Choreographer and dancer Nora Chipaumire returned to EMPAC after working in residence in 2011 to present Miriam, a deeply personal dance-theater performance that looks closely at the tensions women face between public expectations and private desires; between selflessness and ambition; and between the perfection and sacrifice of the feminine ideal. The inspiration for the work springs from the cultural and political milieu of Chipaumire’s southern African girlhood, her self-exile to the US, and her self-discovery as an artist. Performed by Chipaumire and Okwui Okpokwasili, Miriam renders the intensity of women who fight to create themselves despite the dual legacies of strict cultural traditions and imperialist racial views that define female beauty and power. 

Born in Zimbabwe and based in New York City, Chipaumire has studied dance in many parts of the world including Africa (Senegal, Burkina Faso, Kenya, and South Africa), Cuba, Jamaica, and the US. She was a 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts recipient, a 2011 United States Artist Ford Fellow, and a two-time New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) award winner.

Triptych 0811 explores the relationship between dreams, reality, and ambition. Ella Fiskum Danz draws inspiration from the art triptych, in which three images or panels are separate, yet together. The Norwegian dance company journeys into the inner life of fantastic aspirations flanked by the obstacles of real life. Using classical ballet vocabulary in stark contrast to aspects of contemporary life, Fiskum culls together a theatrical dreamscape: a woman in a burqa, a ballerina turned nightclub dancer, a Hollywood starlet played by a man, and a prima ballerina. With a live performance by Norwegian rock guitar legend Ronni Le Tekrø and innovative stage design by Serge von Arx, the audience is invited to view multiple realities through the lives of the characters on stage. This work in progress functions as an open environment to test ideas from a two-week production residency as part of an ongoing open-call residency initiative at EMPAC.

Against the backdrop of economic and social crisis stretching from Greece to the US, Dimitris Papaioannou embarked on an artistic challenge: investigating personal and national identity using the least possible means. The result is Primal Matter, where two bodies on the stage are the starting point for a journey that weighs body and soul to determine what is truly indispensable—what constitutes the essence. To create Primal Matter at EMPAC, Papaioannou and his artistic team erected a custom-made wall with built-in fluorescent light, and created an intricate live audio design using input from contact mics positioned around the set and processed in real-time and sourced to different outputs. 

Papaioannou is an avant-garde stage director, choreographer, and visual artist who has worked across the boundaries of theater, dance, and the visual arts; he drew international acclaim for his direction of the opening ceremony of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games.

Ralph Lemon shared a work-in-progress presentation of a two-channel video installation of 4Walls, a piece that would eventually encompass live performance, surround sound, and two large-scale projections in an open environment where the audience can roam. This video captures the ecstatic abandon of a 20-minute dance section from Lemon’s How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?, which also blended live performance, film, and visual art, and toured the US in 2010. In this excerpt, performers exhibit a turbulent physicality bordering on complete exhaustion, revealing what is left when we feel we cannot go any further. 

Lemon is a dancer, choreographer, writer, and visual artist, and is also artistic director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation. 

In this three-part lecture series, Michael Century presents a fresh reading of today’s experimental media art scene by surveying key works, personalities, and movements of the past century and laying out a framework for forecasting its future. Organized around an intertwined pair of narratives, the lectures are richly illustrated with stills and video, sound recordings, and live musical demonstrations. The underlying narratives are driven by contrasting conceptions of the role of the artist and of time. The first sees the artist as anticipating the powers and dangers of techno-scientific progress through idiosyncratic experiments, with time as linear and progressive. The second sees the artist as re-constituting past historical ruptures and forgotten pathways to envision alternative ways of being contemporary with a more cyclical sense of progress.

September 27— Après le Deluge, 1913-1947

Surveys key moments and tensions within the historical avant-garde, with examples from dance, abstract film and animation, experimental music, and critical theory.

October 11— The Panacea That Failed, 1948-1974

Balances the celebratory heyday of art and technology against a rising tide of disillusionment and media-archeological irony.

November 29— Virtuality to Virtuosity, 1974-2011

Moves beyond what some have termed the crisis of new media art today—its relegation to “cool obscurity” by the institutional art world, and its simultaneous co-option by the information industries—by sketching out an anti-anti-utopian view of the potential of experimental artworks as “extraordinary freedom machines.” By framing the future of art and technology in terms of creative freedom, this concluding lecture weaves together and synthesizes strands from the first two. The argument unfolds in two parts, examining in turn the micro-temporality of specific media art works, and the macro-temporality of aesthetic systems designed to enable future creativity. In the first part, “virtuality” is explained as an intensification of time; selected works by David Rokeby, Bill Viola, and Steve Reich illustrate the potential in art to vitalize and open new horizons of experience. The second part embraces political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s notion of freedom as “virtuosity”, entailing the creation of a sustainable public space for creative dialogue and collaboration. Examples are drawn from the histories of video art in the 1970s (Dan Sandin’s Image Processor), the history of computer music in the 1980s (the invention of the MAX programming language), and recent new media art (Loops by the Open Ended Group).

This four hour session with the artists of Poor Dog Group (PDG) exposed and examine the unique artistic practices of the PDG collaborators. Participants learned how to build a new theatrical experience in a collaborative environment; learning the fundamentals of constructing an experimental performance piece with the tools of original story structure, character development, movement and text.

Acclaimed for her exquisite performances across India and Europe, Shantala Shivalingappa offers a dynamic double program of contemporary solos and traditional Indian dance. A renowned performer in Kuchipudi, a 2,000-year-old Indian style that fuses dance, music, and theater, Shivalingappa has been called “a total revelation” and “divinely gifted” for her grace, finesse, and powerful presence on stage. She has also performed with some of the greatest contemporary theater and dance artists working today, including Maurice Béjart and Peter Brook, bringing her stamp of classical mastery to contemporary works.

