Spectrum’s Donald Byrd Takes on the Complex Legacy of U.S.-China Relations

Spectrum Dance Theatre’s artistic director Donald Byrd. Photo by Gabriel Bienczycki, Zebra Visual.

Last week, I made my way down to Spectrum Dance Theatre‘s studio, in a converted bathhouse in Madrona Park, to sit in on the rehearsal for Farewell: A Fantastical Contemplation on America’s Relationship with China, which opens Thurs., Feb. 18 at the Moore Theatre (through Feb. 20; tickets $25). As artistic director and choreographer Donald Byrd watched, sitting next to composer Byron Au Yong, the company of a dozen or so dancers arranged themselves in a rows on benches, each taking turns barking out brief declarations of Communist dogma through a megaphone before rearranging themselves in a seemingly neverending Chinese fire drill.

Farewell is second part of Byrd’s ambitious three-year project with Spectrum called Beyond Dance: Promoting Awareness and Mutual Understanding. Last year, Byrd—known for his high-concept, intellectual work—presented A Chekhovian Resolution, which explored the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its wider ramifications in the Middle East and abroad, and next year the program concludes with a work about Africa.

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In crafting Farewell, Byrd was primarily inspired by Ma Jian’s 2008 novel Beijing Coma, a first-person narrative told from the perspective of a man left in a waking coma following the suppression of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square. From there, as Byrd explained in an interview after the rehearsal, he built the work out into a sort of triptych, with the novel linking the events of Tiananmen Square to the attacks of Sept. 11.

“The Student Democratic Movement in China in 1989 was significant in China’s history, and China is different because of those demonstrations,” Byrd said. “It’s different because it shifted its focus from conversations in the country around how progressive it would be in terms of citizens’ rights, what kind of rights they would give to the people, the government being—not liberal—but allowing for more kinds of discussions around democracy. After June of ’89, that conversation went away. The conversation, not only among the government but among the people, shifted to economic concerns.”

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“The China you see today is a post-June ’89 China, and the concerns that came to the forefront because of that. 9/11 serves a similar purpose, has a similar place in American history in terms of that who we are as people and what we thought was important shifted as a result of 9/11, in particular, notions about civil liberties, and the moving of security from being a primary concern to the concern that trumps everything.”

Ma Jian‘s work first started appearing in English translation in the 2000s, years after his work was originally suppressed in China during the 1980s, leading him to finally flee Hong Kong for Germany in 1997, and settling in England in 1999. As a young man, Ma was something of a classic bohemian, and he traveled to Tibet in search of enlightenment. His experience there formed the basis of his first stories (published in China in 1987, and in English in 2006 as Stick Out Your Tongue). Contrary to the idealization of Tibet by many Westerners, who sympathize with its desire for independence, Ma found an often disturbing, perverse traditional culture, trapped in degrading poverty. Chinese censors originally declared it a “vulgar, obscene book that defames the image of our Tibetan compatriots,” and banned its continued publication, helping establish Ma as a leading dissident writer.

Spectrum Dance’s “Farewell,” at the Moore Theatre, Feb. 18-20. Photo by Gabriel Bienczycki, Zebra Visual

“I was on a flight going from somewhere to Berlin,” Byrd explained of how he first encountered Ma’s work. “I read The Financial Times, and on the weekend section of The Financial Times, there’s a column called ‘Lunch with the FT.’ And [Ma Jian] was the one who the writer was having lunch with. So I read that, and I was kind of fascinated by him. And so I bought the novel and some of his other books, and just his thinking was fascinating to me.”

The interview centered on the recently publication of Beijing Coma, which won Ma accolades around the world. “It’s a historical novel, basically, and through memory it maps out China’s transformation from the Cultural Revolution up to 2001. Which is the same year as 9/11,” Byrd said. “What he’s suggesting, I think, is that China’s sort of been in a coma. And it lives, in some ways, in its memory of stuff rather than what’s really going on. That’s been a criticism of him as a writer—‘Why do you keep talking about this stuff in the past?’ But his sense of how he’s using a coma, I think, is just as unconscious, unaware. However, the character in the book is actually in a waking coma, he’s aware of things.”

“What’s really interesting to me about the novel is the way events are recounted,” Byrd continued. “They’re not emotional, they don’t have emotional weight. The emotional weight in the novel is in how this man is analyzing the function of memory. He says, ‘I remember it this way, and memory does this.’ And the fact that he’s trapped inside a body that’s uncommunicative, that he can’t communicate through. You can take in stimulus, but you have no way to share what your experience really is.”

That emotional detachment came to inform Byrd’s choreography in Farewell. The scenic elements are photo-journalistic images of the events Byrd explores. The dance is primarily formal, exploring the visual elements and structures and creating a dialogue with the historical presentation. “The thing that I wanted the movement to do was not to be emotional,” Byrd noted, “for the most part.”

“I wanted it to be complex,” he added, “so that it’s almost impossible for you to see everything at the same time. The organizing principles are designed to make it impossible for you to see everything. You’re going to have to choose what you look at.”

“Complex” is perhaps an understatement. The segments I saw were downright busy. The main set pieces are just benches, and Byrd uses these to manipulate the geometrical patterns onstage; for long segments, the benches focus the action inward, to the middle, with frequent movement around the periphery and across the center-space, such that I struggled to determine what the audience’s perspective would be in performance. True to his reputation, the piece was athletic and demanding on the dancers, who were left panting after going through only 20 minutes or so of the work.

The structure of the work begged a question: if the centerpiece in Beijing Coma, which is set between 1989 and 2001, with the work projecting back in time from the current of the novel to lead up to Tiananmen Square, and then projecting forward into the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, why call it “Farewell”?

“I think that what I was thinking was the idea of, ‘Goodbye to the past.’ The idea that in order to move into the future, you have to get rid of the baggage of the past,” Byrd explained. “And also the other meaning of ‘farewell,’ which means ‘to do well.’ To good luck as you move into the future. And so the farewell exists in this place between the past and the future, so if you’re on that side, it goodbye to all this, and if you’re on this side of it, it means, do well as you go into the future.”