Story & Place + CU: PYGMALION
In this new series, HRI Director Antoinette Burton explores the 2025–26 theme “Story & Place” as it connects or intersects with the Champaign-Urbana community.
Genre-Crossing and Interdisciplinarity at PYGMALION
This year’s theme at HRI, “Story & Place,” will take us from the island of Jamaica to the continent of Africa, to the cities of Chicago and Berlin to the state of Indiana, and back to the diasporic Midwest again—all through interdisciplinary humanities research that helps us appreciate why place matters and how history and other forms of storytelling throw it into bold relief.
And yet, many if not most of us connected with HRI live our daily lives in and around Champaign-Urbana. What are the stories that ground us in this place? How is HRI itself tied to the local community and the stories it has to tell?
There’s no better place to start with that question as the fall semester kicks off than with PYGMALION, the annual Urbana-based music festival which has been going on since 2005. Founded by Seth Fein and Justine Bursoni, PYGMALION has spent the last two decades showcasing local bands, national touring acts, and a frankly stunning array of artists, writers, and poets whose collective energy transforms our twin cities for three glorious days in mid-September.
This year’s lineup features the stand-up comedian Josh Johnson, the hip-hop duo EarthGang, the inimitable Bob the Drag Queen, and the band Model/Actriz. You won’t want to miss the whole 2025 program, which starts Thursday, September 18 and runs through Saturday the 20th.
For almost a decade, HRI has partnered with Seth Fein and Patrick Singer, the local wizards behind the PYGMALION curtain, to support the work, and especially the concept, behind this unique, dazzlingly curated expression of community-based arts and humanities creation in east central Illinois. I’ve learned through many conversations with Seth, himself Urbana born and raised, how exceptional this commitment to a locally grown festival scene is in an age of media conglomerate and corporate spectacle production nationwide. Against a lot of odds, Seth and Patrick have persisted in keeping PYGMALION true to its C-U roots while developing a 21st century business model for an indie-style festival in east central Illinois.
“Not Just Any Midwestern Town”
The flavor of PYGMALION is perhaps most obvious in the venues where the amazing acts they’ve booked have appeared. The High Dive, The Canopy Club, Cowboy Monkey, the Gallery Art Bar, the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts: these are storied sites which are household names for those of us who live here. At PYGMALION, audiences get to experience these spaces anew every year as so much original and innovative artistic and musical talent throbs through them.
PYGMALION helps us remember why C-U is not just any midwestern town. It’s a micro-urban place with deep histories of talent and creative energy which has produced globally renowned performers like Sasha Velour, writers like David Foster Wallace, and bands and singers like REO Speedwagon and Dan Fogelberg, and media critics like Roger Ebert. Not to mention spectacles like the annual music festival Farm Aid, which debuted 40 years ago this month in Memorial Stadium to a crowd of 80,000 (see the related exhibit at the Spurlock Museum).
But there’s another locally sourced reason which has drawn HRI into conversation and collaboration with Seth and Patrick over the years. And that is the astonishing genre-mixing and genre-crossing that is as key to the festival’s ethos as it is to its design. At HRI we call this “interdisciplinarity,” which is at the core of how we think of humanities research, teaching, and community-based practice.
The synergies that PYGMALION and HRI have cultivated are grounded in our shared premise that the best work—creative, academic, performative, musical—doesn’t happen in silos. We are, each in our own way, hungry for the breakthroughs that draw on established ways of knowing and doing while pushing them into new genres, emergent forms, unthinkable combinations—that “meat and medicine,” as poet Gwendolyn Brooks put it, that we need to survive, and collectively remake, our broken world.
HRI Sponsored Readings
This year HRI is thrilled to be supporting the performances of Carmen Giménez, Barrie Jean Borich, and Maggie Su at PYGMALION, and we hope you will turn out for their readings. There are so many performers you won’t want to miss, I can’t name them all. But be sure to check out the “sonic souvenirs” of Hannah Cohen, the experimental “digital textures” of Wombo, and the “genre-defying sextet,” The Soul Syndicate. Not to mention University of Illinois-connected creatives Azlan Smith, Gabriella Paz Hoggatt, and David Foley, among others.
You can read all about this September’s extravaganza in Smile Politely, an online community arts and culture weekly also run by the PYGMALION team. Part of HRI’s partnership with Seth and Patrick revolves around the urgency of communicating the extraordinary work that humanities and arts folks are doing in and around town, off campus and on. A big shout out to Jessica Hammie and Amy Penne, who model truly outstanding community-based journalism at SP, in part by covering the experimental as well as the established, in part because their writing comes straight out of their humanist hearts and minds.
Smile Politely and PYGMALION are, in short, a huge part of how HRI is visible to people who live in Champaign-Urbana.
So as you make your way from venue to venue in the coming week, I hope you’ll take a minute to think about how the convergence of PYGMALION and HRI in Champaign-Urbana shapes the kinds of stories we can tell about this place. I look forward to seeing you there!
Stay tuned for the next installment of Story & Place + C-U: how the first ever Humanities Open House, coming to you on Saturday, October 4, 2025, took shape. Meanwhile you can check out all the activities of that day on the HRI website.