Letter from the Chair

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

In 2005, the Davis Performing Arts Center opened its doors as Georgetown’s distinctive commitment to the arts, as a laboratory where scholarship and performance, students and professionals, tradition and experimentation could converge. Twenty years later, that vision has not only held—it has evolved into a creative ecosystem of remarkable academic rigor and artistic collaboration.

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.

These ideas are woven into our curriculum. Courses in songwriting, sound studies, eco-acoustics, music and medicine, performance and politics, sustainable fashion, and Asian American performance directly intersect with the season’s events. The Friday Music Series and Performing Arts Colloquium bring iconoclastic interdisciplinary artists—like Dessa, Peter Yates, and Tania Isaac—into weekly dialogue with our students, offering both performance and reflection on the artist’s role in the world.

Our students continue to share the stage this year with innovative capstone projects, Music Week, and Dance Week. These events are part of the same vision that unites faculty scholarship, performance, and public programming. And our newest initiative, the Music Sustainability Initiative, builds on the decades of musician advocacy and models the kind of artist-institution-community partnership we will cultivate in the years ahead.

The strength of this season is how it came to be: through the integration of research, teaching, and performance, through the convergence of faculty vision and student energy, and through renewed commitment to collaboration across Georgetown and the DC arts community.

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.