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Imagine spending three years researching the American South, exploring the origins of the blues, visiting and videotaping sites of lynchings and Civil Rights protests.

But instead of putting the research into a book or documentary film, you channel it into a dance concert.

Such was the approach taken by choreographer Ralph Lemon for "Come Home Charley Patton," which makes its Pittsburgh debut Saturday at the Byham Theater.

"I would do the research and know as much of the history as I could," Lemon says. "A good three years of this last part was done with me out in the field, almost as an anthropologist, naive perhaps, but very little dancing and a lot of talking and traveling and videotaping and writing."

The show, presented by the African American Cultural Center, is the final installment in "The Geography Trilogy," an ambitious and acclaimed 10-year project in which Lemon explored African and African-American identity and religious belief systems. He traveled to Africa to gather material for "Part 1: Geography" in 1997 and to Asia for "Part 2: Tree" in 2000.

"Come Home Charley Patton" is named for the seminal Mississippi delta blues singer born in 1891. Patton often croaked songs such as "Down the Dirt Road Blues."

Lemon drove down several dirt roads in the south, with daughter Chelsea Lemon Fetzer along to shoot video. He visited "charged sites," where blacks were jailed or lynched.

"For me, these back roads are haunted," Lemon says. "You see a tree, you don't see beauty, you see black people hanging from trees."

They spent an unnerving day retracing the final steps of Michael Schwener, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, three civil rights workers who were kidnapped and murdered in April 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan.

It was late in the day when they finally arrived to the trio's final destination: the earthen dam where the Klan buried the bodies of the murdered men.

Lemon and his daughter were both tired and more susceptible to sinister imaginings.

"It started getting dark, and it was raining," Lemon recalls. "Chelsea felt like she was smelling something dead in the road. I was very uncomfortable. For a moment, I thought, 'Let's turn back.' I guess the fear factor there got really overwhelming."

"Come Home Charley Patton" is not a history of the Civil Rights movement, however. Any drama is sublimated into movement.

Like Rami Be'er, who choreographed "Aide Memorie" about persistent memories of the Holocaust, "Charley Patton" is not a re-creation of the past so much as an examination of its memory influences collective present-day memory and identity.

"There's no point in miming or theatricalizing something that happened specifically in the past because that's not how we deal with the past," Lemon says. "The past is gone and all we have is a written history, a collective history."

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