How can media technologies and live presence help us to think about embodied disabled and mad gestures in and out of the archive? What is an eco soma approach to engaging site, the elements, and time?

The Crip/Mad Archive Dances is a lecture by scholar and artist Petra Kuppers that draws on her prolific research integrating performance and disability studies to address disabled and mad presences in dance archives. The talk at EMPAC is rooted in Kuppers’s book Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (University of Minnesota Press, 2022, open access), parsing what she calls eco soma methods and finding dis/comfort within participatory performances grounded in disability culture. Kuppers discusses the strategies and insights of the performance and archive project Crip/Mad Archive Dances, including a poetic documentary-in-progress.

Content note: some film clips focus on medical incarceration but offer survivor testimonies of artful and agency-full reclamation.

This presentation will include in-person live ASL interpretation. This event will be livestreamed, with live ASL interpretation visible on-screen.

For visitors with mobility concerns, please email John Cook or call 518-276-2822 (voice only) to see how we can best accommodate you in your EMPAC experience.

This is the first of three events with Petra Kuppers, and is followed by two workshops, including a wheelchair procession, to take place on October 12 at The Sanctuary for Independent Media.

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Kuppers grounds herself in disability culture methods, and uses somatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. In addition to Kuppers’s scholarly and performance work, she has published three poetry collections including her latest, Gut Botany (Wayne State University Press, 2020).

Kuppers is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2022 Dance/USA Fellow. She is artistic director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with Stephanie Heit. Kuppers is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Evidence of Labor uses choreography to complicate the labor ethics of AI, such as ChatGPT, to better recognize how services like these may on the one hand appear to simplify word-ordering and meaning-making, but could have significant social implications for humans and machines. The new EMPAC commissioned performance takes choreographer Michelle Ellsworth and programmer Satchel Spencer’s long standing collaboration into the realm of machine learning, maintenance art, and ontological speculation.

Two dancers act as a neural network and another two build what the artists call a “cellular automata,” referring to a computational model that inspires their choreographic structure, in a kitchen. The work functions simultaneously as a reverse Turing test, a prototype for life After-AI (AA), and a birth canal. Working with dance’s inescapable failure to be documented meaningfully as a stable object, Ellsworth and Spencer use dance’s ephemeral methodologies within the black box theater setting. The performance replaces the labor of AI with choreographed acts of glitch-heavy kitchen hygiene that puts “dancers in latent space and words in a wood oven.”

Evidence of Labor is the sequel to Ellsworth’s Post-Verbal Social Network, and continues to propose that the efforts involved in generating language should match its impact. Following this preview performance at EMPAC, Evidence of Labor premieres at The Chocolate Factory Theater (Long Island City) in November. Initiated at EMPAC in 2020, the commissioned work was developed over the course of three residencies where the artists, their collaborators, and EMPAC production teams experimented with materials, construction, choreographic methods, and programmatic approaches.

This talk and conversation will delve into Alexis Blake’s approach to choreography. Experimentation with olfactory, sonic, and tactile materials figures prominently within Blake’s recent works. Working across the visual arts, performance, and dance, the artist’s choreographic practice plays with movement languages that have been sedimented by social structures and cultural precedents. Her works combine research into historically codified styles and gestures with responsive choreography that attends to dancers’ embodied physicality, building on individual movement languages to develop new pieces.

rock to jolt [ ] stagger to ash, awarded the Netherlands’ 2021 Prix de Rome prize, involves the gradual release of a smell of decay, realized in collaboration with the smell artist and researcher Sissel Tolaas. Blake’s recent project Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve develops from work with the bodily impact of resonance and low-frequency sound. In this new work, resonance stimulates forms of physical breaking: of both a glass scenography in the work, and of dance styles that draw from “breaking” in hip-hop. Like other works by Blake, Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve also takes a feminist approach to dance, using choreography to explore ways to fracture rigid models of gender.

Learn more about Blake and her projects on her website.

This presentation follows the US premiere of Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve at High Line in New York City.

In a project sponsored by the Flemish Government’s Department of Culture, Youth, and Media, composer-performer Winnie Huang brings new works by composers Kelly Sheehan and Timothy McCormack which explore the applications of machine learning, the nuance of timbre, and the possibilities for spatiality in employing EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis Array.

