Dancer, choreographer, and philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone will lead a discussion over dinner on the primacy of movement in perception and our fundamental understanding of aliveness. A topic rarely acknowledged in the history of western philosophy and science, Sheets-Johnstone will examine how our understanding of space and time is fundamentally conditioned by our experience of movement. Observer Effects invites thinkers to present their highly integrative work in dialogue with the fields of art and science. This lecture series takes its title from a popularized principle in physics that holds that the act of observation transforms the observed. Outside the natural sciences, the idea that the observer and the observed are linked in a web of reciprocal modification has been deeply influential in philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, and politics.

Nicole Beutler works with the tension between intense emotionality and cool calculation while also reflecting on the history of theater. How do we look at emotions—what moves us and what doesn't? How does the past resonate in our contemporary reality? These are issues that are at stake in Nicole Beutler's work. Always searching for new forms, she currently is drawn to working with existing texts or dances.

1: Songs

By Nicole Beutler / nb in collaboration with Sanja Mitrovic and Gary Shepherd 1: Songs is a dramatic solo performance in the style of a rock song-cycle that crosses rough terrain. Performer Sanja Mitrovic channels the final words of tragic female protagonists from the history of theater, including Antigone, Medea, and Gretchen, allowing their timeless cries of suffering to enter her body and distinctly contemporary voice. As she shouts, speaks, and sings, she violently shifts between characters, at times fragile, raw, calculating, or emotional. Created by director and choreographer Nicole Beutler, with electronic music by DJ/composer Gary Shepherd, 1: Songs asks us to reconsider the words of these classic literary heroines (and anti-heroines) in the here and now. Who is speaking? What do these words mean today? Where does the character end and the performer begin?

2: Dialogue with Lucinda

By Nicole Beutler / nb based on Radial Courses (1976) + Interior Drama (1977) by Lucinda Childs Fascinated by the radical and deceptively simple minimalism of American choreographer Lucinda Childs' early work, Nicole Beutler has remade two of her silent dance pieces, Radial Courses (1976) and Interior Drama (1977), setting the latter to specially composed music. The underlying choreographic scores used by the dancers while performing are fiendishly complex. Radial Courses is based on three movement sequences in a constantly shifting, circulatory composition. In Interior Drama, five dancers conform to an apparently perfect system, moving in repetitive and hallucinatory patterns. Childs describes her own work as an "intense experience of intense looking and listening." Beutler's reinterpretations focus on the individual dancer's roles and actions within the group patterns, revealing parallel realities and the ritualistic qualities of both dances.

Nicole Beutler is a choreographer, curator and performer based in Amsterdam. Her work is situated on the threshold of dance, performance, and visual arts. She seeks to precisely articulate sense and experience through performances, installations, and books. Her performances are composed musically, and suffused with subtle humor. They are characterized by minimal stage sets and a focus on the performer as a human being.

In 2005 Beutler co-founded LISA, the Amsterdam-based theater makers' collective. From 2008 to 2010, she was dance and performance curator at Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam. She collaborated for years with choreographer and performer Paz Rojo and has worked with David Weber-Krebs, Hooman Sharifi and the live art group Private Thoughts in Public Places. She is an artistic adviser for choreographers, and a guest teacher at the School for New Dance Development and the Mime School at the Amsterdam School of the Arts (AHK).

A delicate, room-sized machine of intricate kinetic sculptures is assembled from flotsam, bicycle wheels, and old glass objects held in tiny robot arms. Actors who double as instrumentalists set in motion a chain reaction of dreamlike shifts between macro and micro perspectives. And All the Questionmarks Started to Sing crosses between concert, sculptural installation, and performance. In a landscape under constant transformation, light, shadow, sound, puppetry, and object theater merge to form a mesmerizing constellation of associations. Bringing artists of different backgrounds together, the work shows Verdensteatret's fascination with all kinds of animation—the strange and miraculous activity of breathing life into dead objects, stiff figures, and frozen images.

