scourse?
Donald Byrd, artistic director of Spectrum Dance Theater, isn’t sure, but he and his colleagues aim to find out over the course of the next three years as the Madrona-based dance company embarks on a series of productions designed to get audience members thinking and talking about war, politics and social justice.
The Theater of Needless Talents, which premieres at Spectrum on Friday, Feb. 22, explores art and music created by concentration camp inmates during World War II. It is Byrd’s hope that the show will leave audience members reflecting both on the 20th century’s greatest humanitarian crisis as well as more recent instances of genocide.
“With genocide, I’m just always horrified that these things keep occurring again and again,” Byrd said. “We talk about the Holocaust and we say, “˜Never again,” but what it comes down to is “˜Never again after this time.’ When do we get to the point where never again is really never again? That’s what I’d like people to ask themselves after this show.”
The Theater of Needless Talents is Spectrum’s second production of the season to deal with such weighty topics. The first was Interrupted Narratives, a show that Byrd described as “a requiem for soldiers fallen in Iraq.”
According to Anne Derieux, executive director for Spectrum Dance Theater, upcoming performances will address Middle East tensions, the challenges facing Africa, and the future of China.
“We’re definitely changing course a little to address some global issues and to see what we can do to bridge art and those issues,” she said.
Spectrum is not the only studio in the country currently using dance as a tool for social change. Byrd cites growing outrage with the war in Iraq as the source of increased interest in performance art about violent conflicts, both past and present.
“One of the things that is really interesting that’s happening is [that] arts organizations have been looking at artists’ connections to war and the aftermath of war. Many have seasons planned right now around investigating that topic,” he said.
Both the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center at the University of Notre Dame and the performing arts center at Duke University have signed on as co-commissioners of The Theater of Needless Talents, which will then be performed at those locations in the near future.
The title, The Theater of Needless Talents, is the name the Jewish Czech actor and composer Erwin Schulhoff, whose music the Spectrum performance is set to, gave the production company that he started in Europe in between the first and second world wars. Schulhoff died in Terezìn, but is still considered to be one of the most versatile performance artists of his time, often referred to as “the Jewish Charlie Chaplin.”
The performance itself is being billed as a mix of “dance, theatrical vignettes, and cabaret.” There is no underlying plot or story, which, according to Byrd, relieves him and his performers from the challenges of working with a fictionalized account of the Holocaust.
“We want things to connect obliquely rather than directly,” Byrd said. “How can you actually tell a story about the Holocaust? It kind of trivializes the events to come up with a story. The point is to have people connect on some level with what happened, with how horrible people can be, and also how amazing they can be.”
Byrd said he hopes that audience members will leave with a better understanding of what was lost in the Holocaust as well as other, more recent genocides.
“I want people to make connections between what happened there, what’s happening now in Darfur, and what they can do to stop these things from happening again,” he said. “I’d like people to ask “˜What action can I as an individual take?’ As they watch the show, that’s just a question I hope they’ll sit with and consider.”
Political movement
