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.
 

Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans & the American Century) is a performance jointly authored and performed by filmmaker Bassem Saad and writer Sanja Grozdanić that opens up a complex grammar of mourning in the face of impersonal, legal accounts of collective grief. The piece contends with the temporal, political, and intellectual fallout of so-called post-conflict societies beset by imperialist violence in the 20th century. Its plot centers on two traveling eulogists who encounter one another in a declining architectural estate. They must contend with the sense of an ending–of an epoch, of a revolution, of a regime.

Over the course of the performance, the project's characters gradually open up a dreamlike grasping after the principles of revolutions and their failures. Riffs off official political stances rupture suddenly into unfettered expressions that ride collective affects of public feeling and dissidence. The work touches on parallel histories--such as the breakdown of the former Yugoslavia and ongoing crises in and around Lebanon--as it shifts between the openly tragic and the melancholically absurd. What starts out as a formal reflection on a sort of "professional mourning" eventually unravels into a very different sort of historical reckoning.

This version of the performance, commissioned by EMPAC, expands the artists’ original script-based work to encompass a new sound score, film material, and additional experimental projection. Reflecting the artists’ iterative working method, this presentation includes material from their in-progress film of the same name, plus archival footage.

The artists approach this expanded version of Permanent Trespass as a cinepoem, building on avant-garde techniques for merging the sensibility of poetic writing with the possibilities of cinematic footage.

Dana Michel’s experimental choreographic work MIKE deploys an unexpected logic that unravels the orderly world of mechanical labor. Accompanied by an inventory of office items, which appear sculptural yet also act as performance collaborators, Michel embarks on a series of tasks subject to interruption and absurd redirection. Michel moves her body and these disparate objects nomadically through the margins of theatrical space and the given architecture, upending their typical function. Both playful and serious, MIKE deals with work culture and self-respect. Michel asks: “is it possible to live public lives that reflect our inner selves?”

Michel’s MIKE is an ever-shifting work that updates in response to each architectural space it is presented in. At EMPAC, the piece’s itinerary shifts between one of the building’s most technologically advanced spaces (Studio 1) and some of its seemingly most simple and public—such as lobbies, stairwells, and an outdoor patio. Where apparently straightforward infrastructure becomes entangled in subtle, comic gestures, the finish of theatrical production is surrendered to the physical and emotional complexities of maintenance. At issue are the everyday performances we undertake at work.

MIKE is a three-hour, durational performance. Viewers can move around the performance spaces as needed to follow the work. While audiences are encouraged to stay from start to finish, viewers are free to enter and exit the performance as they like.

In this talk presentation, renowned artist and musician Laurie Anderson reveals the process behind her newest music-theater work, ARK, while at EMPAC for a final production residency in preparation for its world premiere in Manchester in November 2024.

An opera starring a host of mythical and contemporary figures, Anderson’s subjects—apocalyptic climate events, technology and information overload, American history—are warped into a story that plays with the flow of time and poses questions about the survival of the human spirit. How does humanity need to change in order to be saved?

Laurie Anderson was at EMPAC for her first residency in 2009. She was Distinguished Artist-in-Residence for three years from 2012 through 2014. In all, Anderson has developed 10 projects during residencies at EMPAC, including this season's ARK.

One of America’s most renowned performance artists, Laurie Anderson’s genre-crossing work encompasses performance, film, music, installation, writing, photography, and sculpture. She is widely known for her multimedia presentations and musical recordings and has numerous major works to her credit, including United States I-V (1983), Empty Places (1990), Stories from the Nerve Bible (1993), Songs and Stories for Moby Dick (1999), and Life on a String (2001), among others. She has taken part in countless collaborations with an array of artists, from Jonathan Demme and Brian Eno to Bill T. Jones and Peter Gabriel.

Dancer and choreographer Ligia Lewis’s performance A Plot / A Scandal takes up plot in its multiple meanings. Rebellious fantasies become schemes against the limits of narration. Mythical, historical, and political vignettes scandalize landed property’s legacy. Where plot is a scandal, the stage gives itself over to the pleasures of transgression. Here, Lewis explores what it might mean to be caught in the act.

