Byrd’s Beast Dares You To Sit and Watch

There are many affecting moments onstage in Donald Byrd’s remount of The Beast (at Spectrum Dance Theater’s studio theater through October 16), but a good number also arise offstage: Rarely does an audience feel so implicated in a work, as in this dance of domestic violence that had its premiere in 1996.

The New York Times review of the original work, which featured a glowing rectangle and dancers spattering stage blood, called out Byrd’s eclectic blend of Brechtian alienation and overheated German Expressionism.

In this 2011 re-visioning, Byrd has doubled down on Brecht, with the aid of Matthew Richter’s stark scenic design, Doris Black’s cool gray costumes, and Tom Sturge’s expressive lighting: Multi-colored rectangles of strike tape map out the floor like an electronic schematic showing power flows, a puppet head shrieks an abusive screed, projected blood drips down a screen, a long white over-determined table suggests dining room, dance platform, morgue. The sharp snap of a wooden clapper signals an end to scenes. A dancer introduces the next via megaphone.

It’s irrational, of course–why should you interrogate yourself about watching a representation of domestic violence? The resemblance to real-life domestic violence (in that there are usually spectators of a sort who hold back from intervening) produces an anxiety that can’t be resolved within the piece, even as it reaches its conclusion.

Post-show, there’s a discussion that ranges beyond dance to domestic violence, and allows people, consciously or not, to voice the source of their discomfort. One audience member over the weekend asked if the dancers could hug each other. Another wanted to firmly state that a “certain kind of person” gets battered, which the domestic violence counselor on hand just as firmly disagreed with.

The dance’s narrative, Byrd admits, is drawn archetypically from case histories of abuse: The Beast (danced by the charismatic Donald Jones, Jr.) grew up witnessing abuse. He is charming and explosively angry. He disparages his young wife (Kate Monthy), slaps her, treats her as a sex object, balances his beer on her, then apologizes, begs for forgiveness. She is confused, cut off from friends, made to feel worthless and the center of his world. It’s her fault, she sets him off, she can change him, every relationship has problems.

There is a fairy-tale wedding, everyone wearing big, plastered-on smiles. The bride’s dress is beautiful, she dances with her husband, his hands tighten on hers–really tighten. Soon he’ll beat her. At the side of the stage, musicians Judith Cohen, piano; Jamie Maschler, accordion and percussion; Alicia Rinehart, violin and viola; and Tobi Stone, woodwinds, play dance and theatre composer Andy Teirstein’s off-kilter cabaret score.

Byrd’s choreography turns the trust relationship of dance on its head–he dramatizes in dance (rather than simply using dance to illustrate) the gut-wrenching whip-arounds and reversals, seizures and falls, of a partnership that’s no partnership to speak of. His leads, Monthy and Jones, are frighteningly (in this context) talented actors as well, giving you volumes with a slight shrinking away, a thousand-yard-stare, an embrace that reminds you of a boxers’ clinch.

They are, speaking of complicity, replicated by three couples that share to some extent their physically and emotionally contorting dynamic. At times you see Vincent Lopez and Ty  Cheng throwing their partners around like meat dolls, posturing, stamping, competing in spousal put-downs; but when The Beast takes things “too far,” they also become a chorus of disapproval. (Cheng also plays The Beast’s father, bristling with his own rage.)

There’s a moment when the women link arms that’s not at all anthemic, but still lets you know these are formidable people, not passive victims. Newcomer Jade Curtis in particular is strikingly fast and strong, her lines compressed arcs that suggest a bow and invisible arrows.

In Byrd’s telling, revenge is a natural culmination–and failure. There’s no getting even.