Through the Open Window: Ralph Lemon and the Legacy of Dance at MoMA PS1

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.¹ 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.

The 1970s

Before founding P.S.1 in 1976, Alanna Heiss programmed experimental work through the Institute for Art and Urban Resources. Bureaucratic in name only, the Institute connected artists with city-owned buildings that were sitting empty, inviting them to realize site-specific works with few limitations (aside from budget). P.S.1 continued and expanded this model to encompass a school building spanning the entirety of a city block in Queens, offering up its classrooms, auditorium, basement, and all other interstitial spaces to artists.

What performers needed at this moment, Heiss felt, was time and space to invent. An open 7,000-square-foot space on the third floor of PS1—the building’s former auditorium and gymnasium—was ideally suited for this use, and would eventually host numerous performances over the ensuing decades.

In October 1976, Simone Forti inaugurated the P.S.1 performance program with Group Works, three nights of dances with music composed by Peter Van Riper. Building on her earlier “Dance Constructions”—task-based, pedestrian movements that greatly influenced the Judson Dance Theater Workshop and the trajectory of postmodern dance—Forti premiered Planet. As she describes it, Planet “included a section with some fifteen performers traveling in a circular path, transitioning between crawling flat to the ground like a reptile to sprinting, with all stages in between. And five of us, whom I thought of as the nucleus, spent a lot of time observing animal behavior. Two of us were fascinated with how crocodiles climb over each other to get to a better sunny spot.”²

After programming several other standalone performances, Heiss piloted a more formalized performance residency program, offering artists two months in the auditorium space to develop a new piece that would then premiere at P.S.1. For the 1977–78 season, residencies were extended to Jacki Apple, Guy de Cointet, Jean Dupuy, Tina Girouard, Ron Gorchov, Dan Graham, Jill Kroesen, and Stephanie Woodard, among others. Although the residency program lasted only one season, it established an interdisciplinary approach that would continue, and intensify, in the dance series of the 1980s.

The 1980s

The first two editions of the Spring Dance Series were curated by Jane Comfort, Marjorie Gamso, and William Dunas. DANCETEXTFLASH (1981) and Paranarrative (1982) explored the relationship between gesture, movement, and meaning through language. For these editions, around 20 choreographers participated, including Kenneth King, Sally Bowden, Wendy Perron, John Bernd, and Stephanie Woodard.

That year, Tim Miller presented his work-in-progress, Postwar, which featured a taped conversation with his mother, the distribution of copies of his birth certificate, a recorded announcement of the end of WWII, and the action of spray-painting, or tagging, his own name on his torso—in a complex exploration of personal and generational identity.

The success of these initial events propelled an expansion of the 1983 edition in both length and scope. With dance critic Barry Laine and choreographer Judy Padow at the curatorial helm, Dance Environments: New Collaborations Between Dancers and Visual Artists focused—as the title suggested—on collaborative processes. Eight choreographer-artist pairs were commissioned to create new works together. This edition spanned genres such as ballet and tap, incorporating collaborations with painters, sculptors, video artists, and musicians.

In 1988, Barebones Dancing, curated by Valda Setterfield and Bruce Hoover, marked the final event of the decade, and shifted focus to “dance as dance”—eschewing sets, language, film, and overt narrative in favor of more formal and technical explorations. Participants included Amy Sue Rosen, Hank Smith, and Jennifer Monson.

