Farewell / Spectrum Dance Theater / Donald Byrd
Thursday, February 1, 2010
Farewell, Donald Byrd’s new piece for Spectrum Dance theater, is described as “a Fantastical Contemplation on America’s Relationship with China”. That’s an ambitious theme for the second performance in the three year project “Beyond Dance: Promoting Awareness and Mutual Understanding”. With the premier of Farewell February 18-20 at the Moore Theater, Byrd says his intent was to continue to push audiences to think beyond the forms and movements on the stage, to consider current events and international relations. While Farewell does provoke contemplation, it is less about Sino-American relations, and more about what happens when the prevailing social order is upended.
Farewell begins the moment the audience files into the reconfigured Moore Theater. Byrd installed bleachers on either side of the stage, and built rows of chairs on risers out over the Moore’s regular seating. This arrangement brought spectators much closer to the action, and to the set, creating a more intimate atmosphere than the usually cavernous Moore. Photographs of China’s 1989 Tien An Men protests and subsequent violence hang overhead. They’re interspersed with photos of the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist bombings in Manhattan. A huge portrait of Mao Tse Tung is centered on the rear wall. And, at the center of the stage, lying motionless on a wooden bench, covered with a white cloth, is dancer Joel Myers.
When the lights finally go down, Donald Byrd steps onto the stage, followed by a woman in a black dress, Jessica Markiewicz. They take seats on a platform directly under Mao’s portrait. Byrd utters the word “go”, and his dancers take the stage. Composer Byron Au Yong and musicians Tiffany Lin and Paul Kikuchi sit just behind the bleachers, on either side of the stage. As they pound out a contemporary taiko rhythm, we also hear a recorded montage of news reports, and personal recounts of the Tien An Men massacre, set to the drone of Markiewicz’ recitation of what sounds like a foreign policy text. The sound is a thick, almost impenetrable thicket, an onslaught you must cut your way through in order to pay the dancers any attention. They move through the tangle of words and music, using straight armed salutes, fingers tight together, to slash through the noise.
The intricate group dancing gives way to a series of duets: Vincent Lopez and Geneva Jenkins spar around one another. Kelly Ann Barton and Jenkins meet to repeat the stick straight arm thrusts. Joel Myers, at the end of his emotional rope, is a twitching contrast to cooly elegant Catherine Cabeen (a last minute stand-in for injured company member Kylie Lewallen). Cabeen is not a constant onstage presence, as are the other dancers. She appears, disappears, then reappears, the calm eye of the storm amidst the frenzied audio and continuous waves of movement. Late in the performance, as Cabeen moves to center stage, the relentless soundtrack fades to birdcalls, and a calm melody. Cabeen gracefully extends her arms, her fingers relax and unfurl, a brief counterpoint to all that clenched salutation. She is an angel in repose, and the audience finally gets a chance to ungird the loins we’ve tensed in self defense against 90 minutes of nonstop stimuli.
There are other powerful moments in the hubub of Farewell. In one sequence, the company assembles on rows of benches, megaphones in hand. One by one, the dancers stand, change positions, sit, then regroup. It’s a complex weave of bodies, precisely executed. Later, the dancers play a game of musical benches; They stride across the wooden slabs. Then, the benches are pulled away, forcing the dancers to jockey for a place to stand. By the end of Farewell, the dancers topple the benches one by one, victims of the upended social order? Even when the action onstage confuses, the Spectrum dancers are interesting to watch. They are all highly trained, among the best in Seattle. In particular, Vincent Lopez and Kelly Ann Barton grab the viewer’s attention with their stregnth and attention to detail. But it was guest artist Catherine Cabeen who shone on opening night. Perhaps it was the role she was given to perform.
With his stated intentions for Farewell, Donald Byrd has set himself a high bar to vault over. How does an artist, in one work, comment in any meaningful way on a subject as complex as Sino-American relations? Byrd attempts to do this through multiple layers of audio and movement. But when the sound and fury of Farewell finally die away, we are not much wiser about China or the United States. Farewell could be described more accurately as a study of authoritarianism, anarchy and chaos, with an emphasis on the chaos. That may well be Byrd’s intent with this piece, his own“fantastical contemplation”. But even the most avid Spectrum Dance Theater fan will need some time after Farewell for the cacophony to subside before we can even begin our own contemplations.
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