And the sky is not cloudy all day

Music

John Adams (“Rag the Bone”, “Judah to Ocean”, “Toot Nipple”, “Dogjam”, and “Pavane: She’s so Fine” from John’s Book of Alleged Dances, 1994)

Choreography

Donald Byrd

Costume Design

Doris Black

Lighting Design

Reed Nakayama

Premiere

April 1, 2021
Pacific Northwest Ballet (digital release)
Filmed March 2021

The world premiere of Donald Byrd’s And the sky is not cloudy all day is generously underwritten by Marcella McCaffray.

Little boys of my generation played “Cowboys and Indians.” Because of what I saw on TV and in movies, I wanted to be like the men depicted in those visual narratives. For me the West as myth pulled at my notions of masculinity. I wanted to be the hero of a John Ford movie. As a boy, the racial implications of that want had not dawned on me. Neither did I know the movement West brought with it the genocidal murder of the Indigenous people, now turned into a game for boys. In these games nobody wanted to be the Indians because we knew the outcome if not the implication. We played the cowboys and we killed the Indians.

In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner, in his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” used the term “frontier” as a model for understanding American culture. Turner thought of the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery [Native people] and civilization [White people]” and argued that this point was the foundation for American identity and politics. Americans’ notions of nationalism, democracy, and individualism, as well as a rejection of European ideals, Turner believed, were a result of the frontier. Thus he concluded that America was only unique because of its interaction with the frontier (and the West as it expanded) and therefore “to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics.”

But I think it was the manifestations in popular culture of these notions of the West and the frontier that promulgated the myth. Beginning with the Western novels of Zane Grey and the works of painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer Frederic Sackrider Remington, American men and boys became increasingly enthralled by these images of the West. But perhaps the most potent influence was Hollywood and its machinery of dream and myth-making. Through movies, in particular the early films of John Ford and his Stagecoach (1939), and later in television shows (Zane Grey Theater, Rawhide, Wagon Train) the myth of the West was solidified and indelibly inscribed the images of a strong and rugged Western (White) man in the imagination of the boys and men of the late-nineteenth and early- and mid-twentieth centuries.

My new work for Pacific Northwest Ballet, And the sky is not cloudy all day, with its John Adams score so reminiscent of Aaron Copland’s dance scores for Martha Graham, Eugene Loring, and Agnes de Mille is a kind of “nostalgia”. It presents a picture of something that existed only in my boyhood imagination. It is like the ‘dream ballet’ in a Broadway musical. It steps out of time and reality to present a vision free of harshness, where the bloody narrative of the massacre of Native people is not there. There is a tension created by what we know happened and this confection. It is my boyhood dream, a boy from the past’s playtime. Ultimately, however, as we watch, we must ask ourselves to consider and grapple with the myth of the West, the true West and its cruelty, and its terrible legacy… Yet if only for one brief moment, it also allows us to accept those contradictions.

Notes by Donald Byrd, March 2021

Artist Biographies

Donald Byrd

Donald Byrd is a Tony-nominated (The Color Purple) and Bessie Award-winning (The Minstrel Show) choreographer. He has been the Artistic Director of Spectrum Dance Theater in Seattle 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 NewYork that toured both nationally and internationally. He has created dance works for many leading companies including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Pacific Northwest Ballet, The Joffrey Ballet, and Dance Theater of Harlem, among others, and worked extensively in theater and opera.

His 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. He was recently named a 2019 Doris Duke Artist Awardee.

Donald Byrd received the 2016 James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award, which is 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 and culminates in a presentation at the Frye Art Museum.