Now the subject of an award-winning documentary film, The Innocents is social justice advocacy through performance art. The one-hour concert work, created and performed by percussionist-composers John Lane and Allen Otte, is an effort to delve deeply into the most current issues surrounding the core subject of wrongful imprisonment and exoneration, as well as a commitment to connect with the communities in which it is performed. We have embraced our role as advocates through the realization that our work cuts to the emotional core of the human experience surrounding these issues.
Using a variety of found-object and home-made instruments, electronic soundscapes, and spoken texts, we have devised a one-hour dramatic soundscape comprised of at least seventeen individual tableaus which endeavor to explore various aspects of the issues surrounding wrongful imprisonment and exoneration in the American criminal justice system: mistaken identity, incarceration, injustice, politics, psychology, and resilience.
American society’s struggle with mass incarceration is a volatile and divisive issue. While it disproportionately affects people of color, specifically African American men, wrongful conviction is a subset of mass incarceration which resonates across all lines of race, class, political affiliations, age and gender. We have performed this work in a version specially made for educational settings – a public charter school with a range of ages, public high schools, and community colleges. Our experience in these environments is that a non-partisan socio-political issue, presented not as didactic instruction but rather as creative art delivered with the highest level of expertise and commitment, elicits from these younger audiences stimulating, thought-provoking comments and questions, demonstrating palpable engagement with the issue.
Art provides a platform for advocacy, affords us an opportunity to raise our voices in the name of
something other than ourselves in an eloquent and hopefully memorable way. In the current socio-political landscape where we are confronted with the most egregious examples of the opposite, our offering wishes to prove the power of empathic engagement with issues that ultimately touch all of our lives.
Learn More: https://www.the-innocents.com