Modern Living is a multi-chapter project by choreographers Gerard & Kelly made in collaboration with L.A. Dance Project to explore themes of queer intimacy and domestic space within legacies of modernist architecture. The project began as two site-specific dance performances, which the duo then took to EMPAC to translate into a gallery installation integrating architectural forms and video projection. This work-in-progress presentation took audiences behind the scenes of Modern Living.

In 2016, Gerard & Kelly choreographed nine dancers in performances at the landmark Schindler House in West Hollywood, CA, the site of an early experiment in communal living, and Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, CT, where the architect and his partner David Whitney lived for over 40 years. The performances investigated the livability of queer space—
its pleasures, tensions, and impossibilities—and were filmed for the next iteration of the project. Gerard & Kelly were in residence with their technical and artistic collaborators to build the installation to scale, experimenting with architecture, projection mapping, and sound. 

Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly have collaborated since 2003 to create installations and performances interrogating the formation of the couple and exploring the critical potential of intimacy. Driven by an inquiry of their own partnership, the duo uses choreography, language, video, and sculpture to address questions of sexuality, memory, and the formation of queer consciousness.

Choreographer, writer, and performer Okwui Okpokwasili and director Peter Born presented their work, Poor People’s TV Room. Okpokwasili had been to EMPAC previously to perform for choreographers Nora Chipaumire and Ralph Lemon. As choreographer, Okpokwasili’s style transcends genre categories like experimental theater and conceptual choreography. The artist performed with three other women in a multifaceted work using live song, dance, and text amid other media including television, audio recording, light, plastic, cloth, and wood.

Poor People’s TV Room took inspiration from the Bring Back Our Girls campaign, started by a group of Nigerian women in 2014 to raise awareness about the Boko Haram kidnappings of 300 young Chibok girls. The campaign turned into a global movement after gaining widespread attention through social networking platforms such as Twitter. Since the speed of this online phenomenon ultimately overpowered the voices of the indigenous Nigerian women who started the movement, Okpokwasili used live performance to refocus our attention. Acknowledging a history of Nigerian women’s collective action, Okpokwasili wove the Bring Back Our Girls narrative with The Women’s War of 1929, an early anti-colonial revolt organized by women of six Nigerian ethnic groups.

Okpokwasili spent a week installing and finalizing Poor People’s TV Room for the New York City premiere of the work. 

Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, writer, and performer who has shown her work at New York’s Lincoln Center, PS122, Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, and the Walker. She has toured her work internationally at Théâtre de Gennevillers and Theatre Garrone in France, The Zagreb Youth Theater in Croatia, and Arts House in Australia. Peter Born is a Brooklyn-based director, designer, and filmmaker who, in addition to working with Okpokwasili, has worked with clients including Vogue, Bloomingdales, and the Wall Street Journal, and with collaborators ranging from Kanye West to NoStringsUS Puppet Productions.

Over the course of two and a half years, Mary Armentrout Dance Theater worked in residence toward the fall 2018 premiere of Listening Creates an Opening. A collaboration between Oakland-based choreographer Mary Armentrout, media artist Ian Winters, composer Evelyn Ficarra, and performer Chris Evans, the project took shape over the course of a number of production visits, work-in-progress presentations, workshops, and pop-up performances. 

Armentrout introduced audiences to the project’s focus on bodily approaches to technology through a workshop in spring 2017, From Feldenkrais to GoPro, which paired Feldenkrais techniques of awareness-through-movement with media technologies. At this point, the team also initialized a year-long time-lapse video, documenting EMPAC’s north staircase and equipping the lower landing with props, including the work’s iconic motorcycle helmet, for building visitors to interact with the video. The scope of the work grew to incorporate themes of architecture and histories of place, resulting in a work-in-progress performance that led audience members from Rensselaer’s Off-Campus Commons, through the EMPAC building and down into the city of Troy. The final, roving performance expanded on this path, with performer Jack Magai leading audiences through these sites, as well as the Karma Hair Salon, and Uncle Sam’s Good and Natural Products, ending at the Hudson River. Along the way, the performance incorporated footage from the year-long time lapse as well as recurring performance motifs. 

