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Lane Czaplinski, Director of Performing Arts
Aug 07, 2018
It’s possible to frame the art of any season as a matter of personal reckoning by a participating artist with some thing—an event, a subject or other stimulus—that occurred or existed during some period of time be it the past, present or future. In a contemporary art context, the resulting artistic responses or expressions tend to lean towards the abstract and are often difficult to comprehend. And this is where both the challenge and opportunity exists for the viewer, listener, and audience member: either turn off or turn on to what is not immediately understood.
Talented artists are capable of making creative expressions that cause willing audience members to pause in the space-time continuum as they ponder what has just occurred and await the next bit. When artists create opportunities for such pauses to take place successively, something resembling ecstasy can occur.
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When I moved to Columbus a little over a year ago, lots of people told me I needed to meet Dr. Mark Lomax. I looked him up online and could tell from listening to a few tracks that he’s an accomplished drummer who’s been at it for awhile. I guess I would’ve described him at that point as a “jazz drummer.” That was before we met for beers.
“I’m the son of a preacher but not religious.” Everything he said was like that—it went into some deeper place than where I thought he was initially heading. A conversation about jazz history ended up becoming a lesson about compositional theory. A description of rhythmic structures in music became a lament about Eurocentric bias in education. A discussion of the local creative scene turned into the two of us jamming on how Columbus could turn into a cultural hub of national significance.
By my second IPA, I learned that he’s also a musicologist, a mystic, a community organizer, and a family man. I learned that not only has he been touring as a jazz drummer since he was 14, but he’s also an accomplished composer, who is finishing a massive 12-album project called 400: An Afrikan Epic, which tells the story of Black America from precolonial Africa to Black Lives Matter today towards a new era of Afro-futurism.
Born, raised, and educated in Columbus, I wanted Mark to be the Artist-in-Residence for Performing Arts. It’s also a commonly accepted fact that a talented drummer is the lifeblood of any ensemble so it makes sense that Mark would become central to how the upcoming performing arts season at the Wexner Center came together.
Our conversations led me to a framework for organizing the season: artist, writer, and curator, Emily Roysdon’s idea of “ecstatic resistance.” While the artists in this season employ a wide variety of techniques to respond to a multitude of subjects and concerns, I see each project operating in dialogue with Roysdon’s construct. She writes:
Ecstatic Resistance is a project, practice, partial philosophy, and set of strategies. It develops the positionality of the impossible alongside a call to re-articulate the imaginary. Ecstatic Resistance is about the limits of representation and legibility—the limits of the intelligible, and strategies that undermine hegemonic oppositions. It wants to talk about pleasure in the domain of resistance—sexualizing modern structures in order to centralize instability and plasticity in life, living, and the self. It is about waiting, and the temporality of change. Ecstatic Resistance wants to think about all that is unthinkable and unspeakable in the Eurocentric, phallocentric world order.
Here’s a diagram she made in collaboration Carl Williamson in 2009:
A couple of projects by artists trained in theater—Lars Jan and Josh Fox—feature time-worn narrative techniques honed by the likes of Joan Didion and Spalding Gray to examine what’s going on in the social/political spectrum of today. Though quite different in style and approach, both create intimacy with their audiences despite the scale of their subjects and the cavernous confines of Mershon Auditorium.
Projects that emphasize the body by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko; Charles Atlas, Silas Riener and Rashaun Mitchell; and André Zachery confront in their own way what Jaamil describes as “a fatal axis of abstraction, illegibility, identity and gender complexity.” Through interactive technology, Afro-futuristic philosophy, mysticism and visual art strategies these artists empower bodies that seemingly atomize at will. Similarly, Netta Yerushalmy questions the legacy of embodied representation in dance performance through intersectional analyses and physical deconstructions of iconic modern works.
Ann Carlson; Jason Moran and the Bandwagon with Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch, and Ashland Mines; and the ensemble Berlin deal with circumstances of impoverishment, strife and commercialization. Though their subjects are tough, and maybe because of it, they work to upend the normal artist-to-audience relationship to create communities that can ask difficult questions together.
Verdensteatret, Trad Gras Och Stenar with Endless Boogie, and Amir ElSaffar’s Two Rivers Ensemble with Hamid Al Saadi trade in pure abstraction to create expansive portals that better resemble how our minds work than average day-to-day noise.
As Artist-in-Residence, not only will Mark unveil his 400 shortly after the new year but he’s also curated a series of other events including a public conversation with Black elders from the Columbus art community, a new performance project by DJ Krate Digga examining rhythm across different cultures and musical genres, and a recital of prominent African-American composers featuring cellist Timothy Holley. At this particular moment in time, I think we’re lucky to be able to follow the lead of a talented artist and fellow citizen as he grapples with the past and the world around him while also envisioning a radiant future.
18 - 19 Season at a Glance
