Shards

Donald Byrd originally created Shards for the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble (now Ailey II) in 1988. When Artistic Director Sylvia Waters gave Alvin Ailey a peek at the work, Mr. Ailey decided to premiere it with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater instead.

To create this abstract piece, Byrd looked at classic ballets such as Sleeping Beauty and influential modern dances by major African American choreographers of the time including Mr. Ailey, Talley Beatty, and Donald McKayle. He deconstructed the language these choreographers used and recombined it with his own sensibility as a rising young artist.

As Byrd explained in a 2007 interview, "If you think of shards in a kind of genetic way, the inside of each gene—a shard perhaps of the body—has the capacity to reproduce the whole organism again. You clone from the cell. And so, there’s the idea that with one shard of a shattered mirror, what’s imprinted in the shard is the last thing the mirror saw. The mirror can see all kinds of things, but in this case it’s the 'Rose Adagio' from Sleeping Beauty or the clump of dancers in 'I Been ’Buked' [from Revelations]. It’s an Escher-like way of thinking about it, that things kind of turn in on themselves and create a kind of infinity."