Coming to OZ
OZ Arts’ 14th Season Looks Beyond the Noise
For its 14th season, OZ Arts Nashville is doubling down on the qualities that have defined the contemporary arts center since its founding: international exchange, artistic experimentation, and a willingness to give audiences experiences that resist easy categorization. The 2026/27 season brings nine productions to OZ’s Creative Warehouse, with artists from seven countries joining some of Nashville’s most adventurous performers for a program spanning contemporary dance, theater, music, poetry, and multimedia performance. (Featured image: The Longest Night, Photo: Tiffany Bessire)
For Mark Murphy, OZ Arts’ Executive and Artistic Director, that appetite for experimentation has grown alongside Nashville itself. Now entering his eighth season at OZ, Murphy remembers arriving in 2019 impressed by an audience that was already unusually curious and invested. Since then, he says, the organization has become increasingly confident in pushing its programming further afield, while an expanding and increasingly adventurous Nashville audience has followed.
The season opens October 23–24 with the U.S. premiere of French choreographer Leïla Ka’s Triptyque, three works that explore womanhood through a volatile combination of contemporary dance, Hip-hop, theatricality, and fierce physicality. In November, Japanese collective KEDAGORO brings The Age is Yours, My Liege! (A Tale of Proto-Japan), a surreal dance-theater spectacle involving a giant hamster wheel, pastel-colored costumes, and an irreverent examination of power, mythology, and authority. “I don’t think I could have invited companies like the wild Japanese group KEDAGORO back then,” Murphy says.
The season’s international programming is not merely geographically expansive. Many of its artists use performance to investigate how individuals understand themselves within larger systems of power, history, and social expectation. New York theater-maker Dahlak Brathwaite’s Try/Step/Trip, December 4–5, draws on his experience with the criminal justice system, combining step dancing, spoken word, and original music to confront stereotypes imposed upon Black men in America.
Murphy sees such work as particularly important in the present moment. “Wild times require artists who can rise to the moment,” he says. For him, the responsibility of contemporary art is not necessarily to respond directly to the news cycle, but to help audiences perceive the human condition beyond the noise. Artists, he argues, can offer “a reassuring reminder that people are innately strong, resilient, and forward-thinking.”
That idea of looking beyond immediate headlines also extends to the season’s more formally adventurous productions. The French-Chilean brothers Cosme and Óscar Castro’s Cuervo, arriving in January, uses handmade animation, documentary, live film, and personal testimony to tell the story of their father’s experience creating theater while imprisoned during Chile’s military dictatorship. In April, members of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas join Moroccan choreographer Radouan Mriziga for Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione, a reimagining of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons that connects geometric movement and the natural world to the contemporary climate crisis.
Yet for all its international reach, the season remains deeply invested in Nashville. December’s The Longest Night brings together Portara Ensemble, saxophonist Jeff Coffin, poet Ciona Rouse, and dance collective Di Mossa for a multidisciplinary Winter Solstice celebration. In March, Rouse and choreographer Banning Bouldin’s New Dialect present DECLARATION, a world-premiere dance-theater work that reconsiders the language of the American Declaration of Independence through contemporary choreography and erasure poetry.
For Murphy, that local work is not secondary to OZ’s international programming. It is central to the organization’s identity. “The most vital thing we do is serve as a laboratory for local artists to grow and be encouraged to take risks,” he says. The exchange between visiting artists and Nashville creators, he adds, expands the possibilities of both individual disciplines and the city’s artistic community.
That philosophy culminates in May with the sixth annual Brave New Works Lab, which has already supported 20 new projects by Middle Tennessee artists during its first five years. The season concludes with Argentine director and filmmaker Mariano Pensotti’s La Obra (The Play), April 30–May 1, an intricate theatrical construction in which a revolving stage and cinematic imagery blur the boundaries between memory, history, performance, and reality.
The emphasis on hybrid forms is intentional. Murphy sees contemporary performance moving toward increasingly fluid artistic vocabularies, shaped by a world in which audiences are constantly bombarded with information. “We don’t require the beginning, middle, and end to always be in that order,” he says.
That may be the clearest description of OZ Arts’ coming season: nine productions that refuse to remain neatly in their lanes, bringing together artists and audiences willing to embrace uncertainty, complexity, and surprise. In a city whose cultural landscape continues to expand, OZ is betting that Nashville is ready to follow wherever contemporary performance leads.
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