In playback theater, a “teller” recounts a significant memory to a group of players who then perform an interpretive and reconstructed version of the story. If I were such a teller, I might recount the happy but now bittersweet experience of being picked up in the air by instructor Wade Madsen in what is now Spectrum’s space, because I danced something right.
Spectrum choreographer Donald Byrd states that as he gets older, “memory is an active companion.” But memory can be a slippery, changing and constantly shifting thing. Byrd chooses instead to attempt to capture the emotional essence of memories, or the “residue of experience,” by choreography that he and his dancers play back and forth to each other to see if it rings true.
That Byrd chose dance to get away from the reduction of words is apparent in the portions of his unpublished memoir that he reads during the performance. It rambles, feels incomplete, and is best listened to as another layer of music. But somehow the very language of the dance, the music, and the visual displays of the sets ring emotionally true, underscoring some of the lines like, “Art, music and dance all have an essential role to play,” “This performance won’t be resolved,” and “This piece exists in my body.”
In the first half of the performance, warm orange lights come up on a huge, partly folded backdrop map of New York, with a scrim towards the front of the stage on which is projected a video of overlapping images of streets in Jerusalem, in which Byrd says he feels “at home” – “a landscape of doubt and anxiety,” “uncertain remains,” conflict, love and seduction. At times, Byrd stands in the center of the stage reading from his memoir (as if an invisible narrator in a film) while the dancers dance around him, and at other times he reads from a front row seat. The music by Le Trio Joubran has a Middle Eastern flavor, by turns propulsive and meditative. The movements start with slow solo walking, outstretched limbs, swooping and undulating. Each dancer seems to be in their own world, but gradually one dancer observes the others, then there’s a folk-dance-like grouping, and finally the kind of gymnastic balances and three-ring partner circus that audience members like myself most look forward to seeing in Spectrum shows.
In the second half, the scrim goes away, and the map of New York turns blue. This section is Byrd’s New York “golden age,” where “the dances came fast and hard.” Here, the dancers wear bright multi-colored tights and leotards (la Paul Taylor), and move to dissonant, cacophonous “New York” music by Louis Andriessen. The movements seem a little Paul Taylorish too at first, but then things start to ramp up, and there is more cool Spectrumesque partnering galore: acrobatic, athletic, fluid and surprising. Finally, some minor, intense notes musically “spotlight” each dancer separately as they are lifted by one by one in the middle of the group like a kind of pre-bow water ballet.
In his post-show talkback, Byrd mentions in passing that he wants to return to the state of delighted childhood overstimulation – something that gets all too lost with adult mentality. Another audience member observed that there was a great mix of both heaviness and lightness in the work. It seems to me that Byrd’s “golden age” just keeps continuing.