Singer/songwriter Suzanne Vega, composer Duncan Sheik and director Kay Matschullat are in residence at EMPAC in January to explore the sound challenges provided by a music-theater piece that combines songs with conversation. Designers Louisa Thompson and Lenore Doxsee will also work with the director to experiment with set and light elements, creating a piece that floats in time and moves between forms. The informal work-in-progress showing will include songs and text from the show, with a chance for discussion with the artists. In Carson McCullers Sings About Love, Suzanne Vega, in the role of Southern writer Carson McCullers, presents her theory of love, divulging the secrets of the human heart. McCullers often repeated “Nothing human is alien to me” – a quote from the ancient Roman playwright Terence; her own story, as well as the stories of her characters, run the gamut from touching to terrifying. As she speaks and sings her way through this labyrinth of love, we experience the comedic Carson, the pained Carson and the provocateur she became. Accompanied by a guitarist and pianist who also take on characters, Vega moves seamlessly from spoken word to song and back again. She channels McCullers in a way that reveals the meeting of two souls through a work of art. Carson McCullers Sings About Love will premier at New York’s Rattlestick Theater, David Van Asselt, Artistic Director, in April of 2011.

Using a modified one-armed bandit slot machine, MindBox is a viewer-driven dance video: insert a coin, work the machine’s lever and buttons, and directly remix the moves of the beatboxing man on three screens. Media artist Christian Graupner and choreographer Roberto Zappalà teamed up to make a vocabulary of sounds and movements that take beatboxing—a vocal percussion style that comes out of hip-hop—into the realm of interactive media. The soundtrack takes advantage of both the randomized real-time processes of slot machines and Zappalà’s rhythmic, beat-based performance. As lights flash, the viewer plays this media sculpture like an instrument, creating an idiosyncratic movement portrait.

Graupner is a Berlin-based artist, film composer, and the creator and developer of real-time media playback systems. Zappalà founded the Compagnia Zappalà Danza to widen and deepen his own research in choreography while extending the possibilities for the training of young contemporary dancers. The technology was developed by Nils Peters (Humatic) and Norbert Schnell (IRCAM).

Cold Spring is a battering ram for stage created by the Los Angeles-based composer Sean Griffin. A diversity of musicians, actors and dancers from all over the United States and Canada turn the EMPAC theater into a high-energy collision of charged musical and theatrical particles and their underlying ideologies. Among these is the Eugenics Archive in Cold Spring Harbor NY. This archive represents the breeding-ground research for the eugenics-based social policies that resulted in mass sterilization of undesirables, forced lobotomies and, ultimately, with support from the Carnegie Foundation, Nazi Germany’s master race policies. In Cold Spring materials from this archive intersect unexpectedly with the early 20th century spiritualism-meets-pop-supernaturalism of the 1970s. Through an operatic rendition of the 1961 Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction hypnosis tapes we follow the embattled, mixed-race couple as they navigate social complications through the hyper-vigilant sanctimony of their pre-civil rights world. Cold Spring is propelled by a collection of iconic musical and theatrical snap-shots, several performed by actors familiar to Capitol Region theater-goers. Ideas best forgotten and good intentions gone awry unfold onto one another, turning the theater into a crippled ceremonious procession.

Sean Griffin lives and works in Los Angeles.

Encompassing many languages, styles, media and forms, Griffin’s unusual compositional works rely on interdisciplinary incongruities positioned at the intersection of sound, image, performance, and the archive.

Manifesting as large and small-scale operatic works, collaborative sound and video installations, complex numeric choreographies, or historically weighted political works that defy categorization, Griffin’s works obsessively instrumentalize embedded cultures of injustice, racism, and wars of the recent past disturbingly mixed with dated-pop fantasies about self worth and class. Animated by rhythmic regimentation and improvisation, his compositions can be viewed as platforms for the performer's unique talents with whom he collaborates extensively.

