Spectrum Dance Theater and Donald Byrd present

THE insidious trilogy

MAY 20 - 24, 2026

A THEATRICAL EVENT

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.

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strange fruit

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grief

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targeted

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strange fruit • grief • targeted •

Poster for 'The Insidious Trilogy,' a theatrical event running from May 20-24, 2026, featuring Spectrum Dance Theater. The poster has a collage-style design with overlapping images of people, a tree, and abstract textures, with text providing event details and choreography by Donald Byrd.

The Insidious Trilogy:

A Theatrical Event

May 20 – May 24, 2026

On The Boards | 100 W Roy St. Seattle, WA

A theatrical dance performance with six dancers leaping in front of a large tree prop on stage with a yellow backdrop and digital screens showing images of trees above.

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

A woman in a black dress with pearls and white gloves is crying and praying, surrounded by young children with headphones, in a dark setting.

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)

Group of five women in white dance costumes perform on stage, with a male instructor in military-style clothing holding a paper and pencil observing in the background.

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)

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