Letter from the Chair

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

This year, under the title “Next: Incubating Creative Praxis,” the Department of Performing Arts marks the 20th anniversary of the Davis Center with a season shaped collectively by our faculty. This is the first time the entire department has collaborated to build a year of programming from the ground up, designing performances and residencies in conversation with our teaching, our research, and the urgent questions we bring into our classrooms and studios.

Our season features new chamber operas and musicals, immersive installations, interdisciplinary lectures, and sound art—all drawing on and extending the work of our faculty and their networks of artists and scholars. These projects reflect the core of our mission: performance as inquiry. This is a generative cycle in which both performance and scholarship are reimagined through artistic practice.

As we reflect on two decades of performance at the Davis Center, we invite you to see this season as a celebration of the past and, importantly, as a blueprint for what’s next.

Benjamin J. Harbert, Ph.D.
Chair and Professor of Music, Department of Performing Arts