OZ Arts Nashville's 2025 Brave New Works Lab To Premiere Four New Performances

Contemporary arts center OZ Arts Nashville's fourth annual Brave New Works Lab will premiere a diverse, multidisciplinary collection of four inventive new performances by local artists May 15-17. Among the line-up is a dance and music collaboration exploring connections between South African gumboot dance and American step dance, a new dance-theater work inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, a trippy multimedia rock music presentation, and a new Hip-hop dance work from one of Nashville's rising stars. Selected from dozens of applications, the artists featured in the Brave New Works Lab are invited to transform OZ Arts' expansive creative warehouse into a laboratory for innovation. Performances in the Brave New Works Lab are Thursday-Saturday, May 15-17 at 8:00 p.m. with all four pieces performed each night.

Audiences at this year's Brave New Works Lab will experience a dynamic, irresistible collaboration between South African artist and dancer Tumelo Michael Moloi and local choreographer Windship Boyd exploring the convergence of two visceral percussive dance forms, originated around the same time, but on different continents: South African gumboot dance and the Southern tradition of stepping. This explosive new production, entitled Ba Tsamaile meaning "they have gone" in Sotho, also features projections by artist Sari Hoke, live step dancers, and percussion and brass instrumentalists who have played with TSU's marching band.

The dynamic evening also features a new work for a large company of 11 contemporary dancers by lauded choreographer Stacie Flood-Popp and her Found Movement Group. The project, currently titled BOSCH, draws inspiration from a surreal, 500-year-old painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Flood-Popp and collaborator Kat Driver discover both fascinating and disturbing connections to current events when they delve into the multi-level mysteries of the creepily beautiful artwork The Garden of Earthly Delights. With a highly visceral movement dreamscape, BOSCH offers a contemporary perspective on this famous visual exploration of temptation, sin, chaos, and bliss.

Spoken word artist and musician Landry Butler and his underground rock collective Inglewood Social Club will present a new multimedia production, Welcome to Paradise, including large-scale projections of visually arresting black-and-white images. Butler and ISC's talented group of multi-instrumentalists invite audiences to imagine possible futures at a time of global chaos. The long-time collaborators draw on their collective experience with such influential musical outfits as JonesWorld, The Shapeshifters, The Emancipators, and Landry's nom de plume Seventh Sister.

Finally, virtuosic Hip-hop choreographer Kourtney "Koko" French sets soulful dance moves on 8 inexhaustible dancers, creating a powerhouse performance that examines the concepts of time and urgency - and the ways time is borrowed, spent, wasted, or cherished. French has helped shape the Nashville performance scene as the founder and director of Ink Movement and as the inventor of her individualized Ko-Style Method, in addition to serving as a choreographer for legendary Gospel performers like Cece Winans and Kirk Franklin. She has assembled a breathtaking team of hyper-committed performers for this dynamic new dance work.

Brave New Works performances are May 15-17. Tickets start at $20 and are on sale now at this link. Artist applications for next year's edition of Brave New Works Lab will open in the fall of 2025.