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Choreographer and self-described naive anthropologist Ralph Lemon embarked on a 10-year odyssey to research memory, race and beliefs for a trilogy of dance theater pieces gathered under the title "Geography."

Rather than create dance pieces inside a studio, as he did during his years as the artistic director of his New York-based dance company, Lemon played Marco Polo. He traveled to Africa to gather material for "Part 1: Geography" in 1997 and to Asia for "Part 2: Tree" in 2000.

The third and final installment in the trilogy, "Come Home Charley Patton," was co-commissioned by the African American Cultural Center, which presented the work to a distracted and gabby audience Saturday night at the Byham Theater, Downtown.

The piece was a highly abstract look at the African-American struggle in the early 20th century, and Lemon's attempt to understand its impact on his own evolution as an artist. During three years of research, he visited the sites of lynchings in Mississippi as well as Duluth in his home state of Minnesota. He collected and choreographed buck dances that invoked plantation life. And at the beginning of "Patton," Lemon engages in a dialogue with author James Baldwin, who appears as an animated caricature in a screen to the right of the stage.

But the 90-minute "Come Home Charley Patton" was too personal to forge any real connection with the Byham audience. Call it a highly abstract documentary or call it performance art, but the aesthetics and associations were too vague to grab hold of.

The impressionistic sections whipsawed from inspired to perplexing. They included a video of Lemon wading in a Southern swamp, holding a teacup and reading his favorite story, Arna Botemp's "A Summer Tragedy." Video and text referred back to the story throughout the evening.

His quintet of dancers, sometimes joined by the choreographer, flailed and circled tirelessly in movements that seemed celebratory but radiated torment. Female dancer Okwui Okpokwasili, her neck yoked with horseshoes, assumed the character of a woman who recalled being called the N-word in the fourth grade. In the evening's most powerful moment, Lemon danced while he was sprayed with a fire hose, an obvious reference to the police crackdown on civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Ala. But the images and dances never coalesced.

It might not have made a difference anyway, with the amount of talking going on in the audience. In the annals of rude audiences, this one should have gotten some sort of award.

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