Choreographer Byrd Unleashesa Powerful, Disturbing ‘Beast’

Donald Byrd’s “The Beast” is a frightening dance because it shows how cliches about domestic violence are true. You cannot leave a performance of “The Beast” without feeling scathed. At some point, an action--verbal or physical--is probably going to get you, as it did many who stayed after Saturday’s performance at El Camino College’s Marsee Auditorium in Torrance for the heart-wrenching formal discussion about family crisis.

The awakening to horror in “The Beast” could be when Thaddeus Davis and Kristofer Storey handed out red roses to each of the five women, and spoke aloud their inner dialogue: “Pin her against the wall. Is there a problem?”

The cycle of their macho denial was patently clear. They pretended to urinate and defecate, and then they stomped over the prone women. On a white canvas that occupied most of the back wall, they also hurled buckets of red paint. Their hatred was as simple as rain falling.

Then, with a slap of two wooden boards--a Japanese theatrical device intelligently borrowed to signal scene changes--six Donald Byrd/the Group dancers dragged out metal folding chairs.

After a few brutalizing “accidents,” the men departed having balanced their beer cans on the heads of the women, crouching on all fours like dogs or human end tables.

“The Beast” built to an inevitable scene of female retribution, but there was nothing predictable about the shock of Storey’s death. He deserved it when his wife (a magnetic Rachel Venner) repeatedly stabbed him.

He had bounced her head between his hands for minutes on end, in real time. How could she take it? But once murdered and laid out on a clinically white table, Storey rose from the dead and, in the final image, stood arrogantly smiling with his hands perched on his victorious hips.

As was clear in the audience’s personal accounts shared in the post-performance discussion, the beast of domestic violence endures. It is a shame that Byrd’s astute, resonant and, in all senses, remarkable “The Beast”--created originally in 1996 with a brilliant German Expressionistic score by Andy Tierstein--was performed only here once. As hard as it was to see, “The Beast” refreshed cliches about violence and made them deeply felt.