In choreographer and theater director Jack Ferver’s My Town, the small town is a portal that provides special access into questions of self-expression and collective agency. Set loosely in an area of upstate New York, My Town considers the queer experience outside urban metropoles, and the ways physical geography marks the interior terrains of the mind.

Ferver has described the project as “exploring the disappearance of the femme,” taking a queer departure from the classic American play Our Town by Thornton Wilder in which the female protagonist Emily passes away. My Town is closely informed by the experience of building an art practice in the dense and intense environment of New York City, and the piece deals also with Ferver’s experience growing up in a small town in Wisconsin, and experiencing early familial tragedy.

Moving through tragicomic moments of violence, sexuality, and loss, Ferver balances the work with a playfulness and self-awareness that lifts the work into a surreal register. The fluidity of the work is echoed in the video by acclaimed filmmaker and artist Jeremy Jacob that frames the work and interacts with Ferver’s performance, enabling one scene to melt into another as if in a dream.

Ferver shifts through choreography and theatrical sketches throughout the work. As with many of Ferver’s past projects, My Town focuses heavily on constructing a persona, and also plays at the edge of the fictive and the real.

Choreographer Leslie Cuyjet is in residence in the EMPAC Theater venue to refine theatrical elements for her solo performance, With Marion, originally commissioned by The Kitchen (NYC) for an open-plan loft space.

Jack Ferver and Jeremy Jacob are in residence in the EMPAC Theater to develop new material for the commissioned work My Town. Across two residencies, they develop scenography and lighting, and integrate Ferver’s choreography with projected video developed by Jacob. The residencies also support experimentation with the work’s dramaturgy.

Choreographer Leslie Cuyjet performs inside a cocoon of mediated memory, text, and gesture in her solo performance, With Marion. Cuyjet combines her own embodied archive of movement with looping archival, pre-recorded, and live-captured video in a multi-sided enclosure that serves as both projection screen and stage, dynamically shifting the viewer’s perspective on her bodily form over time.

Originally commissioned by The Kitchen (NYC) for an open-plan loft space, this evening-length performance now floats in the dark void of the EMPAC Theater, further emphasizing how Cuyjet displays and obscures herself—and her internal thoughts—amidst objects, images, and the camera’s lens.

Cuyjet grapples with questions of classism, privilege, and race that arise in her family’s archives and the legacy of her great aunt, Marion Cuyjet (1920–1996), a pioneer of 1950s dance education. As a teen, Marion Cuyjet passed as white to train in Philadelphia ballet schools and later created the Judimar School of Dance where Black dancers studied before they could do so at white studios, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Judith Jamison (1943–2024) and Philadanco’s Joan Myers Brown (b. 1931).

Layering her own memories of dance training many decades later alongside this complex family legacy, Leslie Cuyjet crafts a dense, fragmented, malleable, and intentionally oblique collage of memory within the sculptural structure and across her own body. With Marion at once fills in historical gaps and highlights where new fissures appear in the unstable relationship between self and the traces of the past that surround it.

In the context of the Ephemeral Organ series, Steffani Jemison revisits a recent performance work combining sculpture, movement, and narration to create a new iteration for video.

As part of the Ephemeral Organ series, SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY’s residency investigates the mutual possibilities of technology and body to track, mediate, and generate a theatrical experience through trigger mechanisms and machine learning.

Pan Daijing conducts a research and development residency to establish work on a possible future commission with the curatorial program. Taking full advantage of the expert staff and advanced technical venues at the center, Daijing explores the implications of music, dance, and video intersections following her monograph exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany.

Composer Rama Gottfried is in residence with contemporary music ensemble Yarn/Wire to develop the experimental music theater piece Ontopoeisis (formerly Schismogenesis).

As part of the Ephemeral Organ series, new media artist SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY culminates her EMPAC residency with an artist talk exploring her overall practice and demonstrating interactive cuing technology she is developing for her latest multimedia performance projects. In this event, HOLLOWAY investigates the mutual possibilities of technology and the body to track, mediate, and generate elements of a theatrical experience.

Known for her experiments with noisy, electronic sculpture and her unique approach to expanded cinema, HOLLOWAY shapes the grammars of computer programming and sadomasochism into tools for exposing structures and narratives of power. Her two current projects in development reimagine familiar narratives through a Black queer lens, and an aesthetic approach driven by the digital age. [WALLED GARDENS ] _or_ return(ing) "a love in disguise as forever.” is based on the “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tale; and THEY LAID DOWN THEIR HAMMERS AND CRIED is based on the John Henry folk tale.

Both projects use technologies that allow the performers’ gestures to generate and interface with lights, sound synthesis, sculptural elements, and video. These responsive, interactive designs are inspired in part by Robert Rauschenberg’s piece, Open Score (1966), which stages a game of tennis that uses reactive engineering to choreograph light and sound through physical motion. HOLLOWAY presents a similar live interaction between technology, theatrical staging, and bodily action. Here, she applies machine learning algorithms as decision-making mechanisms to produce the landscape of each piece in the moment

As Curator-in-Residence, Theater and Dance, Tara Aisha Willis provides context for the Ephemeral Organ series and discusses her forthcoming book projects and past curatorial work. Ephemeral Organ culminates in April 2025 and brings together residencies, performances, and talks by several artists whose work explores choreography and the body in motion as a technology for transmitting memory, history, and Black lived experience.

Willis’s body of research explores the lineages and practices of Black experimentation and improvisation in dance through contemporary performances. To do so, she uses dance historical context, frameworks from Black studies and performance theory, and explorations embedded in her creative practices as curator and dancer. In part, her work grapples with the archival capacities of the dancing body and with how movement emerges within the process of generating archival research.

Her scholarly book in development, Indescribable Moves: Improvised Experiments in Dancing Blackness, points to the intricacy and changeability of both dance and race in performances by choreographers Bebe Miller, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Ralph Lemon, as well as Will Rawls: one for which Willis served as curator and the other in which she performed. A more experimental book project in collaboration with writer Jaime Shearn Coan and artist taisha paggett challenges conventional modes of writing and archiving dance practices across paggett’s body of performance work (forthcoming from Soberscove Press).

Guided by her simultaneous practices as a writer, curator, and dancer, in this talk Willis discusses the structuring devices of her thinking across these various platforms: methods for attending to the specificities of live, movement-driven performance in programming and on the page.

The series begins with residencies and talks in November 2024 with artists SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, Steffani Jemison, collaborative duo Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon, and series curator Tara Aisha Willis.

In April 2025, using EMPAC’s spaces simultaneously like a series of chambers, the program culminates in a weekend of events: a performance by Leslie Cuyjet, an installation and performance by Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon, and artist talks by Steffani Jemison and Justine A. Chambers on their latest works which register archival and historical traces through gesture.