The program begins with two solos that pairs her sensuous and precise dancing style with new forms. This is followed by an excerpt from Gamaka, a Kuchipudi-based performance choreographed by Shivalingappa, danced in shimmering silks and in rhythmically complex and playful dialogue with four master musicians.

Inspired by Sir Ernest Shackleton's harrowing expedition to Antarctica in 1914, Phantom Limb unites puppetry, dance, film, history, and photography with contemporary music to create a stunning vision of the great arctic continent—past, present, and future. Dim light plays across a lunar terrain dotted with icebergs. Shackleton’s crew, played by half-life-size puppets, struggles to survive in this vast landscape, putting into stark relief the power of endurance and camaraderie and the price of knowledge. With sound that combines the junkyard dog aesthetic of the band Skeleton Key playing live, a score recorded by the Kronos Quartet, and glacial field recordings, 69˚S. mines the inherently bittersweet and complex nature of the Shackleton experience and what the future may hold for this fragile environment.

Following a two-week residency at EMPAC with the entire cast and crew, these performances are the final workshop showings before the piece officially premieres at Dartmouth College. A look inside the creative process in the making of 69°S.

The New York City-based Phantom Limb Company, founded by composer and marionette maker Erik Sanko and visual artist Jessica Grindstaff, is critically acclaimed for its reinvention of traditional theatrical forms, incorporating marionette puppetry, music, and large-scale installation in order to probe issues of contemporary life. Since the success of their first marionette play The Fortune Teller in 2006, Sanko and Grindstaff have collaborated on numerous original theatrical works with such diverse artists as Ping Chong & Company, Ulrike Quade, Geoff Sobelle of Pig Iron and rainpan 43, and Mark Z. Danielewski.

Jessica Grindstaff is a multimedia artist. Known for her tiny Victorian taxidermied shadowboxes, wax and chalk paintings, she has most recently taken her micro-universe macro through the medium of installation and set design.

Erik Sanko is a lifelong musician, and has played with The Lounge Lizards, John Cale, Yoko Ono, They Might Be Giants and his own band, Skeleton Key. Erik also has always made puppets, first for his own amusement, then for art collectors, and now for theatrical productions.

DANCE MOViES Commissions support new works that fuse dance with the technologies of the moving image.  

World premieres of three new dance films and an installation commissioned by EMPAC’s DANCE MOViES program, followed by a procession led by the punk marching band Mucca Pazza, featured in the film Fanfare for Marching Band.

A Circus of One

US, 15-minute looping video installation Director: Alison Crocetta Composer: Jason Treuting A Circus of One is a 16 mm black-and-white film directed by visual artist Alison Crocetta in collaboration with composer Jason Treuting. This film records Crocetta as a clownish figure within a one-ring circus completing a series of eight acts that run the gamut from feats of daring to absurd gestures. These performance actions form a filmic garland with Treuting’s score that draws inspiration from historic circus music and the tradition of musique concrète.

Fauna

Chile, 20 minutes Script and General Direction: Paulo Fernández Choreographic Direction and Production: Rodrigo Chaverini Original Music and Sound: Tomas González Art: Paulo Fernández & Antonio Becerro Performers: Camila Scholtbach, Luis Acevedo & Daniela Tenhamm Fauna creates an audiovisual world of confined and fantastical spaces, setting in motion a poetic dialogue between nature and artifice. Bodies possessed by different states inhabit landscapes configured in these restricted spaces. The film evokes a rhythmic relationship between body and location, dark and latent, questioning the concreteness of reality and life as staging.

Fanfare for Marching Band

US, 15:35 minutes Director: Danièle Wilmouth Choreographer: Peter Carpenter Band: Mucca Pazza A film following the mayhem created by a ragtag musical militia that embarks on an impotent invasion through a parallel universe, where their exuberant music is out of sync and unheard. The two worlds are finally unified when the band masters the tempo and patience of empathy.

Spring Cleaning

US, 10 minutes Director: Pooh Kaye Performer and animation assistant: Alexander Clack Sound design and sound edit: John Kilgore Choreographer and filmmaker Pooh Kaye’s alter ego, Wild Girl, played by Alex Clack, has a busy day weeding the dandelions, raking up dead brush, and mowing the lawn. Dandelions swirl in animated patterns around her, the flowers popping in and out of her ears and mouth as she tries to speak. The ground swallows her and spits her out, and piles of brush attack her as she tries to rid her lawn of dead branches. Kaye returns to her early Super 8 films from the 1970s, which explored the human body’s relationship to the world.

Half man and half horse, satyrs were the legendary companions of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and theater. In Dionysia, Poor Dog Group uses ancient drama, lore, and imagery found on clay pots, to reinvent the “satyr play.” Based on fragments of these plays, many by Euripides, Dionysia relates the myth of Thyestes and Atreus and delves into the ritualistic, unstable, and sometimes hilarious behavior of satyrs. Commissioned by EMPAC and created during a three-week residency including the work’s premiere, Dionysia channels forgotten rites into a full-blown physical expression of the bestial qualities inherent in contemporary life, revealing a world both barbaric and beautiful. 

Poor Dog Group is a Los Angeles-based collective of performance and media artists committed to nurturing a distinctive aesthetic through adventurous collaboration in the creation of new work and through the radical reexaminations of existing texts.

Quote Unquote: Experiments in Time-Based Text was an interdisciplinary series presenting works by artists that use an existing text as a departure point for time-based works including installation, film, and performance.