Spectrum’s Dance Company’s “Theater of Disruption” lives up to that handle with dual World Premieres
Cruel, life-changing, and—too often—deadly violence suffered by LGBTQ people formed the basis for this 90 minute dance/dramatic performance by the Spectrum Dance Company + Donald Byrd. Though the press release mentions the killing of 49 people and injuring of 58 others in the machine gun attack by Omar Mateen a year ago at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Byrd drew upon the sadder and much older outlaw “tradition” of anti-gay violence. Evoking the artistic monologuist styles that emerged in the 1990s during the peak of the AIDS Plague, Byrd continued his exploration of a “theater of disruption.” This style of theater uses all the tools available for performance on stage to, in Byrd’s words, “engage audiences in issues that are difficult and intractable, and importantly to move closer to disrupting the artificial and often arbitrary boundaries between dance and theater.”
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