Duckwall Artsist Series: The Innocents
THE WORK
The Innocents is social justice advocacy through performance art. The work 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 (performer-composers John Lane and Allen Otte) 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.
The texts spoken in the work are derived from a variety of sources: various historic prison diaries/poetry, interrogation transcripts, Google autocomplete, Thomas Jefferson, Jax (a female prisoner in the Oklahoma State Prison system), Mark Godsey (former NY prosecutor, author of Blind Injustice), captured Chicago police scan chatter, among many other sources. In an effort to make our work relevant, each major performance has originally crafted tableaus (texts and or music) that directly resonate with the local communities in which we are performing.
FOR MORE
Website:https://www.the-innocents.com/