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. As an advocate of social justice he co-created with Allen Otte The Innocents which the duo has performed throughout the US, including appearances at the Innocence Network Conference, Woody Guthrie Center, and Atlanta’s Center for Civil and Human Rights. 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 at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. www.john-lane.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. Otte regularly presents his own creative work, often in residencies centered around the theme of performing social justice, and is the regular 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 Innocents is an approximately one hour dramatic soundscape and is comprised of 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, psychology, politics, injustice, and resilience. Though we do this from our admittedly privileged perspective, we have available not only the information – both factual and testimonial – but, significantly, we have resources of a time and sound-based art. 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.  

Some of the pieces are meant to be uncomfortable – too long, momentarily chaotic and confusing, difficult to understand. Others are simple and direct. 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. We offer no answers, but through our work we strive to confront questions.   

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 of that, our offering wishes to prove the power of empathic engagement with issues that ultimately touch all of our lives.