Ralph Lemon did something we'd all like to do -- drop out and dig deep to discover our true selves, our own personal history as it relates to the world at large. His project took 10 years to complete, a process where Lemon traveled to Africa, Asia and throughout the Deep South here in the United States. The final segment of the resulting trilogy, "Come home Charley Patton," landed in the New York Times "Top 10 in Dance" last year.

		Ralph Lemon's 'Come Home Charley Patton' Where: Presented by The African American Cultural Center at the Byham Theater. When: Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets: $12-$25; call 412-456-6666, visit the Box Office at Theater Square or go online at www.africanaculture.org.

Sometimes it pays to follow your instincts.

Saturday night the African American Cultural Center, a co-commissioner in the project, will present Lemon's dance theater work at the Byham Theater. For years he had operated within the modern dance mainstream in New York City, a postmodern choreographer noted for uncommon intelligence in creating abstract works that harbored a piercing emotional content.

But the pressures of running and sustaining a company came to a head in 1995, when he disbanded his group and set out on his own personal and artistic journey. "It was an act of survival," says Lemon. "I disbanded the company to find a different way of working."

He began by traveling, much like modern dance pioneer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, first to Haiti, then to Africa, tracing his roots and asking, "What's my relationship to the performance, culture, politic in Africa?"

But not really defining it.

"It began as a live conversation about how we're different," Lemon explains of his initial trip. "And maybe how we're a little alike. The idea of race was there, but it was blown apart from the very beginning. Africans have been black forever -- race was not the issue it was for me as a black American."

Almost immediately Lemon knew that he was on to something that was going to be "mercurial and slippery, an investigation that was going to ask only more questions and not really answer anything."

And that was exciting.

What he discovered was that "with all the horror and psychic damage that we inherited as black Americans, what we also inherited was a multiple identity. With that comes a great need to go out and figure out who we are and where we come from and that's unanswerable. But we end up landing in some really interesting places."

"Geography" would deal with lineage and "Tree," where Lemon visited parts of Asia, would "question the concept of belief systems," specifically Buddhism.

But he definitely came "home" for "Charley Patton." Although Lemon was raised in Minneapolis, his family came from the Deep South. He admits that, as black Americans, "we're forced to make sense of our own wobbly existence of remembrance."

For four years he probed the "rich history of slavery that is and was and the civil rights movement and what that had to do with me as a privileged American -- I consider myself very privileged."

Lemon's travels had taken him to places where people, both black and white, weren't ensconced in continual poverty. But in "Charley Patton," he would try to identify how a performing artist, whose choreography is, at its best, essentially about nothing other than the body moving through space, could connect to a lynching that happened 80 years ago. "It has everything to do with that and nothing to do with that and is what this piece is about," Lemon affirms.

He conceptually chose the South as "Ground Zero for black American placement," but that proved too overwhelming. So he narrowed it to the state of Mississippi. "That is the state I held the most mythology for and the state that held the most fear for me," says Lemon. "It's also the state that has been the most resistant to black American equality."

Throughout the trilogy, he has operated in his own discomfort zone. But in "Charley Patton," his heightened expectations were "somewhat met." He would go from Atlanta to Selma, Ala. But in Mississippi, there would be places like Senatobia, Money, Yazoo City, Bentonia and Jackson.

Traveling alone at times, or accompanied sometimes by his daughter, videographer Chelsea Lemon Fetzer, performers Djedje Djedje Gervais and David Thomson or dramaturg Katherine Profeta, Lemon constructed his own "counter-memorials in historically charged places," such as unmarked lynching sites, to re-engage the memories. It would produce a rich piece of theater that includes film, dance and text by author James Baldwin.

Lemon found that "there is this history that did happen and that there was a certain brutality that happened in the South. And yet there are some of the most beautiful landscapes that I have ever experienced." With that came a deep, psychic sense of belonging and new friends with whom he continues to maintain a treasured line of communication.

There are no regrets. "Since the day I disbanded the company, it felt not only like the right thing to do, but more and more absolutely the essential thing to do," Lemon offers. "It's so important ... that we all individually need to find something personal about what it is we do. We don't have to continue to make the same dance."