Description:

Join us for a noontime works-in-progress talk by Professor Cristal Chanelle Truscott! 

Cristal Chanelle Truscott, PhD is a culture worker, scholar, educator, playwright, director, founder of the touring ensemble Progress Theatre, and creator of “SoulWork” – a generative method for making performance, training artists, engaging communities and framing analytical research that is rooted in generations-old African American cultural practices, theories and performance traditions. 

As a culture worker and artist, Dr. Truscott is director of SoulWork Studio and has led Progress Theatre in using art as anti-racism to connect communities via a broad, deeply linked grassroots network fostered nationally and internationally. She writes a capella musicals called “NeoSpirituals” that span and straddle time between histories and the present to explore identities, inheritances/legacies and cultural movements to encourage connection, consciousness, and healing. These include PEACHES (in Plays from the Boom Box Galaxy, TCG Books), ‘MEMBUH, and The Burnin’. Plantation Remix, her current work-in-progress, is a site-responsive NeoSpiritual to radically reimagine the separatist genre of heritage tourism by rehearsing a contemporary, multi-cultural, future-building “afterlife” for historic sites related to slavery in the U.S. Her plays blend pop culture and academic conversations, fusing genre from Negro Spirituals and Folklore to Blues, R&B, and Hip Hop to produce performances that engage communities across race, class, gender, and spiritual identity.

We hope to see you there!

Feel free to reach out to bac@northwestern.edu with any questions.