Satchel Spencer and Michelle Ellsworth conduct the third EMPAC residency toward the creation and premiere of Evidence of Labor. This production residency focuses on the final staging of the EMPAC commission and includes a preview performance before the work premieres at The Chocolate Factory Theater (Long Island City) in November 2023.

Winner of the EMPAC/CINARS Open Call, Theatre Junction is in residency to develop final staging for their new work Outside / In, including the creation of a large four-room built environment in Studio 1 as well as a livestream video element.

Outside / In is inspired by the logic of the panopticon–an architectural prison designed by the architect Jeremy Bentham in the 17th century. The principle of the panopticon is simple: a central tower allows the jailers to monitor, without being seen, all the acts and gestures of the prisoners who are locked in small cells in a circular building around the tower. The effect of the panopticon is based on imposing behaviors on the whole population based on the idea that we are being watched, that we are watching each other and that we can be punished or excluded, at any moment if our behavior deviates from what the central power has defined as normal or accepted. If the panopticon concept is extended to the society in which we currently live, we see that social media are taking more and more place in our lives and influencing our behavior. The advent of this panoptic society integrates the omnipresent look of control that monitors and therefore limits thoughts and behaviors. Each person therefore ends up internalizing and exercising this control over himself. The omnipresent gaze is then internalized, as well as the gradual loss of freedom. This relationship between the exterior and the interior inspired the choice of title and is at the heart of the dramaturgy of this new creation, Outside / In.

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.

Transtraterrestrial, a prequel and premiere of The Unarrival Experiments – Unconcealment Ceremonies is a new live performance work by artist Sage Ni’Ja Whitson designed to amplify the dark. In dialogue with Yorùbá Cosmology, Astrophysics, and research on the “blackest black,” the work centers the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy through a Black, Queer, and Transembodied lens. Dark matter and dark energy serve as portals to interrogating spaces of the unknown, yet have an unequivocated impact on the composition of the universe. The performance and its environment takes an audience through an otherworldly dive into the dark. Led by space conductor, Trans Trappist the Extraterrestrial, this work traverses the dark as an ancestor, embodied transgender technology, and cosmic intervention.

Transtraterrestrial happens inside and outside of a custom-built space|ship, which is uniquely designed as a futuristic space vessel covered in painted organic matter. Whitson worked with architect Valery Augustin to realize the first prototype of this space|ship during an EMPAC residency in 2022. For the space|ship environment of the 2023 prequel and premiere, Whitson worked in collaboration with DNA Architecture + Design, Inc. and Gordon Clement. Its design and fabrication aids in visualizing darkness while also allowing for the seamless integration of immersive VR, projection, and spatial audio. The space|ship cradles performers and witnesses in encounter, collectivity, medicines, and invisibilities.

After her EMPAC debut with the solo work Serpentine in December 2022, Canadian choreographer Daina Ashbee returns to Troy, NY for the US premiere of the artist’s first ensemble work.

J’ai pleuré avec les chiens (Time, Creation, Destruction) is a live performance saturated with the incisive, sober precision and poetics of explosion and trance that we recognize as Ashbee’s choreographic signature. Between the growling, yelps, tears, and calls from its staged human pack, Ashbee offers EMPAC audiences an evening to observe human bodies in acts of leading and following, piling on all fours, and passing through trance-like states as we consider pain, tenderness, and sensory experiences without narrative boundaries.

Serpentine is a solo performance that centralizes choreographic repetition and insistence to explore the occupation of space, time, and attention over the course of two hours. It will be installed in the Lobby of EMPAC. What is designed as a cathartic work for a performer, or interpreter, is staged in close proximity to an audience who might be moved to find their own relationship to repetition and insistence. 

The work vibrates the essence of choreographer Daina Ashbee’s dark and feminine oeuvre and intensely summarizes the artist’s previous three works, Unrelated (2014), When the ice melts, will we drink the water? (2016) and Pour (2016). Each of these performances features subtly specific choreographic exploration and simple imagery that is meant to resonate with many different viewers. At its core, the work is a deep study of bodies in movement as they relate to their environment; cultural, social, performative, and natural circumstances. 

Serpentine includes original electric organ composition by Jean-Francois Blouin. The haunting electric organ creates sonic space for slow, sensual movement to escalate in its violence.