Hip hop dancer, choreographer, and scholar Naomi Bragin led a workshop on the dance style known as the Robot, Robotting, or Botting. She introduced the basic steps and movements of Robotting and contextualized them within the history and practice of street dance. Participants were invited to take part in a dance workshop featuring the freestyle circle, a collective improvisation fundamental to black expressive dance practices. Bragin also addressed the complex relationship between kinesthesia, politics, and technology, and how this relationship enables our understanding of hip hop culture. The workshop explored what happens when the body is the robot and the robot is the body on the street.

Naomi Bragin is assistant professor in the school of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at University of Washington Bothell. Drawing from 20 years dancing in clubs, the streets, and onstage, she researches the intersections of dance, popular culture, media, and black political theory, attending to issues of cultural appropriation and aesthetic politics. Bragin is the founder of DREAM Dance Company, for which she was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Future Aesthetics Artist Award, a Zellerbach Foundation Grant, and was a California Arts Council Artist-in-Residence.

Dancer, choreographer, and media artist Jonah Bokaer combined three of his iconic solos—False Start, Charade, and Nudedescendance—in a 60-minute performance titled Three Cases Of Amnesia. Rarely performed in the United States, the program showcased Bokaer’s pioneering work with choreography, and computer-generated animations.

Where does a movement begin? Where does it end? What, and who, does it leave behind? In these performances, Bokaer used a digital avatar to compose body movements that he might not have discovered working with a physical person, and then transposed that choreography onto his own body for live performance. Over the course of the three works, Bokaer and his animated double dance together, the uncanny precision of each one’s movements building upon the other’s. The result was an intimate portrait of a man and the various media he comes into contact with—not just a computer, its software and projections, but also a chair, a ladder, an apple, and clothing. Bokaer navigated these objects with a personal movement style that goes beyond any specific technique and dialogued with themes of play, memory, ephemerality, and disappearance.

Jonah Bokaer is an American choreographer and media artist known for addressing the human body in relation to contemporary technologies. Recruited to the Merce Cunningham company at the unprecedented age of 18, Bokaer is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow in Choreography, a United States Artists Fellow in Dance (Ford Foundation), and a Bessie award-winner. In addition to his own work, he has also choreographed for Robert Wilson and danced for such choreographers as John Jasperse, Deborah Hay, and Tino Seghal.

Through the articulation of his body, choreographer/dancer Silas Riener explored the potential of dance in describing “things.” Based on word histories, personal histories, and translational acts in poet, translator, and essayist Anne Carson’s Variations on the Right to Remain Silent, The Autobiography of Red, and the Gender of Sound, Riener resisted the linguistic impetus to name in the effort to describe. Driven by both the promise and inherent futility of choreographic description, he performed this resistance as a translational act that challenges us to combine memories with meaning while circumnavigating language and the weight of words.

Silas Riener has been researching and translating Carson's prose into dance since making NOX in 2010 with choreographic collaborator Rashaun Mitchell. A member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 2007-2012, Silas Riener is in residence at EMPAC with Rashaun Mitchell and artist Charles Atlas to produce a newly commissioned stereoscopic dance film and subsequent theatrical production, co-commissioned with Walker Art Center.

The electronic music of composer France Jobin can be described as "sound-sculpture," revealing a minimalist approach to complex sound environments where analog and digital methods intersect. While her music often makes use of restraint and limit, she isn't one to shy away from extremes.

Her skillful interplay between highs and lows, louds and softs, creates an intricate narrative, which stretches the listener's perception and continually refocuses attention. Using an array of specifically placed loudspeakers numbering in the dozens, Jobin will present a new work built for the EMPAC Concert Hall.

France Jobin is a sound/installation artist, composer, and curator residing in Montreal, Canada. Her installations express a parallel path, incorporating both musical and visual elements inspired by the architecture of physical spaces. Her works can be “experienced” in various music venues and new-technology festivals across Canada, the United States, South America, South Africa, Europe and Japan.

The Extra People is an immersive theater performance where 15 audience members sit and watch another 15 onstage. After half an hour, they find themselves replacing those onstage, only to discover that another 15 have appeared in the seats they've left behind. And so it continues, through the hours… The theater building—dormant, empty, and unlit save for your flashlight—seems unable to be deactivated. And within this strange process, wearing headphones and a "hi-viz" vest, you're cast along with everyone else as some kind of extra. But an extra for what?

