The Machine Starts is based on E.M. Forster's 1909 sci-fi novella The Machine Stops, an eerily prescient tale that predicts the internet, television, global environmental ruin, social isolation and the impact of technology on the human experience.

Under the leadership of Rensselaer artists Shawn Lawson and Michael Oatman, professors in HASS and the SoA respectively, this student run performance features A Capella singing group, The Rusty Pipes, The Parkour Club, and Center Stage, a spoken word group, as well as interactive media, new music and architectures designed to transform EMPAC.

The goal for HeadSwap was to allow participants to choose an individual point of view within footage shot in Japan and New York City, while “swapping their heads”: simultaneously seeing what another person chooses to see. During a three-week research residency, Joris and a multi-disciplinary team of designers, programmers, and dramaturges worked to composite different video and graphic sources and find a way to view the end result in an “omnidirectional” way. They tested spherical layers upon which different media could be textured, and developed hardware to render and composite live images from a 360-degree camera without visible loss in quality or delay. This research enabled CREW to explore the conflict between live and prerecorded images and to see where both can enhance each other. At the end of the residency the work-in-progress was presented to the public followed by a discussion with the artists. 

CREW, a Belgium-based multidisciplinary team of artists and researchers founded by Eric Joris integrate technology into theatrical events to create new forms of experience. They create immersive environments for audiences, using video goggles and interactive technology, that put each spectator at the heart of the experience and that challenge notions of presence, spectatorship, and narration.

What value does our society attach to relaxation, rest, silence, sleep, and laziness? Are we caught up more than ever in the relentlessness of production and consumption? These were the central themes behind this performance created by Belgian artist Kris Verdonck and choreographer Alix Eynaudi that played with basic theatrical elements such as light, sound, movement, language, and scenography to steer the audience’s perception. According to Verdonck, “…sleep is anarchistic, not in the destructive sense, but rather dangerously constructive. Without sleep, our ideas and our knowledge become superficial mass products and therefore easy to set aside…by doing nothing at all, man becomes more productive and his knowledge more in-depth, thereby making him less vulnerable in a world that is flooded with information and choices.” 

Kris Verdonck’s visual arts, architecture, and theater training is reflected in the work he produces: his creations are situated between visual arts and theater, installation and performance, and dance and architecture. Alix Eynaudi trained as a ballet dancer in the Opéra de Paris; in 1996, she joined Anne-Teresa De Keersmaeker’s company Rosas. She works in Brussels creating her own pieces, and in collaboration with Anne Juren, Marianne Baillot, and Agata Maszkiewicz. 

Annie Dorsen returned to EMPAC to perform Hello Hi There, which she worked on in residence in 2010. Hello Hi There uses a famous 1970s television debate between the philosopher Michel Foucault and linguist/activist Noam Chomsky as the inspiration and raw material for a dialogue between two custom-designed “chatbots”: computer programs designed to mimic human conversation. Every conversation between the chatbots follows a unique path due to their custom-made software, which has been programmed to mimic the nuances of human conversation. As Chomsky and Foucault debate language, creativity, the roots of scientific discovery, and the nature of political power, the chatbots talk on and on, endlessly circling the questions of the debate, and frequently veering off into unexpected, at times nonsensical, digressions. 

An Obie award-winning director and writer, Dorsen works in a variety of fields, including theater, film, dance, and digital performance. She is the co-creator of the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange, which she also directed. 

Bodies emerge, float, and then disappear into the shadows of a dimly lit architecture. In (glowing), Kota Yamazaki draws inspiration from the great modern writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s (1886-1965) essay In’ei Raisan (In Praise of Shadows), which plumbs the unique Japanese aesthetics of shadows and darkness. In this subtle and powerful work for six dancers, with a set made following principles found in the traditional Japanese house, Yamazaki draws on his own deep background in butoh, a dance form developed in Japan after WWII that embraces darkness, and connects it with traditional African dance and contemporary movement to mine the inherent similarities between these forms. Dancers from Senegal and Ethiopia join Japanese butoh dancers and US contemporary performers to create a scenario in which lightless vision ignites the imagination, conjuring illusion and upturning the ordinary between the shadows.

Saturday, March 31, 10:00 AM-1:00 PM — Workshop

New York based butoh-trained choreographer Kota Yamazaki and two dancers from Africa, Shiferaw Tariku (Ethiopia) and Marie Agnes Gomis (Senegal) will offer a unique workshop focusing on the fundamentals of butoh, and the common threads found between butoh and African dance. Inspired by the creative process of his newest work (glowing), Yamazaki offers a special opportunity to explore these dance styles and to experience his creative process. Max 15 people. **No dance experience necessary.

