The Insidious Trilogy -- Spectrum Dance Theatre

Over Memorial Day weekend, Spectrum Dance Theater presented Donald Byrd’s The Insidious Trilogy: A Theatrical Production at On The Boards. Audience members could see Strange Fruit and Targeted on Friday, the full cycle of Strange Fruit, Targeted, and Grief on Saturday, or do as I did and attend the Sunday matinee to watch Targeted and Grief. Byrd has been making dance for four decades now and has put his stamp on abstract formalism, lyric expressionism, and assertive dance theater. His 2017 piece Shot—an exploration of police shootings of unarmed black people—stands as a reference point for politically-engaged theater in my memory long after most of the other dance events I’ve attended in the past nine years have vanished. Targeted and Grief are works in this same vein; spoken word, music, movement, scenography conjure a complex evocation of feeling and diagram an unflinching exposition of history, politics, and morality. 

​

I have spent a lot of time watching dance, thinking about dance, and writing about dance. I’m comfortable describing what I see and how it makes me respond. I am confident that my judgements, while subjective, are also anchored within a wider context of criticism and reason. Philosopher David Best’s work Feeling and Reason in the Arts was instructive in helping me see the primacy of rationality in any good arts criticism and to recognize the fallacy that human understanding of the arts exists somewhere outside the sphere of reason where all judgements are equally valid. What has any of this to with The Insidious Trilogy, or at least the two pieces I saw?  It’s relevant because the thick texture of both these works--the layering of tableaux, live video projection, recorded video, music, dance, light, sound, scripted scenes, singing; the stark stillnesses; the shifts in showing, telling, addressing the audience—defy my ability to evoke my viewing experience, to offer the ‘evidence’ upon which my interpretation and evaluation might be grounded. It’s relevant because I don’t have the same critical, interpretative framework for theater—which this undoubtedly is—and I hesitate to opine in areas where I have scant expertise. And in this instance that extends to the subject matter. 

In Targeted, as Byrd explains in the program note, the audience is asked “to sit, listen, and hear the language, the song of white supremacy, the language of a racist murderer” spoken by actor Arlando Smith and interrogated by actor Bob Wright. It seems pertinent to note that Smith is young Black man while Wright is a much older white male. The discourse is vile but the aesthetics are pristine. There’s beauty here, particularly in the dance sequences, the stark scenic design and spatial form of the production, and the attention to small, perfectly lit details in the videography. Does that distract from the ugliness of the story being told, or will a white audience only stay present with this material if it’s aestheticized? I don’t know. Certainly, we sat in a collective silence, too moved to applaud, after the faces of the ten people who died in the white supremacist attack at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, NY  were shown on the suspended video screens. 
 

If Targeted sought to engage its audience in unwavering contemplation of the “hateful song” (again I quote Byrd’s program note) of white supremacy, Grief seemed to me to want to gut-punch my emotions. It’s a crude distinction--intellect versus empathy—and in truth both works played in both registers to a certain extent, but I could not witness Josephine Howell sing and speak the pain of Mamie Till, Emmett Till’s mother, without falling fully into feeling along with her. There was a moment when I thought the piece was coming to an end: it felt done and I was ready for it to be over. But it didn’t end. It went on. And I thought that might have been the point. The grief never ends. It just goes on.