Unfinished Revolutions: Reflections on our inaugural cultural season

28 July 2026

Anniversaries invite us to pause and look back, but they can also prompt us to consider what’s still to come. Our public programme launched in May with a series of events exploring how freedom, democracy and belonging are imagined, contested, and lived today.

Unfinished Revolutions was the Schwarzman Centre’s first themed season, marking 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. While the season reflected on a pivotal moment in American history, it also marked a significant moment in the Schwarzman Centre's own story.

Throughout the season, music, dance, comedy, literature, history, theatre and conversation filled the Schwarzman Centre's performance venues. Leading artists and Oxford researchers were brought together to create and collaborate, and asked: who gets to tell the story of the USA? And what does it mean, two and a half centuries on, for a revolution to still be unfinished?

Around performances in the Sohmen Concert Hall and the Theatre, the season's thinking was also shaped through discussion: historian Patrick Spero on Thomas Jefferson's final draft of the Declaration, and conversations with Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Percival Everett that illuminated the 250-year history through different lenses.

Early in the season, Sarah Jones: America, Who Hurt You? Live brought the central themes of Unfinished Revolutions vividly to life on stage. Expanding on her podcast of the same name, the Tony Award-winner conjured a cast of voices spanning two and a half centuries of American history, each one wrestling with questions of power, identity and belonging. Prior to the show, Sarah Jones spent time in Oxford, in conversation with academics whose research fed directly into the piece.

The exploration of the founding of the United States continued with Suzan-Lori Parks' Sally & Tom, a staged reading of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright's sharp, time-bending drama about the making of a historical play on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Moving between past and present, it asked who gets to shape history, whose voices are remembered, and how the stories we inherit shape the present.

Music, too, embodied the spirit of Unfinished Revolutions. Cécile McLorin Salvant brought Book of Ayres to the Sohmen Concert Hall for its UK premiere in May, drawing on poetry, song, and folk traditions from Europe and the Americas with a sound world that moved fluidly between harpsichord, theorbo, flute, and synthesiser, bringing forgotten songs to life. A month later, Anna Clyne's Looking Glass paired a new composition by the Grammy Award-nominated British-American composer, created with sound designer Jody Elff, with works by Dvořák and Copland, exploring shifting perspectives between past and present.

Mid-June brought Taylor Mac and Matt Ray's Bark of Millions in Concert to the Sohmen Concert Hall (12–13 June). The epic queer rock opera has been growing, song by song, since its premiere, with one number for every year since Stonewall. Oxford's run added the latest addition to that canon, a new song co-commissioned by the Schwarzman Centre and the Schwarzman Center at Yale, performed by an international ensemble including Le Gateau Chocolat and Mama Alto. It was maximalist, moving, and ‘unfinished’ in the very best sense: a living work that continues to evolve.

Unfinished Revolutions drew to a close in June with 1776, a Schwarzman Centre co-production with ZooNation and the Lil Buck Foundation that did something special: Jookers from Memphis joined young dancers from ZooNation Youth in London and Oxford’s own Body Politic Youth on stage. Lil Buck and ZooNation's Dannielle "Rhimes" Lecointe used hip hop and Memphis Jookin' – dance forms with their own histories of resistance and reinvention – to ask what independence looks like, across cities and generations. 1776 embraced the idea that history isn’t static – it’s something we must continue to interpret, question, and remake. The performance was a powerful conclusion to a season that asked audiences to look at familiar stories from new perspectives, and consider how the present – and the future – might be shaped as a result.

Our inaugural season asked what it means for a revolution to remain unfinished, and, in doing so, established the kind of conversations we hope to continue. It treated a national anniversary not simply as an occasion for looking back, but as a provocation: argued over, dressed up, sung about, and danced through. Rooted in curiosity rather than certainty, Unfinished Revolutions marked the beginning of the Schwarzman Centre's public cultural programme, showing what can happen when Oxford's scholarship, artists from around the world, and audiences, are given room, and reason, to explore complex questions together.

We're already looking ahead to Utopia Now! this autumn, but for now, we thank every artist, academic, and audience member who made our opening chapter one to remember.

Check out Utopia Now!