Spectrum Dance Theater Donald Byrd, Executive Artistic Director
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Friday, February 9, 2018, 8pm Saturday, February 10, 2018, 2pm and 8pm Metro Operahouse, Oakland Spectrum Dance Theater Donald Byrd, executive artistic director A Rap on Race Premiere: May 5, 2016 at The Leo K. Theatre at Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle, WA CO-CREATORS Donald Byrd & Anna Deavere Smith CHOREOGRAPHY & DIRECTION Donald Byrd LIGHTING & SCENIC DESIGN Jack Mehler COSTUME DESIGN Doris Black LIGHTING DIRECTION Nathan W. Scheuer STAGE MANAGER Sara Torres TEXT A Rap on Race by James Baldwin and Margaret Mead MUSIC The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady composed by Charles Mingus This performance will last approximately 85 minutes and be performed without an intermission. A Rap on Race used by kind permission of The Estate of James Baldwin and Dr. Mary Catherine Bateson. The creation of A Rap on Race was supported by 4Culture, ArtsFund, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, the National Endowment for the Arts, MapFund, Tricia Stromberg Professional Dancers Fund, Nesholm Family Foundation, and Laird Patterson. The presentation of Spectrum Dance Theater was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Cal Performances presentations in Oakland are generously underwritten by Signature Development Group. Cal Performances’ 2017 –18 season is sponsored by Wells Fargo. Anna Deavere Smith and Donald Byrd Talk A Rap on Race Donald Byrd: So the first question… and I about persona and language. I then learned and don’t want to do the interview, I think, as some - performed the edit that you have as a one- body who is not vested in it in some way, be - person piece for the opening of Zankel Theater cause that’s kind of impossible… at Carnegie Hall. I then directed actors in it in 2014. The recording and book are compelling Anna Deavere Smith: Yes, and not true. to me as a drama. Race is the topic of discus - sion, but the drama is actually more complex. DB: In your usual process you do the fieldwork It is a drama about two people who have met of interviewing the subjects. You have met them their match intellectually, but who substantively and have a real sense of them beyond the inter - see the world differently, in part because of their view. Because this was a pre-existing recording, histories and their experiences, but also because how are the challenges different, in shaping the one of them, Baldwin, thinks and talks in meta - script and, in this particular case, it not being phor and the other collects and absorbs what devised as a solo performance? she calls “facts.” The fire in the conversation is about two inevitably different ways of seeing ADS: I have been learning and studying this and connoting the world. material since the early 1980s, when I found it in the bookstore of the American Museum of DB: Can you tell me what it is about this mate - Natural History in New York, where Margaret rial—the recordings—that attracted you in the Mead worked in the Department of Anthro - first place? pology from the 1920s until her death. I have taught it for years in my acting classes, having ADS: The musicality of it, and also their will - students play parts and switch sides to learn ingness to talk with one another and their desire Opposite: A Rap on Race . P hoto by Tino Tran. PROGRAM NOTES to pick up the pieces of the 1960s and to make he is doing it in a way that is not meant to set sense of them. And so the vigor of the inquiry her up, but just to allow her to revel in some on both sides is very interesting to me. ways in who she is and what her background is. DB: This thing you said about the musicality ADS: Yeah, I mean I don’t know if he had a mo - of it… when you and I were working together, tive. I know from watching audiences watch it, you said, “Listen to the tapes and try to capture they assume certain things—they laugh because the musicality of it….” they think that it’s this white woman, you know, talking so much. ADS: Yeah. DB: Yeah. DB: I’ve found the same thing happens when doing it, performing it, is that they—Mead and ADS: But I actually think that any good writer, Baldwin—start to make sense, literally just in any good artist, any good thinker spends a good the abstraction of the musicality of how they deal of time listening or reading or watching. speak to each other. Do you think that that’s And so I think that he’s truly—my choice if I where the truth of it really is, in how they are were performing him—is that he’s truly inter - playing their music together? That there is ested. something about that , their music, as much as in what they are actually saying, their interplay, DB: Right. in the counterpart of the musicality of their conversation? ADS: He doesn’t know her. ADS: I think that’s part of it. But I do think that DB: Yeah. there is also just the heft, the intellectual heft, that even if we had never heard them and we ADS: As you know they met specifically for this just saw this on the page, you can feel the intel - and he doesn’t know the terms of the conversa - lectual energy there and the bulk of knowledge. tion yet. So I think it would be wise for any of us You know, these are true public intellectuals. So in that same situation to listen before we speak. I would say that both are true, that both count in this case. DB: I agree. I find that he just—they don’t know each other—he just listens. And then the other DB: One of the things I find really interesting is thing… I mean, one other question is about the that, in the beginning of the conversation with role of alcohol in loosening them up. As the her, he seems to let her speak. He acquiesces in conversation progresses, would they have been some way or—what’s the word I’m looking able to have a conversation like this if they had for?—he is “gracious” in his letting her tell him not been so sloshed? all about her northern background and her northern good and all of that stuff, that pro - ADS: Well I don’t know. We don’t know if they gressive liberal kind of way of thinking, and that were drinking because we didn’t see it. You Berkeley RADICAL – JOINING GENERATIONS ese performances are part of the 2017/18 Berkeley RADICAL Joining Generations programming strand, which explores the work of four generations of African-American choreographers who have expanded the terrain of contemporary dance, each speaking profoundly, deliberately, and uniquely to issues of identity. Joining Generations concludes later this season with the annual visit by the Alvin Ailey American Dance eater (Apr 10 –15). For more information, please visit calperformances.org. 6 PLAYBILL PROGRAM NOTES n a r T o n i T know what I’m saying? Maybe that slurred do so, and I think without alcohol it would be speech is that they’re tired. I mean at one point, just as open and just as fiery. he says “these last 48 hours” or whatever. DB: Right. I wonder if…I mean, I think… one DB: Right. of the things I’ve said to people and wonder if you agree with this or if there is something you ADS: So that’s a long time. So we don’t know want to add to it… I kind of look at this, their for sure. I think we have to say that. We don’t conversation as a model. That if we … that the know if they were drinking. It seems that they value of bringing it up, the Mead/Baldwin con - were. And do I think that they could have had versation, and kind of putting it in front of peo - the same conversation? Absolutely. Absolutely. ple is in some ways… they are a model for how I have no doubt about that. Because you and I we might… the degree of honesty and openness are both old enough to know how those quote- that we might have… and the kind of messiness unquote “conversations” about race went quote- and sloppiness of having a conversation about unquote “back in the day,” when we weren’t so race. My hope is that in some ways their con - careful about talking about white privilege or versation is a model and might give us permis - this or that or the other. I think that people were sion to have deep uninhibited conversations in a vigorous seeking, asking how can we find around race. our way together after, you know, more than 100 years—or 200 years depending on when ADS: Well I think, yes, I think it’s a model, very you landed on American soil—all these years hard to find now. But I also think that we again of a very peculiar relationship that was guarded can’t underestimate that this isn’t just like a and where people didn’t have a chance to have truth-telling session. These are two people who their full humanity expressed. So I think many are extremely accomplished researchers in their of us dove into that when we had a chance to own way, thinkers and writers.