Plantation Remix
Cristal Chanelle Truscott is a playwright, director, scholar, culture worker, founder of Progress Theatre, and creator of “SoulWork,” a generative method for performance and analysis, rooted in generations-old African American performance traditions.
Artist BioPlantation Remix, a site-responsive acapella musical, will be performed at historic plantations and related sites to revisit, raze and reimagine the separatist genre of plantation tourism by rehabilitating the singular story of antebellum glory through shared histories and multiperspective narratives of both enslaved and slave-holding families and their descendants, with a central tenet that no American identity—across a multicultural range of experiences—is left uninformed by the systemic and sociocultural descendants of US Slavery.
2021 Artist Retreat Presentation
Cristal Chanelle Truscott
Chicago, IL
Cristal Chanelle Truscott, PhD, is a playwright, director, scholar, culture worker, founder of Progress Theatre and creator of “SoulWork,” a generative method for performance and analysis, rooted in generations-old African American performance traditions. Her “NeoSpirituals,” or acapella musicals, including PEACHES, ‘MEMBUH, and The Burnin’, straddle time between histories and the present to explore identities, legacies/inheritances and sociocultural movements as a way to encourage connection, understanding and healing relevant to our times. She is a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award, Creative Capital Award, MAP Fund, NPN Creation Fund and NEFA National Theatre Project grants and Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Graduate Acting at Northwestern University.