Aided by a young doppelganger straight out of silent film and an elderly entomologist, composer/performer Christina Campanella spins a sonic web that traces a young woman’s discovery of her companion’s deployment to a secret war and the steps she takes to make sense of his absence.

Staged as a concert that unfolds within a densely layered video installation, Red Fly/Blue Bottle conjures an associative visual landscape in which objects open up in unexpected ways, revealing worlds within worlds. Tightly crafted songs emerge from an evocative terrain of found sounds, ticking clocks, and analog tone generators. Miniature noir films are projected onto floating surfaces; live and pre-made video animates still objects.

Red Fly/Blue Bottle explores the mediating effects of memory and how we use the power of our imagination to surmount that which we have lost.

Live Shorts is a series of performances for the stage commissioned for Filament. Invited artists were asked to create a performance for a specific period of time under 20 minutes that made use of the following constraints: a 20’ x 30’ stage, with the possibility of using only one screen, one projector, and a sound system. Standing in contrast to EMPAC’s typical embrace of flexibility and open-ended possibility, these create a platform for working within a specific structure. The result is a varied and vigorous set of short works created by a range of artists, from performers in the worlds of contemporary theater and dance, to experimental and electronic musicians, to visual artists whose work is typically exhibited in museums and galleries, all sharing the same stage and set of technical parameters. The interstitial space between performances is activated by dynamic lighting design by Wingspace Theatrical Design.

ST2A

Act Curtain — Like the grand drapes of the great old theater houses, this installation transfers the audience's attention from the performance area to the auditorium during the interstitial moments between performances. Using the medium of light, it animates the whole of the theater architecture through both space and time. ACT CURTAIN was conceived and installed by Scott Bolman, Zane Pihlstrom and Lee Savage of Wingspace Theatrical Design. Wingspace is a Brooklyn-based collective of artists, designers, writers, and thinkers committed to the practice of collaboration in theatrical design. Wingspace has created lighting environments for numerous projects at the Old American Can Factory, including the 2009 Beaux-Arts Ball for the Architecture League of New York. Wingspace members have collaborated with artists such as Robert Wilson, Isaac Mizrahi, the Kronos Quartet, Shen Wei Dance Arts and the Grammy-nominated Lila Downs. Their work has been appeared at the Roundabout, the Public Theater, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Alliance Theater, Baltimore Centerstage, the Old Globe, the Shakespeare Theater and the Guggenheim Museum as well as internationally at venues in Canada, Ireland, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands and South Korea. In addition to creating dynamic work of their own, Wingspace co-produces a salon series with XO Projects. Each salon brings featured artists together with the broader performance community for open-ended discussions of vital issues in contemporary theatrical design.

ST2B

Sheepspace (SUE-C & Laetitia Sonami) — Sheepspace is a live film inspired by the writings of Haruki Murakami. Adapted from the Sheep Man character in Dance, Dance, Dance and The Wild Sheep Chase, the film is brought to life through the manipulation and projection of photographs, drawings, scale models and various three dimensional objects, along with the processing and amplification of electronic music, nostalgic songs, and field recordings. The artists draw from their palette of a suitcase-sized animation booth, miniature televisions, a train-propelled camera, motors, sensors, flash bulbs, and talking lamps to blur the boundaries of the real world and the cinema world. It is up to the audience to determine where dreams end and reality begins.

Intervention #2 (Created by Wally Cardona + a local expert) — Each Intervention is the meeting of Wally Cardona and a local specialized expert. Through their intimate encounter, they generate a new version of Cardona’s “empty solo,” designed to make itself completely available to an outside eye or opinion. The re-conceived solo is performed as a new entity. Intervention is a game leading to other games of meaning, intent, and form that can create multiple interpretations of “a dance.” It is also the first stage of development for Tool Is Loot, a collaboration between Cardona and Paris-based choreographer Jennifer Lacey.

