How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? @ YBCA October 7, 2010

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

Thu, Oct 7-Sat, Oct 9, 8pm: Performance: How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?
Thu, Oct 7-Sun, Oct 10: Exhibition
Fri, Oct 8: Post-performance Q&A
Sun, Oct 10, noon-6pm: Installation: Meditation
Sun, Oct 10, 4:30pm: Solaris film screening

Hailed as “one of the most adventurous artists working today” (Time Out New York), renowned interdisciplinary artist Ralph Lemon returns to YBCA with a groundbreaking multimedia project of epic – and intimate-- proportions. Through live performance, a multimedia installation, film, video and an exhibition of objects, How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? explores human connections, loss and the elusive but ever-compelling possibility of grace. The culmination of an eight -year collaboration with Walter Carter, a 102-year-old former sharecropper, carpenter and gardener from Bentonia, MS, How Can You Stay… reflects on the memories and futuristic dreams of life fully lived. Lemon’s work combines footage of Carter’s world with a performance by dancers and actors whose turbulent movements push the boundaries of exhaustion, to create a visceral examination of what it means to be human.

To fully experience the breadth of this extraordinary new work, performance patrons are encouraged to return on Sun, Oct 11, for the final chapter of How Can You Stay…, entitled Meditation, a visual art installation in the Novellus Theater at YBCA, as well as for the accompanying exhibition in the YBCA Gallery and a screening of Andrei Tarkovksy’s classic sci-fi romance, Solaris, in the YBCA Screening Room.

Performance:
Thu- Sat, Oct 7 – 9, 2010; 8 pm, Novellus Theater at YBCA
$30 Reg; $25 YBCA Mem/Stu/Sen/Tea
Post-Show Conversation with Ralph Lemon//Fri, Oct 8//Novellus Theater//FREE w/ performance ticket

Installation: Meditation
Sun, Oct 10, noon – 6 pm
Novellus Theater at YBCA//FREE
Meditation is a room-size art installation that can be experienced either on its own or in tandem with the stage performance. It visually reiterates the project's themes of love, loss and possible redemption by using greatly slowed film projection, light and shadow to create an immersive environment that distills the emotional themes of the work into a meditative experience.

Exhibition:
Thu-Sun, Oct 7-10
YBCA Terrace Gallery//FREE
An installation of photographs, film and a slide show created by Ralph Lemon inspired by his eight-year collaboration with centenarian Walter Carter, his wife Edna and his extended community in Bentonia, MS. Lemon describes the work: "Walter and Edna, who they are and what they represent, cannot be staged. It is a symbolic exchange. In some respect by viewing this, they are being erased. This erasure creates a myth, an imagined open space story. And they are just as surprised to be in this situation as you are watching it."

Film Screening: Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky
Sun, Oct 10, 4:30 pm, YBCA Screening Room
$8 Reg/$6 YBCA Mem/Stu/Sen/Tea/$4 w/ performance ticket
In conjunction with Ralph Lemon's performances (Oct 7-9), we present this rare screening of Solaris, which has profoundly influenced Lemon's work. Based on the science fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem, it is the story of Cosmonaut Kris Kelvin, who is dispatched to a space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris. The scientists discover an alien intelligence of the ocean-covered planet, which is able to materialize anyone from the past. Kelvin must face his dead wife, and again confront the division between them which drove her to a suicide. (1972, 167 min, 35mm archival print)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Public Info: 415-978-2787 or www.ybca.org/tickets/production/view.aspx?id=11420

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For images, please visit http://www.ybca.org/about/press/