizable, repeatable forms. Lemon has also used the terms no thing and no style to refer to his approach to choreography, less as a postmodern rejection of affect and more a metaphysical attempt to rid these words of tangible meaning. It is this coagulation of impulse into meaning that Lemon’s dancers wrestle with in their bodies. They are Sisyphus on the dance floor, spitting out chains of movement with bewildering multidirectionality. They tackle Lemon’s challenge with an embrace, opening themselves up to impossibility not as a curse but as a grace. 

Lemon’s no form practice engages with histories of the Black body under horror and duress, most explicitly in his “counter memorial” dances, conducted on former lynching sites in the American South. (When you see a body torn apart by movement you have to think about where, when, and by whom it has been done before.) In Rant #6 and Tell it anyway, it is driven by Beasley’s soundtrack, a blistering merging of techno, house, and the ballroom classic “The HaDance.” Beasley reaches into intensities of pitch and tone, probing the communion between sound and body. At times, the bass is so strong that the floor quivers. When a woman standing next to me pulls out her phone and starts to film Rant #6, the dancer Lysis (Ley) swats it away to the rhythm of the beat. 

The no form practice runs breathtakingly deep in the bodies of Lemon’s longtime collaborators, like the dancer Darrell Jones, who has been working with Lemon since 2003. In every fluttering palm, curving elbow, or gliding eyeball, Jones presents an exuberant world-weariness. He arrives at the party with the accoutrements of technique—a meticulous study of voguing and waacking—only to hijack each movement with a particularly queer coyness.Jones was a performer in How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?, in which Lemon embedded what was perhaps his most austere expression of the no form pursuit to date: a twenty-minute sextet titled Wall/Hole that contained next to no conventional dance movements, instead setting the body wringing and writhing like a sponge. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Chorus, 2015, a dance constructed from specific, recognizable moves drawn from the long-running television show Soul Train (1971–2006), invoking pop culture but also the vocabularies of Black social dance. Lemon’s latest works seem to exist in the convergence of Wall/Hole’s formlessness and Chorus’s form. In Rant #6, unison movement phrases appear and disappear from within a continuous no form practice, like flotsam rising to the surface. Each performer dances alone until Mariama Noguera-Devers screams, and they snap into a synchronized downbeat. 

The simultaneous embrace of form and formlessness is indicative of Lemon’s refusal to be fixed. He handles identity like wet clay: something slippery, unstable, and wildly hard to grasp. Often, there are layers, as in the Walter Carter Suite, 2002–24, a series of videos made with nonagenarians Walter and Edna Carter at their home in Yazoo City, Mississippi. The Carters re-create scenes from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris: They are astronauts from the time of Jim Crow. To the recent exhibition “Edges of Ailey” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Lemon contributed a drawing, Alvin Ailey Dancing Revelations #3, 1999, in which he rendered Ailey in thick brushes of oil stick that suggest a cloud of energy more than a body. Lemon quite literally dematerializes Ailey’s identity, pointing a gentle finger to the impossibility of holding still.

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