Research

In the volatile period of the late sixties and early seventies, several theater groups came to prominence in the United States, informing and shaping activist theater as we know it today. Restaging the Sixties examines the artistry, politics, and legacies of eight radical collectives: the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, the Performance Group, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, El Teatro Campesino, At the Foot of the Mountain, the Free Southern Theater, and Bread and Puppet Theater. Each of the specially commissioned essays is from a leading theater artist, critic, or scholar. The essays follow a three-part structure that first provides a historical overview of each group’s work, then an exploration of the group’s significant contributions to political theater, and finally, the legacy of those contributions.
 
The volume explores how creations such as the Living Theatre's Paradise Now and the Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 overlapped with political interests that, in the late 1960s, highlighted the notion of social collectives as a radical alternative to mainstream society.  Situating theatrical practice within this socio-political context, the book considers how radical theaters sought to redefine the relationship between theater and political activism, and how, as a result, they challenged the foundations of theater itself.

The essays in this collection offer a radical reappraisal of the avant-garde by placing it within a much broader global context. The book questions the very assumptions that underlie the generally accepted chronology and theory of the avant-garde, and offer a bold new performance-based theory that moves beyond Eurocentric presup-positions. In ten essays especially commissioned for this volume, leading scholars and critics including Marvin Carlson, Supito Chatterjee, John Conteh-Morgan, Harry J. Elam, Jr., Joachim Fiebach, David G. Goodman, Jean Graham-Jones, Hanna Higgins, and Adam Versenyi discuss avant-garde performances in Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, Argentina, India, and Japan.

Although the canon of modern and contemporary drama would be difficult to imagine without the influential legacy of the movements and strands of the historical avant-garde, this critical history is often overlooked in courses on modern and contemporary drama and theater.

Though primarily focusing on issues of textuality and performance, the essays regard the antitextualism of the avant-garde as indicative of the wide variety of anti-cultural sentiments that have characterized avant-garde performance. The volume begins with the anti-textual sentiments of the avant-garde, then offers antitextual models, explores specific performances, and ends with a critical analysis of the avant-garde. Uniting the array of opinions articulated is a belief that despite the problems that haunt the traditions of avant-garde theater, it can nonetheless offer continued valuable insights into the industries of literature, theater, scholarship, and culture.

Arguing that postmodernism has so shifted current critical paradigms that Adorno's work can best be assessed in terms of its relevance in specific localized contexts, this book pursues a course that preserves Adorno's opposition to hegemonic programs but that is also wary of Adorno's own (negative) penchant for totalizing concepts. Unlike recent works which attempt to synthesize Adorno's writings into a comprehensive system that then becomes either the focus of an overriding critique or an object of appropriation, Harding orders his book as a collection of essays whose loose association questions the structural totality of Adorno's thought. Though together the essays cover all the major issues of Adorno's thought and offer a wide critical survey of his writings, the diversity of their focus avoids a systematic reduction of Adorno's work into a reproducible technique or method. The result of this strategy is a far more dynamic analysis of Adorno than a mere critical reconstruction of his ideas.

By applying Adorno's theories to works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, and Amiri Baraka, the book pushes critical discussion of Adorno into cultural contexts that, while perhaps new for Adorno scholars, reach out to those whose knowledge of Adorno is limited. This book is a fine introduction to the subtleties of Adorno's writing and a genuine contribution to Adorno scholarship.

Associate Professor Crystal Davis received the Outstanding Leadership in Justice, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award 2023 from the National Dance Education Organization. 

Associate Professor Crystal Davis received "Breaking the M.O.L.D." initiative Professional Development Award 2023. 

Associate Professor Crystal U. Davis was nominated by Dean Stephanie Shonekan for a 7-month collaborative program out of the Vice President for Research, Gregory F. Ball, designed to equip research leaders at UMD with the skills and resources needed to communicate about my research findings and expertise to general audiences and key stakeholders.