In a 21^st century post-industrial west in which disinformation and the “fog of propaganda” are intentionally deployed via powerful and addictive digital media, oppositional art-making which situates itself in local, tactile, communal, and somatic material experience is an act of resistance. In university music education systems, in which outcomes and assessments drive influence, promotion, and finance, to attempt to recover—or even to employ – the art of the grassroots local is both systemically challenging and immensely important. Drawing on analytical frames from performance studies, the anthropology of performance, and practice-based research in team- and project-oriented learning, this presentation investigates, problematizes, and rationalizes the production of a piece of site-specific immersive musical theater, set in – and in fact suggested by – a decayed 1928 movie palace in Levelland Texas in the American Southwest, undertaken by a multimodal team of university composers, dramatists, educators, and student performers, in partnership with a community-based non-profit. It further investigates strategies for recovering the tactile, communal, and experiential in the era of pandemic quarantine, and the means by which these essential human experiences can be recovered via alternate media. It argues that vernacular pedagogies – learning which is, in its ethos, intentions, and models, project-, and apprenticeship-based – provide a way forward from the trap of centralized, standardized, hierarchical, incremental, canon-based, and sequential university music education, and models for an artistic citizenship which is ethical, responsive, and engaged.

Christopher J. Smith is Professor, Chair of Musicology, and founding director of the Vernacular Music Center at Texas Tech University. He composed the theatrical show Dancing at the Crossroads (2013), the “folk oratorio” Plunder! Battling for Democracy in the New World (2017), and the immersive-theater show Yonder (2019). His monograph The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (University of Illinois Press, 2013) won the Irving Lowens Award; his newest book is Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History (University of Illinois Press, 2019). He is a collaborator, with Thomas Irvine (Southampton), on the Turing Institute project “Jazz as Social System.” A former student of jazz pedagogue David N. Baker, he conducts the Elegant Savages Orchestra symphonic folk group at Texas Tech, and concertizes on guitar, bouzouki, banjo, and diatonique accordion. He is a former nightclub bouncer, carpenter, lobster fisherman, and oil-rig roughneck, and a published poet.