Recent Stories with tag sept. 11

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

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.

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."... (more)