Donald Byrd (choreographer)


Donald Byrd is an influential American modern dance choreographer, known for themes relating to social justice, and in particular, racism.

Career

For 24 years, beginning 1978, Byrd was the founding artistic director of Donald Byrd/The Group, which toured extensively, nationally and internationally until 2002, when he suspended operations due to financial duress. The Group was based in Los Angeles from 1978 to 1983 and in New York from 1983 to 2002. For years, since 2002, Byrd has been artistic director of The Spectrum Dance Theater, based in Seattle. He is credited for having elevated Spectrum to a company of national rank.
Byrd has choreographed more than 80 modern dance works for his own companies and other companies, including the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, The Philadelphia Dance Company. Byrd also has choreographed for classical companies. He has worked with acclaimed theater and opera companies, including the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, the Intiman Theatre, the San Francisco Opera, the Seattle Opera, and the New York City Opera.

2017 premier

Spectrum Dance Theater premiered Byrd's work, Shot, in January 2017, at the Seattle Repertory Theater. The performance included multimedia and even a lecture in the middle in an acclaimed albeit visceral depiction of the 2016 fatal shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the pleading of his wife, Reykia Scott – "Stop! Please don't shoot!" "Don't shoot him! Don't shoot him! He has no weapon! He has no weapon. Don't shoot him!" Charlotte is about from New London, Byrd's place of birth.

2019 premier

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater premiered Byrd's work, Greenwood, December 6, 2019, at City Center in New York. Byrd described his work as "theater of disruption" "it disrupts our thinking about things, especially, in particular, things around race." The dance performance addresses a 1921 racist mob attack in Tulsa's segregated Greenwood District, which, at the time, was one of the country's most affluent African American communities, known as "America's Black Wall Street." Byrd uses the Rashomon method, depicting three scenarios of what might have happened in an elevator.

As dancer and educator

Byrd, in 1972, was a member of the Twyla Tharp Dance Company; and in 1976, he was a member of Gus Solomons, Jr.'s, Dance Company.
Byrd was dance instructor at the California Institute of the Arts from 1976 through 1982, a period when other notable colleagues taught there, including Cristyne Elizabeth Lawson , Larry A. Attaway '', Rebecca Bobele, Gloria Bowen, Mia Slavenska, Tina Yuan, and Sandra Neels. Byrd taught at University of California-Santa Cruz, Ohio University, and Wesleyan University. In 1993, he was Associate Artist at the Yale Repertory Theater.
Byrd has been member of Board of Directors for the Dance Theater Workshop and Dance USA in Washington, D.C., the national service organization for professional dance, established in 1982.

Awards

Family and growing up

Byrd was born July 21, 1949, in New London, North Carolina, to Jeter Byrd, Jr., and Emmarene Clark . His parents divorced shortly after he was born; and soon after that, with his mother, he moved from New London to Clearwater, Florida. Donald's mother remarried and, around the time he was entering the fifth grade, she and her new husband moved to the Midwest. Donald stayed in Clearwater and was raised by his maternal grandmother, Willie Mae Clark , through high school, until he graduated 1967 from Pinellas High, a bygone segregated school in the Greenwood section of downtown Clearwater. Growing up, his first love, according to biographies, was music. To that end, Byrd studied classical flute; and as a flutist, he became a member of the Pinellas Youth Symphony. He was also a drum major with the Pinellas High School band – the Panthers Marching Band. In high school, Byrd participated in theatrical projects and the debate team.
Byrd's first exposure to dance came when he was 16 years old. Two dancers from Balanchine's New York City Ballet – Edward Villella and Patricia McBride – conducted a lecture-demonstration in Clearwater, which Byrd attended. The dancers left an impression on Byrd, though it was several years later before he began formal training in dance.

Higher education

In 1967, Byrd attended Yale University, initially majoring in philosophy, though he had thoughts of becoming an actor. At Yale, Byrd attended every play produced by the School of Drama and the Long Wharf Theatre. Yale was also where Byrd experienced overt racism for the first time, in the form of slurs and insults, these contrasting with the institutionalized racism of segregation that he had encountered growing up in the South.
The summer after his freshman year, Byrd's prowess on the flute earned him the opportunity to join an ensemble that toured Europe. On his return from Europe, Byrd decided to leave Yale, where he did not feel entirely welcome, and enroll in Tufts University in Boston.
One of the first friends Byrd made at Tufts was William Hurt. By this time, Byrd had begun to study acting seriously. It was from Hurt that Byrd first heard about the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater. On Hurt’s suggestion, Byrd attended a performance of Ailey's signature work, Revelations. As put by his biography in Encyclopedia.com, "the performance was indeed a revelation for Byrd; for the first time in his life, he became aware of the theatrical power of dance."

Higher education timeline

Selected works

Collaborators

Among many others, Byrd has collaborated with composer Mio Morales on several works, including:

Quotes

Videography