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How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?

Published 8:00 am Friday, November 12, 2010

How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?

The title of New York choreographer Ralph Lemon’s new How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? feels almost too close to the bone. It’s true that he doesn’t produce work quickly (his groundbreaking Geography suite took 10 years to make), but it was the death of his partner, Asako Takami, and of his long-term collaborator, Walter Carter, that kept him inside this time. How Can You draws inspiration from the life of Carter, a former Mississippi sharecropper who died at the age of 102; and it adds to that earthy experience a science-fiction overlay drawn from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris. (The multimedia work also samples Ozu’s Late Spring.) Accompanied by six dancers, Lemon will read his narration live on stage. Prepare yourselves for once dancer to (intentionally) break down and cry during the 90-minute piece. It’s meant to be awkward. As Lemon recently told The Huffington Post of the sobbing, “It goes on and on and on and on.” Just like grief. SANDRA KURTZ

Nov. 18-21, 8 p.m., 2010