Cal Poly Humboldt Recital Series: The Innocents - performed by Percussionists Allen Otte & John Lane

The Cal Poly Humboldt Department of Dance, Music, and Theatre is excited to present the “Cal Poly Humboldt Recital Series: The Innocents.” The Innocents is the collaboration of percussionists Allen Otte & John Lane whose performance uses a variety of found-object and home-made instruments, electronic soundscapes, and spoken texts to explore aspects of the issues surrounding wrongful imprisonment and exoneration in the American criminal justice system: mistaken identity, incarceration, injustice, politics, psychology, and resilience. Experience “The Innocents” Saturday, October 24th, 7:30 pm at the Fulkerson Recital Hall. Tickets are $20 General, $5 for Children and Free for Cal Poly Humboldt students with ID. Tickets can be purchased at the door or online at https://tickets.humboldt.edu/section/dance-music-theatre-kldu

Now the subject of an award-winning documentary film, “The Innocents” is social justice advocacy through performance art. The work is an effort to delve deeply into the current issues surrounding the 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. “The Innocents” have devised a one-hour dramatic soundscape comprised of at least seventeen tableaus which explore 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.

Some of the pieces are meant to be uncomfortable – a bit too long, momentarily chaotic and confusing, difficult to understand, provocative. Others are simple and direct: melodic and in familiar genres, lyrics recited to percussive accompaniment. Working on an emotional level, our idea is to shine a light on this subject—as if through a prism—in hopes that various aspects surrounding it may briefly come into focus for each of us. 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.

“In performance we have the opportunity to direct and focus not only attention, but more importantly, to engage on an emotional level where experience is more than simply processing facts and figures. Art provides a platform for advocacy and affords us an opportunity to raise our voices in the name of something other than ourselves in an eloquent and hopefully memorable way. For all of us, creativity catalyzes change faster than awareness alone. 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.”

—John Lane and Allen Otte

About the Artists

John Lane is an artist whose creative work and collaborations extend through percussion to poetry/spoken word and theater. As a performer, he has appeared on stages throughout the Americas, Australia, and Japan. He has recorded two albums: The Landscape Scrolls (Starkland Records, 2018), TRIGGER: Artists Respond to Gun

Violence (Albany Records, 2021). John is the Professor of Percussion and Director of

Percussion Studies at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. www.johnlane1.com

Allen Otte was a cofounder of the Blackearth Percussion Group and of Percussion Group Cincinnati, and toured for decades throughout the world performing new and experimental music created for him and his colleagues in life-long creative friendships with composers including John Cage, Herbert Brün, Frederic Rzewski. Allen regularly presents his own creative work, often in residencies centered around the theme of performing social justice, and is the percussionist with the early music quartet Trobar Medieval. He is professor Emeritus, University of Cincinnati, and in 2017 was inducted into the International Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.

“The Woody Guthrie Center was so proud to recently host a presentation of “The Innocents” in our theater. The need to protect the disenfranchised and the innocents in our society was one of Woody’s driving forces. This is strongly evident in his artist responses to the travesty of the Sacco and Vanzetti trials and their wrongful execution. As John and Allen recited the names and erroneous years of incarceration of so many innocents, we could feel Woody’s presence right alongside them, hitting those rocks and chanting those names. Thank you for following in Woody’s footsteps and sharing this message.”

— Deana McCloud, Executive Director, Woody Guthrie Center