Seattle's Spectrum Dance Theater ignites audiences through the ambitious artistic agenda of Donald Byrd, whose appetite to explore the arts knows no boundaries. The enfant terrible of the New York ...

In Donald Byrd’s “The Minstrel Show Revisited,” to be performed in Seattle this week by Spectrum Dance Theater, the performers are in blackface, as you might guess, and the subject is race. The tunes ...

Frederick Douglass once described blackface performers as "...the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion, denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the ...

If U Black Niggas Network, the satirical television station at the center of the 2005 Atlantic Records debut by Durham’s Little Brother, had been a real cable network, the tone of the broadcast would ...

Every film production has its own stories of research and discovery. For Stephen Foster producers Beth Hager and Randy MacLowry, creating the dances Stephen Foster would have seen was a major ...

When choreographer Donald Byrd first presented "The Minstrel Show" more than 20 years ago, he wasn't ready for the way audiences would react. He recalls one performance in La Jolla, California, when ...

In a time of heightened awareness of racism, Spectrum Dance presents an updated version of Donald Byrd’s lauded 1991 work “The Minstrel Show.” It’s a vivid, smart, and often funny—uncomfortably ...

Although he was not, as he claimed, the leader of the first blackface minstrel troupe, he indisputably led one of the most renowned. During a successful run that included a ten-year stint on Broadway, ...

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