DANCE REVIEW : Guilty Pleasures in ‘Minstrel Show’

In an era of extreme racial tension and radical P.C. militancy, what could be more forbidden than the spectacle of dancers in blackface desperate to please? White saucer-eyes and lips forever seeking approval, cotton-mouthed voices that mangle English with a comic fusion of ignorance and pretension. As Macbeth said after similar revelations, “Can such things be and overcome us like a summer’s cloud without our special wonder?”

They can. Presented Friday as part of the Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century festival, Donald Byrd’s “The Minstrel Show” reveled in showing the unshowable as well as saying the unsayable, offering enough jokes at the expense of Asians, Jews, Latinos, Poles, Italians, Arabs, blondes, homosexuals, women and, especially, blacks to fill a whole season of “America’s Funniest Home Bigotry.”

Many of those jokes came from members of the Japan America Theatre audience, provided on request from Byrd himself during participatory sections of the full-evening performance. Other sequences parodied show-biz sexism as much through Gabriel Berry’s outrageous costumes as Byrd’s choreography, with her bizarre showgirl brassieres (caged, free-rolling, fluorescent tennis balls) particularly inspired.

Now Byrd is smart enough to know that rednecks don’t attend a Black Choreographers festival--so he never bothered to explicitly condemn stereotypes. Instead, he concentrated on showing them as an enduring part of our American heritage, with the entertainment industry and even (gasp!) Major Choreographers mindlessly churning out diversions that denigrate minorities and women.

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The minstrel show tradition provided him with a certifiably antique theatrical format, but allusions to everyone from Bob Fosse to Arsenio Hall continually updated his frame of reference. And, perversely, he staged his nasty show-biz pastiches with as much hard-sell pizazz as their Broadway, Hollywood or Las Vegas sources.

With its breasts and bottoms shaken or rolled in flawless unison, smile upon smile assuring us that we’re loved, desired, powerful--plus all that blackface humor (including Byrd in an uproarious dialect stump speech)--”The Minstrel Show” provided an evening of guilty pleasures as well as irony.

Some of the subtlest irony came in dance sequences where Byrd tore apart his own modern-dance style, keeping his sense of sequencing, partnering, speed and intricacy, but replacing his vocabulary with shuffling, loose-limbed, hand-jiving “black” cliches borrowed from the minstrel show tradition.

His longtime collaborator, composer Mio Morales, rose to the occasion with surprises of his own: Southeast Asian-style gamelan music for the mammy dance, subliminal quotes and allusions, along with increasingly ominous arrangements of Americana classics.

Lest anyone think that Byrd aimed his satire only at white Americans, he included stereotypes still cherished by other citizens. For instance, one scene showed dancer April Wanstall as an oversexed, pink-faced, blond-haired She-Devil conspiring to lure black men to destruction--a shibboleth recently recycled by Bill T. Jones in the “Dutchman” sequence of his “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land.”

Byrd’s mock-nostalgic “Old Kentucky Home” finale showed an enslaved black man and a privileged white woman equally hopeless and in pain--a different reality from the minstrel show concept of childlike, happy blacks or the chorus girl tradition arising simultaneously.

Without ever actually asking for greater honesty and responsibility from entertainers and their audiences, Byrd’s wickedly entertaining survey of entertainment lore reminded us of the lies continually sold to us over the footlights and of our eagerness, generation after generation, to pay any price whatsoever for a hot time in the old town tonight.