Choreographers/dancers Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey come together in TOOL IS LOOT with their identities simultaneously undone and strengthened. They ask the question: What comes after you don’t know anymore? For one year, Cardona and Lacey worked apart, in the US and France, respectively. Each solicited weeklong encounters with non-dance experts, allowing the opinions and desires of an “outsider” to shift what they knew about creating short solos. These experts included a sommelier, an architect, a film editor, a medical supply salesman, a kinetic sculptor, a baroque opera singer, an art critic, an acoustician, and a social activist.

An encounter with one expert, Dr. Heidi Newberg, Rensselaer professor of physics, applied physics, and astronomy, resulted in a solo dance that was performed as part of our biennial Filament festival. Cardona and Lacey worked together this past summer while in residence to build their disparate experiences into this duet.

Susan Sgorbati invites visitors to observe her work with an ensemble of six dancers in Emergent Improvisation. She will introduce the concepts behind the work and show how they manifest in dance. The practice and performance of Emergent Improvisation addresses the nature of improvisation in dance and music. In this context, improvisation means the spontaneous creation of integrated sound and movement by performers who are adapting to internal and external stimuli, impulses, and interactions. The phenomenon of emergence is also found in a wide variety of natural settings. Emergent forms appear in complex, interconnected systems, where there is enough order and interaction to create recognizable pattern, but where the form is open-ended enough to continuously bring in new differentiations and integrations that influence and modify the form. Evolution and brain function are two examples. In linking the creative work of art making to the emergent process evident in nature, there is basis for a rich and textured inquiry into how systems come together, transform, and reassemble to create powerful instruments of communication, meaning, and exchange.

Inspired by the writings of transcendental philosopher Henry David Thoreau and the two years he spent living by Walden Pond, RE: Walden melds theater, music, live performance, and large-scale video projection. Images from Walden Pond overlap with sound and text in an integrated experience that joins an intricate automated orchestra playing with the live piano score, a single performer, and interactive video. Using voice and movement, the performer influences, triggers, and interacts with the complex web of sonic and visual elements at play to create a multi-layered interpretation of Thoreau’s revolutionary musings of Walden Pond. Directed by Jean-François Peyret, this project brings together a stellar group of collaborative artists, many of whom have never been presented in the United States.

Two divergent artist-in-residence work in progress performances navigate vertical space through the tale of a man who slowly realizes he is living upside down, and a dance study of falling and floating that plays with perspective, time, and reality.

Rodrigo Pardo’s FLAT combines storytelling, video projections, and aerial performance. It eventually will be presented outdoors, four stories up, on the side of an apartment building. For now, this dance-theater work is seen 40 feet up inside the theater flytower to simulate the same performer conditions and reclining audience view. A man wakes up in his apartment feeling strange, not knowing he is upside down. The audience hears his inner monologue via headphones as he discovers his new reality and enters into his dreams; he must either learn how to live anew or try to change the world back to a familiar state. Inspired by the magical realism of Jorge Luis Borges, FLAT immerses both the performer and the audience in an intimate situation, shifting our perspective on what constitutes our reality.

Bárbara Foulkes’ FLOTA is a study in falling and floating—a dance performance that takes place in the center of a room on freestanding walls built to form a corner, which is transformed on multiple surfaces by live video projections of the dancer suspended. The audience chooses where to look just as they choose where to roam within the space. Foulkes is interested in creating a moment of suspension and spatial transformation, evoking reflections in an endless mirror, and refractions of time. FLOTA existed as a solo performance and is being developed into a more malleable experience for both performer and audience, interacting more openly with the architecture in which it occurs.

With 4Walls, Ralph Lemon premieres a live multimedia dance installation that provides four points of view on one dance, giving a new shape to a “dance with no form.” The basis of the amorphous collaborative work is a play on time, energy, and the disappearing body. Four Walls is an extension of a long-term project that began in 2003 with pieces originally titled Ecstasy and Wall. Lemon's intention for Wall was to create a “dance that disappears”—an attempt, in the words of dramaturge Katherine Profeta, to “fling the body headlong into an instant of pure presence.” Lemon desires to create a work that provides, for viewers, a different kind of engagement in a creative process that is relentless in questioning the nature of what passes between performers and audiences.