When Dr. Maurice Harris started thinking about a quintessentially American way to celebrate the country's 250th birthday, it was house music that came to mind.
As a young person living abroad in an Air Force family in Germany, he'd fallen in love with it as one of the U.S.'s biggest exports. As an adult, he saw it as a style molded uniquely by queer, Black and Latino voices and artmakers in Chicago. And as an artist and an academic, he knew that it had the power to build community through layers of sound and the power of a shared dance floor.
Harris, who performs and creates music under the moniker Ionne, is bringing that history to Lost In New Haven this Friday, as he presents "Club Lost," an evening of music, dance, poetry, food and visual art celebrating the project of America through the lenses of its art and artists. Across media, the evening is meant to feel as diverse and polyphonic as America (and New Haven), from Harris' propulsive DJ set to live poetry, photography and painting installation.
"For me, house music has always been a form of cultural exchange," Harris said in an interview on WNHH Community Radio's "Arts Respond" program, a partnership with the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. "It began as a distinctly American art form ... it draws on disco, and soul, and funk, and electronic music, and African diasporic rhythms. But once house music went out into the world, the cultures around the globe began speaking back."
Months ago that quest started with a number of questions that he was asking himself about what it meant to be American in this social and political moment. He knew, already, that he wanted to do something in response to the country turning 250 years old. But the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to "create a different conversation."
Across the country, he could see a flattening of the narrative around the U.S.'s founding and history. He leaned into its complexity instead.
Music, he explained, was just the vehicle. He thought about British variations on house music, which he described as "atmospheric and cinematic." He savored African rhythms and instrumentation that made their way into Afro House and Amapiano, itself a pastiche of genres. "What fascinates me right now is hearing that conversation presented to us in new forms."
That's where "Club Lost" begins. Over two hours, the Ionne—with other artists—intends to tell layered, lush stories of America, including the nation's complex histories of migration, of polyphony, of political and cultural exchange. Or in his words, "almost a love letter that America send out to the world decades ago ... and the world has been writing back ever since."
In addition to Ionne, artists include New Haven Poet Laureate Yexandra "Yex" Diaz, visual artists Johnny Komodo, Allyse Corbin, and Laz, and movement artist Kris St. Louis. Diaz, for instance, will present "250 Shades of Freedom," a spoken word and sonic collaboration that folds in her own experience as a mother, as an Afro-Latina, as an artist, educator, and a steward of culture in New Haven and Connecticut. Ionne will also premiere “Children of Nations," a new piece that addresses his own thoughts on what it means to be American.
"I think that this work, even the prompt as I was crafting it ... caused me to interrogate, like, what have I been doing creatively and why have I been doing it?" he said. "What has been influencing me, and what is significant behind those influences?"
The other character in that story is Lost In New Haven itself. Part of what draws him to the venue, where he's preformed previously, is its mission to preserve and present New Haven history. Inside the museum, which is still making its home at 80 Hamilton St., founder Robert Greenberg has collected and installed thousands of artifacts, from old pottery shards to signs that still glow in their original neon color.
Initially, the artist didn't realize that many of them—just by virtue of sharing the space—would become part of the performance. Take, for instance, pottery shards that are hundreds of years old, once buried beneath what is now a high school parking lot. Or the statue of Christopher Columbus that stood in Wooster Square for years before coming down in 2020. To look at it now is to remember a divisive, hot summer day in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, as protesters and counter-protesters fought bitterly for hours.
"To have my work in conversation with this contested, controversial piece of New Haven history standing here in the museum, I thought was actually really wonderful," he said of a prior performance in which the statue became a part of the show. "And getting people to think about that! You know, to think about the intentionality and the impact of what we do as artists."
Tickets for "Club Lost" are available here.
Club Lost takes place at Lost in New Haven, which is located at 80 Hamilton St. in New Haven's Mill River District, on August 28 at 7 p.m. Tickets and more information are available here.