How did a piece of public dance-art become such a big goddamned deal? It went a little something like this.

I just got off the phone with Susie Purves, the executive director of Spectrum, who says she's had to talk the city of Seattle down about people at Survival Research Labs covering the viaduct with fire, but is deeply surprised at the way this Spectrum/Storefronts thing has gone down, saying Spectrum did its due diligence with Storefronts and the local development organizations and The Miraculous Mandarin was exactly what Spectrum said it would be. (Don't you wish you'd stood in the rain with me to see it the other night? Probably 50 people saw it, and probably eight times that many people are now talking about it.)

Van Diep of Spectrum sent an email clarifying the dance company's position. Shorter version: Spectrum says it did everything it was supposed to do, informed all the people they were supposed to inform, and they don't understand why people are flipping out. The full press release is below the jump.

Corollary: Purves told me a Spectrum staff member was dedicated, during the show, to finding people with children and let them know what was going on so they could take their kids elsewhere if they wanted to. She also said that Mandarin had consumed around one quarter of Spectrum's resources for this year, that they had expected to make no real money from it (free performance, funded by grants, and all that), and are sorely disappointed that they went to all that trouble and expense only to get shut down after the first performance.

And so you don't get the wrong idea: The show involved some sexual grinding (which is what people are exercised about) and a suffocation-murder (which, oddly enough, people aren't exercised about). There was implied nudity but no actual nudity that I could see. And the press release, for your edification and entertainment:

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1. Last Thursday, I saw a dance performance by Spectrum at Hing Hay Park in the International District. The idea was to stand or sit in the park and watch the show through the second-story windows of a building. The park is well-known for its drug dealing and prostitution. The performance, The Miraculous Mandarin, is a longtime-banned ballet by Bela Bartok, updated by Donald Byrd to be about drug dealers and a woman—maybe a prostitute, maybe not—caught between them. You can read about how Hing Hay's dealers and sex workers reacted to Mandarin here.

2. The Storefronts Seattle program—which convinces local landlords to loan their currently vacant properties as venues for public art, and which presented Miraculous Mandarin—cancelled the rest of the performances, saying the simulated sex was too graphic for the public arena. (It did have graphic simulated sex.)

3. Matthew Richter (formerly of The Stranger and ConWorks) said that he had explicitly discussed Mandarin with representatives of Spectrum, insisting that it had to be PG (or tamer), or that the whole Storefronts program would risk being shuttered. Storefronts depends on landlords agreeing to loan their spaces, and many of them are economically and culturally conservative. No more landlord buy-in, no more program. Richter and Storefronts also worried on their blog that they had been misled about the content of Mandarin.

4. On the phone this morning, Spectrum choreographer Donald Byrd described the situation as a misunderstanding that blew up into a controversy. He strenuously objected to the idea that he was trying to pull a fast one on Storefronts. "I'm not an adolescent!" he said. "I'm 62 years old! I don't operate like that. I'm not trying to shock anyone. I don't have anything to prove.... The thought that I would put energy into deceiving anyone? This will sound condescending and nasty, I guess, but nobody is important enough to me to deceive them. There's a lot of effort in that—and I'm lazy!"

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