Starting with Rotozaza's Etiquette (2007), Ant Hampton has created nine "autoteatro" works, including his recent Bessie-award-winning collaboration with Tim Etchells for library reading rooms (The Quiet Volume). The "protocol" behind autoteatro—automated processes (often audio) where instructions are given to audience members who find themselves experiencing the work from the inside—is now taken back to the theater building to operate on a larger scale.

The Extra People was commissioned by EMPAC and will premiere in the space where it was developed via the artist-in-residence program.

Ant Hampton (British, b.1975 Fribourg, Switzerland) made his first show as Rotozaza in 1998, a project which ended up spanning performance, theater, installation, intervention and writing-based works, and often focusing on the use of instructions given to unrehearsed “guest” performers, both on stage and in public settings. Solo projects include ongoing experimentation around “live portraiture”: structured encounters with people from non-theatrical milieu.

Returning to EMPAC after his 2013 multi-venue installation and performance, British artist Mark Fell presents Recursive Frame Analysis, a new work for light, sound, and human movement. As with many of Fell’s previous works, Recursive Frame Analysis emphasizes highly formalized aesthetic strategies: arrangements of intensely saturated light, raw synthetic sound, disrupted rhythmic structures, and kinetic systems that urge the audience to their perceptual and cognitive boundaries.   

Taking its title from a therapeutic technique (RFA) developed in the 1980s, Recursive Frame Analysis refers to the cognitive patterns around which behavioral relationships and interactions develop; typically these are thought of as “stuck” and therefore also somehow problematic. The frame in the case of this performance could refer to the semiotic or the phenomenological.

The work engages with and responds to vocabularies of shapes developed by New York-based choreographer and dancer Brittany Bailey and performed by Bailey and Burr Johnson.

Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield, UK. He is widely known for combining popular music styles such as electronica and techno with more academic approaches to computer-based composition, with a particular emphasis on algorithmic and mathematical systems. As well as recorded works, he produces installation pieces, often using multiple speaker systems. He started his career in the ’90s house and techno scene as one half of electronic duo SND and released The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making earlier this year on label The Death of Rave.

Brittany Bailey has worked as a dancer/choreographer in NYC since 2008. She graduated from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in 2008 and went on to train with Merce Cunningham. Bailey has performed with Marina Abramovic, Michael Clark Company, and Robert Wilson. Along with creating performance works for her dance company, Bailey is currently the choreographer on performances with Christopher Knowles, Mark Fell, and a solo dance with visuals by Louise Bourgeois and text by Gary Indiana.

Commissioned and partially developed through the EMPAC artist-in-residency program, Extra Shapes is a performance for lunging figures, a musical concert for loudspeakers, and a light show. Created by DD Dorvillier, in collaboration with composer Sébastien Roux and lighting designer Thomas Dunn, Extra Shapes occupies a rectangular space divided into three horizontal bands, featuring sound in the front, light in the middle, and dance in the back. Picture a slice of Neapolitan ice cream with its three separate bands—strawberry (sound), vanilla (light), chocolate (movement)—then rotate the plate to view each of its sides. In Extra Shapes, the idea is to present the three mediums simultaneously but separately, and to propose a new way of experiencing and thinking about abstraction in a live situation. 

Choreographer and performer DD Dorvillier has been developing her work and practice in New York City since 1989. In 2010, she moved to France and has continued to elaborate her work internationally. Through her original works, Dorvillier has always challenged pre-established definitions, including her own, of dance and choreography. By building works through physical, conceptual, and philosophical approaches, Dorvillier addresses issues of spectatorship, translation, and meaningfulness, in a playful yet urgent manner.

Composer Sébastien Roux writes electronic music, and presents it in diverse formats, from CD’s and records, to public listening sessions, sound installations, sound walks, and radio pieces. In 2011 he began to develop an approach focused on principles of translation, analyzing the structures of preexisting art works (visual, musical, literary) and transposing them into scores for new works (radiophonic or electroacoustic taped music).

Lighting designer Thomas Dunn has collaborated with DD Dorvillier/human future dance corps, lighting all the company projects since 2004. In 2007 he received a Bessie for his lighting design of Nottthing Is Importanttt at The Kitchen in New York. Other credits include works with TheaterWorks Singapore, The Civilians, Trajal Harrel, and Sens Productions. Thomas is also a recipient of a 2009 Kevin Kline Award for Outstanding Lighting Design.