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Local contemporary performance center OZ Arts Nashville is hosting its fourth annual Brave New Works Lab, happening May 15-17, 2025. Get ready for a dynamic evening of four all-new performance works created by local artists here in Nashville. Audiences are invited to celebrate local innovation and creativity with a bold evening of entirely original short-form performances featuring dance, theater, music, and multimedia. The Lab invites daring Nashville artists to transform OZ Arts into a laboratory for the creation and premiere of new works and works-in-progress. Encouraging multimedia experimentation and collaboration across disciplines, the lab creates a safe space for high-risk artistic adventures.
This year’s Brave New Works Lab features some of the city’s most thrilling choreographers, musicians, multimedia artists, and more. Learn more about the exciting projects they are making below!
TUMELO MICHAEL MOLOI
Co-creating with Windship Boyd
Tell us what you are creating in Nashville:
The show we are developing is titled BA TSAMAILE, a term derived from the South African Sotho language meaning “those who have left” or “the departed.” It explores the rich cultural tapestry of gumboot dance and its deep connections to stepping and fraternity. To maintain the momentum and rhythm, we are incorporating West African drums, highlighting the rhythmic exchanges between these two cultures, while also celebrating their individual originality.
Historically, South African mine workers were unable to bring traditional drums and clothing into the mines. In response, they created a unique language called gumboots which eventually evolved into a dance form. Similarly, when Africans migrated to the West, traditional drums and attire were often stripped away, prompting the creation of new cultural expressions—one of which is stepping.
What inspires you to keep creating?
My passion for the stage and storytelling fuels my creative journey. I am driven by the transformative power of art.
What can people expect when they experience your performance at the Brave New Works Lab?
How pain and tragedy can give birth to something beautiful, inspiring, and entertaining. It is this process of rebirth and resilience that inspires me to craft performances that resonate deeply with audiences.
LANDRY BUTLER
Inglewood Social Club
Tell us what you are creating in Nashville:
I am creating a series of signposts, which hold space for important moments in my life. These pieces take form in different media according to what works best with the idea. I make these things up as I go along and don’t have a goal other than to understand myself.
What inspires you to keep creating?
Creating art keeps me sane, and helps me to be a better person, and it’s really the only thing I’m good at. The desire to be a productive member of society and to be a better version of myself. The realization is that sometimes my work resonates with people and makes them feel better.
What can people expect when they experience your performance at the Brave New Works Lab?
Audiences will see a silent, black-and-white film with a nonlinear story about living in America and being shaped by its culture. They will hear Inglewood Social Club provide live, unsynchronized music and narration. Don’t expect it to make sense, just let it wash over you.
KOURTNEY “KOKO” FRENCH
Tell us what you are creating in Nashville:
I’m creating a body of work that’s dealing with the concept of how we spend our time.
What inspires you to keep creating?
What inspires me to keep creating is that I know purposefully I have so much to conquer and tackle when it comes to ideas in my head, that I want to explore through movement and choreography.
What can people expect when they experience your performance at the Brave New Works Lab?
When people watch my project they can expect to see raw emotion, verbal communication within the project & hopefully a sense of how it’s important to take your time in this life because it can go quick.
STACIE FLOOD-POPP / FOUND MOVEMENT GROUP
Tell us what you are creating in Nashville:
I’m a choreographer and movement artist, and founder and director of Found Movement Group, now in its 18th season. With creative consultant Kat Driver, FMG has been touring to festivals, creating immersive works, and we are now debuting a new work in progress, BOSCH, inspired by paintings by Hieronymus Bosch.
What inspires you to keep creating?
I’m inspired by Change & Humanity, wanting to explore what makes us tick and what is our deepest secret.
What can people expect when they experience your performance at the Brave New Works Lab?
BOSCH is a moving exploration of the surreal, 500-year-old painting The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. Kat Driver and I worked to answer the question: What is the present-day ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’? What does a depiction of today’s Garden of Eden, Labyrinth of Temptation, and the Consequence of Sin look like? In a collaborative process of research, movement exploration, and discussion between the dancers and I, the prominent vignettes will become animated by performers’ athletic movement, cacophonous sound score, and sculptural costuming. Bosch’s historical work will come alive to show how leaning in and asking questions is essential to the livelihood of the work.
View the artist’s works May 15-17, 2026 at OZ Arts. Purchase tickets today!
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