You Don’t Know What You're Talking About (MTAA) — Internet artists M.River and T.Whid (MTAA), like you, have often wished while listening to a lecture, speech, or newscast to stand up and tell the speaker, "You don't know what you're talking about." MTAA, sitting behind a desk with two laptops and two microphones, and with a projection screen behind them that displays a timer and the text “#mtaa,” will invite the audience to start twittering. For the duration of the performance, they will read any and all texts sent to Twitter with the hash tag "#mtaa."

ST2C

A Narrow Vehicle (Trouble) — Performers acting like ushers and doubling as shaman enact a cleansing ritual on the audience, which becomes a screen for projections of familiar spiritual imagery and the five elemental lights. Culminating in a performance of trance R&B saxophone meandering, a narrow vehicle brings up a promise — made by universities, militant groups, spiritual organizations, and pop culture. The promise is of freedom and self-actualization via transmutation of defiled elements, and we locate this process in (or on) each audience member. Imparting the message evokes a claustrophobic, aggressive style, but the promise is kept.

Another Circle (Jen DeNike) — Using video, performance, and sound as live ritual magic, a series of circles transforms the space into a vessel for scrying, an act of obtaining spiritual visions by peering into a reflective surface. In DeNike's video a prima ballerina in classical tutu and toe shoes performs what appears to be an infinite pirouette. The ballerina's circular movement becomes the pendulum for scrying. A live ballerina (Lucy Van Cleef) will perform abstract choreographed movements in reaction to and mirroring the video in collaboration with Rose Kallal who will perform an improvised sound accompaniment using a combination of vintage analog synth, guitar, and tape delay; her dark ambient sonic drone providing a complementary yet contrasting circular soundtrack.

AMAZINGLAND IN TROY EMagicPAC (Steve Cuiffo, Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle) — Amazingland is the second in a trilogy of theater pieces that embrace and subvert American popular entertainment. The piece is about illusion, delusion, and the role of deception in American culture. Cuiffo, Lyford, and Sobelle will enter magic contests as their illusionist personas, Louie Magic, Dennis Diamond, and Daryl Hannah, and, succeed or fail, create faux-documentary video to be integrated into performance. Their goal is to expose the pathos behind the gloss of popular Vegas-style illusion shows — and also to blow your mind out of the back of your skull with some incredible magic.

BalletLab’s Miracle is a triumphant onslaught of choreographic hysteria performed against repetitive mantra, movement, and hymn-like voices. Dealing in themes of the afterlife, eternity and cult behavior, Miracle creates a sonic and physical world of overwhelming fervor, spiraling group dynamics, and intense sound. Miracle gravitates toward the emotionally challenging terrain of iconographic religious imagery, communal living, and the behavioral patterns of revolutionary cult groups in the 1960s and ‘70s. The examination of cult mass suicides, including the Jonestown massacre of 1978, inspired the conceptual thread of blind belief as the gateway to the afterlife. Please note that this performance contains nudity and loud moments.

Wilderness unfolds on a dark field in the entrance lobby of EMPAC, and all who inhabit the space — dancers, crew, musicians, and audience — share the same ecosystem. In this site-adaptive work, choreographer Yanira Castro contemplates wilderness as a minimalist environment — a barren desert or the smooth surface of a lake — where action is brought into high relief. The performance begins with a stark, emotional solo by an older man, followed by a quartet of dancers that perform a virtuosic dance, transforming the terrain. Viewers become a part of the performance system, as their behavior influences the sound and movement. No two performances are the same.

The performances of Wilderness take place within the oval environment in the lobby. There are 40 seats per show for audience members who wish to experience the piece from within. These spots can only be reserved by calling 518.276.3921 or stopping by the box office in person. Please arrive 15 minutes before the show start time to drop off all belongings, including shoes, at the coat check. Bags and coats will not be permitted inside the performance environment. Please note that the performance runs for 75 minutes and for approximately half that time you will be standing or walking within it. Audience members can also choose to view the performance from the outside of the oval. The environment and audio installation will be accessible to audiences during building hours. At scheduled times, visitors will be able to enter the installation and activate the space with composer Stephan Moore’s sound.