Bring a powerful dance theater work addressing racial stereotyping to life closing Spectrum’s #RACEish season by dance icon Donald Byrd
Spectrum Dance Theater’s 2016 Season #RACEish: An Exploration of America’s 240 Years of (failed) Race Relations has garnered local and national attention – from the The New Yorker to our local City Arts – praising Spectrum’s ability to ignite real conversation around topics of race and justice through dance. Now Spectrum needs your support to finish this epic season with a revisiting of Donald Byrd’s Bessie Award winning masterpiece, “The Minstrel Show Revisited”.
Click the images below to explore our season’s press:
#RACEish, the brain-child of TONY Nominated and Bessie Award winning choreographer and Artistic Director Donald Byrd, has broken new ground for American contemporary dance. We need you to bring the season grand finale to life: Donald Byrd’s The Minstrel Show Revisited.
Originally created in NYC in 1992, the Bessie Award winning smash hit confronted the American theatre tradition of minstrelsy and its stinging legacy. In his revisited version, Byrd has adapted the masterpiece by examining the present day murders of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin.
“We’re using this season to take audiences on a journey. The idea is to talk about race in a vastly different way. The way we talk about race in this country is entirely too safe.” – Donald Byrd, Choreographer and Artistic Director
We need YOU to bring this important piece of work to our community.
Costs
One of the great challenges in producing a dance theater production is the sheer cost it takes to build something of high quality while ensuring that it’s accessible to all. As a non-profit, we serve thousands of individuals across the U.S. with our professional company performances. Our company is one of the most diverse in the nation. We are committed to making our performances financially accessible by providing subsidized tickets and outreach programming.
By helping us meet our goal, you ensure that we can continue to create art of the highest caliber with a powerful social/civic message. And, you ensure that we can continue to make it accessible to all.
In order to pay for this production, we need $25,000, which is why we’ve come to Kickstarter to ask for your support. Here’s how the $25,000 breaks down:
Company Artists: $12,500
Set and Lighting Design: $1,200
Venue Rental: $6,225
Costume Maintenance: $1,600
Production Labor: $400
Kick-starter Fees: $3,075
Impact
You can feel great knowing that your generosity is directly supporting an artistic masterpiece that is encouraging renewed dialogue and perspective on race today.
When an audience member comes to The Minstrel Show Revisited, they leave the theater a different person. Spectrum Dance Theater conjures strong emotional responses that bring about difficult, yet necessary conversations. This impact is hard to measure, but we know that the arts are a unique and powerful avenue to create understanding across cultural divides.
Whether or not we reach our goal, we are committed to putting on this performance. However, if we do not reach our goal, we will be greatly challenged to provide accessibility to our performances through subsidized tickets and outreach programs, and to continue creating work of great quality that addresses important issues of our time.
Your support promotes sustainability for our mission for dance as a social and civic instrument. Thank you.
Spectrum Dance Theater is committed to bringing this project to full fruition. The challenges we face post funding are ticket sales, and providing subsidized tickets for young adults and students. Thanks to great community partners including Seattle Foundation and Crosscut, we anticipate selling the performance at 75% capacity or better.