sdt 2026
COMPANY
Spectrum Dance Theater (SDT) was founded in 1982 to bring dance of the highest merit to a diverse audience composed of people from different social, cultural, ethnic and economic backgrounds. Our principal objective is to make the art form of dance accessible through contemporary dance performances and high-quality training in a variety of dance styles.
Under Donald Byrd’s visionary artistic leadership since 2002, the organization has embarked on an exhilarating transformation that has attracted world-class dancers, produced some of the most ambitious works in contemporary dance, and generated local and national praise.
Artistic Director
Donald Byrd
Donald Byrd has been the Artistic Director of Spectrum Dance Theater since December 2002. Formerly, he was Artistic Director of Donald Byrd/The Group, a critically acclaimed contemporary dance company, founded in Los Angeles and later based in New York, that toured both nationally and internationally. His career has been long and complex, and his choreographic and theatrical interests are broad. The New York Times describes him as “a choreographer with multiple personalities … an unabashed eclectic.” He is a Tony-nominated (The Color Purple) and Bessie Award-winning (The Minstrel Show) choreographer.
Mr. Byrd has frequently been referred to as a ‘citizen artist,’ a descriptive that perfectly aligns with an important component of Spectrum Dance Theater’s mission and Mr. Byrd’s personal beliefs – “dance as an art form and as a social/ civic instrument.”
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Early projects that were the beginnings of his citizen artist work at Spectrum are Interrupted Narratives/WAR (2007),a critique on the War in Iraq, and The Theater of Needless Talents (2008), a memorial to the artist victims of the Holocaust. Mr. Byrd’s early repertoire also includes three evening-length works that sought, through dance, to stimulate dialogue around a post-9/11, globalized America: A Chekhovian Resolution (2008), a personal, diary-like reflection on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict; Farewell: A Fantastical Contemplation on America’s Relationship with China (2008), inspired by the novel Beijing Coma from Ma Jian and the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square; and The Mother of Us Al (2010)l a dense, collage-like abstract meditation on contemporary Africa.
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Artistic Director, Donald Byrd, continues to demonstrate this by creating dance/theater that is meant to question, to create awareness, to activate, and to move audiences & citizens into action around the persistent social issues that plague contemporary American society and the world: racism and white supremacy, climate change and the climate gap, gender equality, gender identity biases, xenophobia, and police brutality.
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Throughout the 40+ years of his choreographic career, Mr. Byrd has created over 100 works for his companies as well as works for many leading classical and contemporary companies. This list includes Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, The Joffrey Ballet, The Philadelphia Dance Company (Philadanco), Dance Theater of Harlem, and many others. He has worked extensively in theater and opera, both in America and abroad, including Seattle Opera, San Francisco Opera, The Israeli Opera, New York City Opera, The New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, Intiman Theatre, and Baltimore Center Stage.
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Donald Byrd’s many awards, prizes, and fellowships include the Doris Duke Artist Award; Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, Cornish College of the Arts; Masters of Choreography Award, The Kennedy Center; Fellow at The American Academy of Jerusalem; James Baldwin Fellow of United States Artists; Resident Fellow of The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center; Fellow at the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, Harvard University; and the Mayor’s Arts Award for his sustained contributions to the City of Seattle.
A high point of Mr. Byrd’s career was a solo museum exhibition Donald Byrd: The America That Is To Be, at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle in 2019. It was the culmination of his 2016 James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award, which was funded by the Raynier Institute & Foundation through the Frye Art Museum | Artist Trust Consortium. The award supports and advances the creative work of outstanding artists living and working in Washington State.
2025/26 season
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2025/26 season -
We are thrilled to unveil the upcoming season at Spectrum Dance Theater, titled “MEMORY as Archive, History, Warning, Protest, Resistance, Prayer: TRUTH in a TIME of DISTORTION.”
This season is not just a series of performances; it is an exploration of the themes that resonate deeply in today’s world. As we navigate an era marked by cultural and historical erasure, our new season reflects the urgency and importance of preserving truth.
The works reflect that we live in a time of cultural and historical erasure. Across the United States, efforts to dismantle progress toward racial equity are accelerating. Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives are being rescinded. Black history is being redacted or excluded from education. Books are banned. Conversations about systemic racism are silenced under the pretense of neutrality. Simultaneously, white supremacist ideologies have re-emerged into mainstream discourse, repurposed as “heritage,” “traditional values,” or “parental rights.” Christian nationalism gains political ground, promoting a narrow and exclusionary vision of American identity.
Browse the full schedule of our season performances below.
2025/26 season
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2025/26 season -
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.
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)
PAST Performances:
Localities/ An odyssey pt. 2
December 3 – December 7, 2025
Tricia Stromberg Studio Theater | 800 Lake Washington Blvd
Localities/An Odyssey is inspired by Donald Byrd’s unpublished memoir and charts a deeply personal and poetic journey through memory, identity, and artistic formation.
More impressionistic than narrative, the work unfolds as a series of choreographic vignettes—“islands” in a sea of recollection—that explore pivotal moments in Byrd’s life, from his Jim Crow-era childhood in Florida to his experiences at elite academic institutions in the Northeast, and the artistic crucibles of New York and Los Angeles.
Performed by Spectrum Dance Theater company members, the work weaves together abstract movement, spoken memoir, and music by composers ranging from J.S. Bach to contemporary percussion ensembles. Byrd’s narration—raw, lyrical, and emotionally unflinching—grounds the work in lived experience while allowing the dance to suggest a deeper, more elusive truth.
Rather than a straightforward autobiography, Localities offers a meditation on ambition, addiction, alienation, joy, and longing. Byrd’s signature choreographic language—athletic, rigorous, and emotionally incisive—becomes a vehicle for self-examination, remembrance, and ultimately, a search for meaning through the body in motion.
Localities/An Odyssey, Pt. 1 marked the beginning of a larger project —a memoir-in-motion that defies conventional structure in favor of an episodic, sensory, and deeply human approach to storytelling. Pt. 2 continues the journey.
OCCURRENCE #14
October 29 – November 2, 2025
Tricia Stromberg Studio Theater | 800 Lake Washington Blvd
Spectrum Dance Theater is proud to continue its OCCURRENCE series, a bold and imaginative choreographic format first introduced on March 20, 2016, at La Usina del Arte in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Premiered as the culminating public presentation of a U.S. Embassy residency, OCCURRENCE #1 was modeled on the spirit of a Merce Cunningham EVENT—a performance constructed of complete dances, excerpts, and new sequences arranged specifically for the site, often layered with multiple actions occurring simultaneously.
What distinguishes OCCURRENCE within Artistic Director Donald Byrd’s body of work is its deliberate embrace of experimentation, process, and choreographic play. “This is my playtime,” says Byrd. “It’s when I get to nerd out as a choreographer. I recombine past work with new material, guided by imagination and the pursuit of the next right thing to do.” In the OCCURRENCE series, Byrd reconfigures choreographic elements like a child rearranging blocks—placing familiar sequences in new contexts, layering movement phrases not originally meant to coexist, shifting background moments to the foreground, and exploring the impact of music, or its absence.
Each OCCURRENCE becomes a one-of-a-kind dance collage: ephemeral, rigorous, and alive with possibility.