In the artist’s own words, “A plot exposed, a foul deed enacted, invites scandal. In the spirit of revolution or romantic musings, scandals provoke an imagining of the impossible. Utopian or mundane, how might scandal reveal what lies unwittingly close to our fantasies? And how does it expose where society places its limits? If life is a scandal waiting to be plotted, how do we position ourselves within its matrix? Immoral and lacking propriety, scandals are incidents where fantasy and pleasure take center stage.”

Drawing together personae that range from Enlightenment thinker John Locke, 16th-century Santo Domingo slave rebellion leader Maria Olofa (Wolofa), Cuban artist and revolutionary José Aponte, and Lewis’s great-grandmother, Lewis choreographs a “poetics of refusal at the edges of representation.” Scheming against theater’s strict economy of seeing and being seen, the artist outlines a scene “where the excitement for that which does not fit might find its place.”

Onye Ozuzu, Joshua Gabriel, Ben Lamar Gay, and Simon Rouby are in residence at EMPAC to develop Ozuzu’s new dance performance Space Carcasses. The project will involve the creation of a composite digital space and sound dancer from audiovisual data of three architectural sites.

Ligia Lewis and Corey Scott-Gilbert are in residence in Studio 2 for artistic research and development for future choreographic work.

Space Carcasses is a new work-in-progress dance performance by Onye Ozuzu that explores how architectures haunt the body and impart their histories to us as physical effects. Throughout their EMPAC residency, Ozuzu and her collaborators will develop a virtual space that blends digital residues of different sites along the historical transatlantic slave trade (from Savannah, Georgia; Reunion Island in France; and Northern Nigeria). Drawing from movement scores and data Ozuzu developed on location, the residency will explore how the work’s “space carcasses” enable the body to extend itself into these complex and emotionally intense environments. Space Carcasses combines its virtual set with audiovisual traces, which were recorded from performers’ dancing bodies as they interfaced with present-day buildings in the research sites. As skin, container, exoskeleton, or mask, Space Carcasses’s layered scenes forge a composite site that can both record and re-contextualize Afrodiasporic relationships to place.

Ozuzu’s Space Carcasses is inspired by Africanist, circular conceptions of time and expands on these traditions to enable connections to a communal self and to ancestors. Ozuzu situates the body as a technology with the power to access different moments across collective experience. Space Carcasses is performed in an architectural corner created within EMPAC’s Studio 1, which also functions as a projection surface. Large-scale video projections will trail and replay live dancer’s movements in real-time, and a sound dancer will be created from EMPAC’s spatialization sound technology.

Work-in-progress events offer a window into the research, development, and production of new works by artists in residence at EMPAC. These free events open up a dialogue between our audiences, artists, and EMPAC staff.

Scholar André Lepecki’s work focuses on what he terms choreopolitics. This term signifies dance and choreographic practices that enable freedom in the social realm. Choreopolitics resists the policing of movement. Its politics is much more than policy in a formal sense. It resists enforced forms of physical circulation, and it extends dancers’ capacity to move against choreography’s disciplinary rules. Lepecki considers how time may be a technology for policing movement, and looks at performances and works that challenge it.

As the speaker writes: “In this talk, movement and time will be addressed as fundamental political substances through which a whole system of dominance over bodies, their actions, and their non-actions has been erected under different names—such as ‘liberal modernity,’ or ‘progress,’ or ‘global capitalism.’ With the help of some recent choreographies and performances—particularly by the Brazilian duo Davi Pontes & Wallace Ferreira, and by the Berlin-based duo Pauline Brody & Renate Lorenz—we will see how current disputes over who owns movement, who has the right to movement, and when should movement take place, may help us rethink (together with the critical theory of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Michelle Wright, and Sylvia Wynter) the very foundations of what we still insist on calling ‘time.’ In short, another title for this talk could simply be: The continuous struggle: towards a choreopolitics without time.” –André Lepecki

All are invited to stay for the public reception following the talk.

Set to premiere in Manchester in 2024, ARK is an opera starring a host of mythical and contemporary figures. Anderson’s subjects—time, technology, and American history—are warped into a story that sometimes moves backwards. Apocalyptic climate events and information overload set the scenes for these stories, visual poems, and songs.

Laurie Anderson and her team are in the Theater in August for a final production residency for her opera ARK before it premieres in Manchester in November 2024.