Transcript:

[Joyce J. Scott] Donald? Donald Byrd?

[Donald Byrd] Yes! Hey.

[Scott] Hey babe. How are you?

[Byrd] I’m good, how are you?

[Scott] I’m amazingly good because, you know, I’m having my 50-year retrospective. And there’s a whole section called Messing with the Stereotypes and of course “Honey Chil’ Milk” is in it. I’d worked, you know, before with groups of people, but it was a much more, hippie endeavor. This was a real theater piece with props and scripts and lines and the whole thing. So I thought, “Why don’t I talk to Donald Byrd about the trouble we got into, since he was the director of the entire thing?”

[Byrd] I was the director of the entire thing, but I also, I think, came to you with the concept of it?

[Scott] Right. You said, “We’re going to make a dress and we’re going to put five or six people in it, and create a giant mammy.”

[Byrd] I know for me, and I think, in the world at the time, it was one of the earliest times that, Black artists were kind of owning stereotypes around being Black and using those stereotypes, those kinds of negative images, to actually create work.

[Scott] We were still also in a culture when racism was very open. It’s open now again. We’ve gone in a circle.

[Byrd] Yeah

[Scott] Under your guidance, it allowed us to say it in a way that was frank, but not gruesome. I didn’t have fear about getting on stage in front of people or talking about issues because, like, I thought it was so necessary.

[Byrd] I felt the same way. And “Honey Chil’ Milk” is part of this for me, was the idea that needing to be vigilant about anti-Black racism, maybe on the nose in some way, but slightly askance, and “Honey Chil’ Milk” was filled with humor. Even some of the things that were horrible, like the giant mammy is actually, I mean, for some of us, was kind of funny.

[Scott] I think for everyone, it was.

[Byrd] And also, I want to say, when I came to Baltimore to work on it, I was very much aware that I was in the South, and how racism manifests itself there was visible. And that was kind of different for me because I hadn’t lived in the South. I was living in New York. But since that time, I have moved to Seattle, and, and here, I do some of the similar kinds of things that we did down in Baltimore but I think I’ve gotten harsher since I’ve moved to Seattle about leaning into these things a bit more because the insidiousness of it is, is greater. And so, subtlety may not always work.

[Scott] Uh huh. You know, I did a whole series with this, messing with watermelons and messing with stereotypes. And it’s all about either becoming a watermelon or eating a watermelon. One that people find very humorous is “Man Eating Watermelon.” And that piece is in this room, actually a man trying to get away from a watermelon that is consuming it. And that for me, it’s about how all-consuming stereotypes can become.

[Byrd] Well, I’m honored that you want to talk to me to me about it.

[Scott] Well, you were very, very important to me in my progress as a performer.

[Byrd] One of the challenging things about it was that each one of the performers, each one of you, brought different things to the table and how to actually take those gifts and how to create a container for them that would result in an engaging piece of performance art.

[Scott] Yeah. I love you Donald! Bye, bye Sneaky Pete!

[Byrd] Okay. Bye, bye.