Small, round tables are scattered around the Wexner Center for the Arts' black box performance space as rehearsals for "ZAZ: The Big Easy," get underway.
"They'll be dressed and they'll have little tea lights on them," said "ZAZ" writer and director Ryan K. Johnson. The idea is to transport the audience to a New Orleans nightclub.
Johnson's immersive production uses percussive dance, tap, body percussion, gumboot, sand dance and West African dance to tell the real stories of several Hurricane Katrina survivors.
The deadly storm tore across the Gulf Coast 20 years ago this Friday.
"These are real stories. These stories are about real folks who survived the storm, the breaches of the levee, the mistreatment of the government," Johnson said.
Johnson doesn't call the production a show or performance, because he doesn't want Black trauma or pain to ever be performative. Rather, Johnson seeks to give audiences an experience that floods the senses with sights, sounds, smells and even touch and taste. Custom alcoholic beverages will be available to the over-21 crowd.
Johnson grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, but spent a decade in New Orleans, teaching dance and soaking in the city's culture and stories.
His connection to the city is what led him to develop "ZAZ," but he also sees the production as a reflection of the world today.
"We're in a world where cultures and identities are strategically being deleted and erased and strutted," Johnson said. "I felt it was important to use my platform as an artist to protect some of these oral histories, some of the recorded information so that during this attempt of erasure that we still have a place where these very important things can live."
Johnson is doing that in Columbus, as the first show of Wexner Center for the Arts' 2025-2026 season, in a two-week technical residency. He recently completed a post-Masters of Fine Arts dance fellowship at Ohio State University.
Johnson said he wants "ZAZ: The Big Easy" to honor those lost in Hurricane Katrina, as well as those who survived. For the Ohioans who certainly remember the catastrophic storm but were far away from its destruction, he hopes the production reminds them of their humanity.
"I think we live in a world right now where we see so much trauma. It's so accessible from our phones. Like we just, we're just like ingesting so much that I feel like as a society, we are becoming a bit numb," Johnson said. "We have to name the things so that they can get better, because we're talking about not just a physical storm, not just global warming, but we're talking about the psychological, the emotional trauma that was connected to it for generations."
"ZAZ: The Big Easy" opens in previews on Tuesday. It runs Sept. 4 to Sept. 7 at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Johnson hopes to take the show across the country after its Columbus debut.
