SEASON PERFORMANCES
UPCOMING:
La Création du Monde
in collaboration with Music of Remembrance
March 15, 2026
Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall
Darius Milhaud’s La Création du Monde was inspired by the composer’s trip to Harlem. For this daring ballet work, he drew on a blend of jazz and classical idioms to imagine the creation of the world according to African myths. Few details remain of the original choreography, but Music of Remembrance has commissioned Spectrum Dance Theater’s award-winning Donald Byrd to create new choreography for this captivating work, which evokes the experimental aura of Paris in the 1920s. This will mark the sixth commission/collaboration between Music of Remembrance and Donald Byrd.
Occurrence #14
la mama moves! dance festival
April 9 – April 12, 2026
New York, NY
Join us in New York this April at the 2026 La Mama Moves! Dance Festival! Spectrum Dance Theater is proud to collaborate with La Mama to co-present OCCURRENCE #14 at this year's festival.
La MaMa Moves! 2026, the 21st season of La MaMa’s annual dance festival, brings together dance artists at all stages of their careers to experiment, collaborate, and share new work. Curated by Nicky Paraiso, the festival will take place over five weeks in April and May of 2026 and will include twelve productions across La MaMa’s four venues, and up to four in-person community workshops and public discussions. This year’s festival line-up features dancemakers Donald Byrd, Beth Corning & Tom Lee, Vangeline, Patricia Hoffbauer, Sun Kim Dance Theatre, Green Cow, Iver Findlay, BamBam Frost & Ori Flomin, Pioneers Go East Collective, and additional artists invited by guest curators Martita Abril and Blaze Ferrer.
Performance Schedule:
Thursday, April 9 at 8:00 PM
Friday, April 10 at 8:00 PM
Saturday, April 11 at 5:00 PM
Sunday, April 12 at 3:00 PM
The Insidious Trilogy:
A Theatrical Event
May 20 – May 24, 2026
On The Boards | 100 W Roy St. Seattle, WA
The centerpiece of the season will be the complete Insidious Trilogy. The Trilogy contemplates Jim Crow, its history, and its contemporary manifestations; it confronts America’s history of racial violence, systemic oppression, and deliberate forgetting. It is not merely a series of dances—it is a cultural intervention. The three works that make up the trilogy are Strange Fruit, Grief, and Targeted.
Strange Fruit premiered in April of 2019 and centers on lynching and its usage as a tool of racial terrorism during the Jim Crow Era. As a way to reestablish white supremacy and suppress black civil rights, lynching emerged as a vicious and horrific tool of racial control in the South after Reconstruction. Strange Fruit plays out as a series of Expressionist dance/theater vignettes. The work is abstract and non-narrative but is informed by the reality of these brutal acts of violence and terrorism.
Music: Cecilie Ore; Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto; and various Spirituals /Hymns; Sound Design: Rob Witmer
Grief premiered in May of 2022 (revised 2024), and imagines a moment just before Emmett Till’s funeral, the 14-year-old Black boy who was abducted and horrifically murdered in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. Embodying the resolve of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, Grief shifts from a normal external perspective on the pre-funeral events to the sensation of experiencing the moment from inside Till-Mobley’s mind and body.
Music: Andy Teirstein (Prologue), Judith Cohen, pianist in Prologue (recording); Tyshawn Sorey; King Britt; Josephine Howell (Hold On and Vocalizations)
Targeted premiered on June 2, 2023. On May 14, 2022, in Buffalo, New York, at a Tops Friendly Markets store, a mass shooting occurred. Ten Black people were killed, and three other people were injured. The source material for this documentary dance/theater work draws on the manifesto of self-described white supremacist shooter, Payton S. Gendron, an 18-year-old college student. That manifesto puts on display “the great replacement theory”, a belief that whiteness is under threat, justifying the systematic targeting of the murder of Black people and non-white immigrants by white supremacists.
Music: Davee C. Carpenter
The complete trilogy performs over five days in a 2-act or 3-act rotating repertory format:
Wednesday, May 20, 2026, 7:30 PM, Strange Fruit/Grief (two acts)
Thursday, May 21, 2026, 7:30 PM, Strange Fruit/Targeted (two acts)
Friday, May 22, 2026, 7:30 PM, Targeted/Grief (two acts)
Saturday, May 23, 2026, 6:00 PM, Strange Fruit/Grief/Targeted (three acts, with a dinner break)
Sunday, May 24, 2026, 2:00 PM, Targeted/Grief (two acts)