RESEARCH: THE CROSSROADS PROJECT
Dancing at the Crossroads
A celebration of African American & Anglo-Celtic Dance in the New World. Premiered Feb 2013; scheduled for presentation as part of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Washington DC, Summer 2015.Visit the show's website via the link below.
The Crossroads Project at the TTU Vernacular Music Center creates connections: between peoples and communities; between scholarship and lived experience; between traditions and innovations; between the past, the present, and the future. Grounded in the partnership of the VMC and the Roots Music Institute; at the meeting place of research, teaching, and advocacy in the world’s diverse music & dance; the Crossroads Project deploys an integrative, inclusive vision of excellence in the participatory vernacular arts and in the communities that birthed those arts. Headquartered at Texas Tech University, the Project combines engaged scholarship, creative productions, educational presentations and materials, community advocacy, public advocacy, print publications, an online journal, and an annual symposium reaching across the academic disciplines, to develop connections between music, dance, theatre, storytelling, geography, genealogy, history, folklore, and myth. The Project celebrates and facilitates the use of participatory arts as tools for the creative revitalization of 21st century communities: locally, regionally, and around the globe. Texas Tech University provides an educational home for the Crossroads Project, but through its training of young arts professionals at undergraduate and graduate levels, the Vernacular Music Center simultaneously reaches outward from the Tech campus to regional communities and to international conversations, particularly through its institutional partner the Roots Music Institute (501c3).
Our core goal, which lies at the heart of the VMC’s and the Project’s mission, is to maximize the capacity of citizens to employ participatory vernacular performance arts--dance, instrumental music, and song--in service to the social, psychological and ecological health and longevity of their own local, regional, and global communities.
Devised Theatre: Where Scholarship & Creativity Meet
The flagship production of the Crossroads Project is Dancing at the Crossroads, an impressionistic, evocative, engaging theatrical spectacle of live music and dance, celebrating the meetings and transformations between European and African cultures which are the deep roots of American popular music. Conceived as a show integrating music, solo & group dance, narration, solo song, projections, sets, and costume, it draws upon a corps of energized and charismatic young singers, players, and dancers, to tell the stories, both real and imagined, magical and mythical, dusk-to-dawn, that lie at the heart of the American expressive imagination. Mr Scratch & the Bluesman, the Dance Master and the Freestyler, Elizabeth Bennet & the Creole Girl, Reynardine & Marie Laveau dance their way out of history & legend and onto our stage. Suitable for all ages and accessible to widely-diverse audiences, the show is dramatic, participatory, and expansive, capable of taking any audience in any venue on a journey of adventure, discovery, and transformation. The show was premiered to SRO audiences in Lubbock TX in February 2013: for press reports, photos, video, and much more, visit the show's website. Dr Smith (director of the VMC) and colleague Dr Bill Gelber (head of acting at TTU) will present on the show as research project at multiple international conferences (Ireland, Wales, Hungary, England, Brazil, Spain, Canada) in 2013-14.
Celebrating Engaged Scholarship and “Multiple Knowings”
Communal, participatory arts forms have been an essential part of human societies for as much as 40,000 years, since the cave paintings under Cantabria: marking the cycles of the seasons and the calendar; of human experience, from birth to marriage to death and the afterlife. The research mission of the Vernacular Music Center, as crystallized in the flagship Crossroads Project, is to better understand, expertly engage, and vigorously advocate for the enrichment of human experience which communal creativity makes possible. Even in our post-industrial, technologized 21st century life, vernacular participatory arts provide social and creative tools to help us reconnect with nature, with the world around us, across the generations, and with the spiritual and the eternal. Developing a holistic approach to the study of music, dance, and storytelling in culture, recognizing that cultures develop many “complementary Knowings,” we map terrains and topographies and the interplay of seasons and geographies; we employ the “Old Ways” in order to engage, via transformative and renewable dynamic experience, with the topographies of places, cultures, and the human experience.
The VMC and RMI thus function as centers for the study of music and dance in culture, and as creative environments in which to discover, demonstrate, reinvent and teach ways of using pre-industrial art forms to revitalize post-industrial communities.
The VMC and RMI thus function as centers for the study of music and dance in culture, and as creative environments in which to discover, demonstrate, reinvent and teach ways of using pre-industrial art forms to revitalize post-industrial communities.