In December of 1999, Tanaka presented Subject: Heuristic Ecdysis, a cycle of performances realized over the course of two weeks in various exterior and interior locations of the building:

One rainy day on the roof, cold and wet gravel was assimilated to my skin. My eyes traveled slowly from the lead-gray sky to the distinctively hued skin of the gravel. Perhaps something more important that [sic] my life is on that interface where the air and the gravel meet. I have been a dancer since the time I had not arrived here on earth as [sic] what I am now.⁵

A single voluntary observer, Warren Nesluchowski, was recruited to witness every day of Tanaka’s performance activity to “[create] a vital sensory and memory archive in the mind and body of another person.”⁶ Within a gallery on the museum’s second floor, performance footage of Tanaka recorded by video artist Charles Steiner was screened, spanning the two decades since Tanaka’s first performance at P.S.1 in the late 1970s. Tanaka, in fact, had a “life contract” with P.S.1, an “annual series of events for which Tanaka [has] committed to return to P.S.1 each year for the duration of his life.”⁷ Though this was not fulfilled to the letter, Tanaka continued to perform at P.S.1 for the next several years.

The 2010s

MoMA PS1’s engagement with dance and performance shifted during the 2010s. In 2013, Biesenbach oversaw the seasonal installation of a modular geodesic dome in the museum’s courtyard, where music, performance, dance, conversation, and moving images could be presented through the autumn and winter, including for Sunday Sessions, a performance series first initiated by curator Jenny Schlenzka and later also programmed by curators Taja Cheek and Alex Sloane. Within the dome, PS1 commissioned and hosted projects by local and international dance-makers Trajal Harrell (Judson Church Is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/ Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at The Judson Church (M2M), 2012), Mårten Spångberg (La Substance, but in English, 2014), Jonathan González (Lucifer Landing I, 2019), and NIC Kay (Sloth-ish: Where Does It Hurt?, 2019), among others, and from 2016 through 2019 hosted a series of residencies with rising choreographers including Moriah Evans, Gillian Walsh, Leslie Cuyjet, Kim Brandt, and Emily Wexler, all of whom were invited to develop and present new movement works to the public.

During the 2010s, two significant dance presentations blurred the lines between performance and exhibition, once again bringing choreography into the former classroom spaces of the museum. Anne Imhof: DEAL (2015) spanned performances in the dome and the exhibition galleries. The galleries featured a presentation of paintings, live rabbits, and sculpture-cum-props—including a fountain filled with buttermilk that functioned as a liquid “currency” during performances. Exploring the question, “What constitutes a deal?”, the dancers’ minimal gestures mimicked everyday transactions, exchanges, and other forms of contagion through contact or touch.

For French microbiologist-turned-choreographer Xavier Le Roy’s Retrospective, presented at MoMA PS1 in 2014 (through a collaboration with Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona), excerpts from movement works LeRoy made between 1994 and 2010 were “on view” in three different exhibition galleries, where visitors might “encounter performers who either recreate sections of Mr. Le Roy’s solos like video loops or remain in static poses like sculptures.”⁹ Le Roy’s conceptual dance work actively changed the pacing, flow, and observational conventions of the museum. Conceived as an exhibition, Retrospective extended contemporaneous discourse around the auspicious return of dance to the institutional spaces of fine art, and issues related to the collection, conservation, and display of a vital form.

At the time of this writing, movement continues to echo across PS1 with Ralph Lemon’s exhibition, taking multiple forms—from recorded video and sculptural remnants to the stomps and shouts of live performances—and providing a window into Lemon’s unique trajectory as an artist. During the 1980s, Ralph Lemon formed his acclaimed eponymous company in New York, which toured nationally until he decided to disband it in 1995. Since then, Lemon’s work in movement has developed through ongoing research into everyday vernacular forms and a wide range of ritual dance traditions, informed by travels in the Caribbean, West Africa, East and Southeast Asia, and the American South. This work yields writing, video, drawing, and, every so often, dance. During the last two decades, Lemon’s methods began to align more closely with the concerns and process of a visual artist. When Connie Butler was named director of MoMA PS1 in 2024, she invited Lemon’s first collaboration with PS1¹⁰ through Ceremonies Out of the Air, at the precise moment the artist’s expansive practice across material, form, and disciplinary histories could invoke—as well as challenge—the institution’s commitment to radically experimental work.

Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon is on view at MoMA PS1 through March 24, 2025.