Minstrel Show as Social Commentary : Dance: A racially motivated slaying prompted choreographer Donald Byrd to create a satirical look at the often derogatory song-and-dance tradition.

Many people probably don’t know that Little Richard got his start in 1945 as an 8-year-old singing in minstrel shows and selling snake oil. Or that the term Jim Crow is believed to have originated with a minstrel song and dance. Or that, contrary to popular belief, banjos originated in black culture, brought to this country by slaves from Africa. The first whites to play the instrument were white minstrels in blackface. Their imitations were derogatory and stereotypical.

When minstrelsy began in the 1820s, white theater performers in Northeast urban centers blackened their faces with burnt cork and depicted slaves as clownish, superstitious, childlike or dancing “darkies,” and depicted black servants as dupes who secretly wanted to be white.

After the Civil War, black performers, some of whom became famous, took over the song, dance and comedy roles, but were forced by white managers and troupe owners to perpetuate--in black caricature makeup--the old, demeaning routines of the white minstrel tradition.

Choreographer Donald Byrd became interested in minstrelsy 10 years ago and created a minstrel-show piece for his now 13-year-old dance company, The Group.

The 1989 slaying by white teen-agers of a black youth in Brooklyn’s predominantly white Bensonhurst neighborhood, where the 16-year-old and three black friends had gone to look at a used car, spurred Byrd into returning to the minstrel subject to make a larger-scale commentary on race relations.

The result is “The Minstrel Show,” a two-hour music-and-dance farce, with skits, stunts and traditional minstrel routines, to be performed at 8 p.m. today at Mandeville Auditorium at UC San Diego.

“I was really disturbed by” the Bensonhurst incident,” Byrd said by phone from Los Angeles. “I felt that something about the civil rights movement didn’t take, that people didn’t get it, that if these kids were behaving that way, it was a clear indication that something didn’t work.

“I started looking at what I could do. I could have done work for social reform in terms of working in a political medium, but I felt that what I did best was work in the theater, and the minstrel show came to mind again.”

Byrd researched the origin and development of minstrel shows, which he calls America’s first popular culture.

“What I was trying to do was not necessarily to authentically or historically re-create minstrel shows, but to make something that had a feeling of minstrel shows and was structured somewhat like them, but had a more contemporary sensibility.”

He has incorporated some traditional antebellum minstrel dances, such as the soft shoe, the stop-time, the buck and the wing. There’s also the “Walk Around,” which typically opened a minstrel show, with all the performers circling on stage to rousing music.

The show’s first half, following tradition, is a setup for two joke tellers, Tambo and Bones, Byrd said. The second half is a series of specialty acts--”like the old Ed Sullivan show . . . the equivalent of that, only stranger, odd,” Byrd said with a laugh.

The show is essentially one number after another, but it has a late-20th-Century performance-art approach, in that spoken commentary interrupts the minstrel sequences.

“Minstrel Show” is not only about racial stereotyping but also about gender stereotyping, as in the degradation of women as sex objects in genuine minstrel shows. Both racist and sexist stereotyping in “show biz” has survived into this century, and its perpetuation is what prompted Byrd’s research.

“Minstrelsy is a huge part of American theatrical history, so there are a lot of people both black and white who have written about it,” he said. “The only real distinction (between the black and white perspectives) is over the origin of some of the dances. The white historians tend to think that the dance forms were blacks imitating what they saw white people do, but the black historians say no, the blacks were doing what they do and the whites imitated them.”

One historian, Bill Barlow of Howard University, has written that minstrelsy is a conflicting legacy. “It was the training ground for many gifted Afro-American entertainers who would not have had the opportunity to develop otherwise, but it was also the spawning ground for many degrading racial stereotypes that found their way into the popular culture of 20th-Century America.”

There is plenty of dancing in the show, Byrd said.

“Some people respond more to the theatrical elements and some more to the dance,” he said. “But I’m a choreographer. . . . Some of my ongoing interests in movement--movement invention and form--are in this piece. Some of it is speed, and density. And it is clear that the dancers are highly skilled.”

Breakneck speed and density are trademark dance styles for Byrd. He’s been called “an incredible movement machine,” “daring and uncompromising . . . with brittle wit and flashiness.” Byrd has received commissions from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, among other companies, and his company has toured the United States and Europe. He has taught at several universities, including California Institute for the Arts for six years.

As for dance in “The Minstrel Show,” Byrd said that “the problem I was engaged in (was) how to use elements on minstrel dancing along with a contemporary vocabulary. One of the things I’ve been interested in for a while is what is ‘black dancing’ in the modern dance tradition.

“I combined European and black dancing, or what a black dance sensibility is, with a European form--plus the historical dancing and show biz. All those things got put into the mix,” he said.

The show’s music is also a hybrid. Some is contemporary, Byrd said, and some was written after the minstrelsy heyday, by Scott Joplin. Real minstrel music, Byrd said, would be too unsophisticated for contemporary audiences.

“However, I include the traditional opening for minstrel shows in the golden age of minstrelsy, a tune called ‘Hot Time’ . . . so it’s a combination of contemporary music, ragtime and modified minstrel music.

“I made a dance to an old Art Tatum recording in which he’s playing a popular theme from a Massenet opera, but in his style,” Byrd said. “In many ways, that’s in the spirit of minstrelsy--you take something everybody knows, that is popular, and then do your own take on it.”

Donald Byrd/The Group perform “The Minstrel Show” at 8 p.m. today, Mandeville Auditorium, UC San Diego. Tickets are $15 general, $11 for students and $13 for faculty, staff and senior citizens. Available at the UCSD box office from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., or from any TicketMaster outlet. Call 534-6467.