Over the course of four evenings and across a range of sites, Mary Armentrout Dance Theater will perform the roving work Listening Creates an Opening. Members of the group—choreographer Mary Armentrout, video artist Ian Winters, and composer Evelyn Ficarra—have been working in residence over the last two-and-a-half years to conceive and produce the EMPAC commission.

Listening Creates an Opening focuses on how various types of technology impact our physical experience of moving through the world. By inviting the audience to move with the performers through a variety of environments, the performance explores what types of histories and contexts reveal themselves from a consciously embodied perspective. Local artist Jack Magai serves as the guide, leading the audience from a small living room in the turn-of-the-century Off Campus Commons building at Rensselaer, to the highly technical theatrical setting at EMPAC, and down into urban sites in Troy, ranging from a parking lot to a hair salon, to experience the hills at sunset and the Hudson River at dusk. Singers Allison Easter, Darcy Dunn and cellist Patrick Belaga help round out the subtle, quirky, and aesthetically adventurous performance, which also features projected scenery from a year-long time-lapse video taken inside the EMPAC building, and live performance vignettes that repeat and build over the course of the show.

Mary Armentrout is a San Francisco-based choreographer and performance artist, and director of Mary Armentrout Dance Theater. She is the winner of an Isadora Duncan Dance Award, one of the most prestigious honors for Bay Area choreographers. She has long collaborated on her site-specific and staged works with Ian Winters and Evelyn Ficarra. Winters develops visual and acoustic media environments for stage. Together, Armentrout and Winters run their studio The Milkbar in Richmond, CA. Ficarra is lecturer in the music department at the University of Sussex, where she is also the Assistant Director of the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theater.

Accessibility + Performance Information

EMPAC is an accessible venue. The lobby is accessible via the double doors facing Rensselaer’s campus with an entrance off of College Avenue. All-gender wheelchair-accessible restrooms are available on all public-access levels of the building. The main audience entrance to the theater is wheelchair accessible and located on EMPAC’s 5th floor, which can be accessed from the lobby by elevator.

If you have any questions about access, please contact EMPAC Box Office Manager John Cook or call 518-276-2822 (voice only).

This is a promenading performance with the audience standing and moving, sometimes long distances, between venues. Please wear comfortable footwear, dress for the outdoors, and let our box office know if you need assistance or wheelchair accommodation. We will have accessibility accommodations for those unable to walk long distances or stand for extended periods. Please share any specific access requests in the comments form of your ticket, in order to help our Front of House team prepare to welcome you. The performance is approximately three hours long.

Performance will run rain-or-shine. Please dress accordingly.

Artist/choreographer Maria Hassabi was in residence with dancers to shoot and begin editing footage for a moving-image installation derived from various iterations of her work STAGING (2017). This new project was Hassabi’s first moving-image installation and was co-commissioned by EMPAC.

The residency included a four-camera shoot on STAGING’s iconic pink carpet arranged in the EMPAC theater, as well as Steadicam and robotic camera shoots in four locations throughout the EMPAC building. Hassabi’s installation furthered her exploration of color and the signature slowness of her prior performances. The piece had its premiere at the EMPAC 10YEARS celebration.

A Meditation on Tongues is artist Ni’Ja Whitson’s live-dance adaptation of filmmaker and activist Marlon T. Riggs’ 1989 film Tongues Untied, a groundbreaking portrait of Black, gay identity.

Staged throughout the EMPAC building, the performance began with a solo by vogue dancer Leggoh LaBeija, who led the audience through a corridor constructed in Studio 2 to back hallways, passing a small shrine erected in memory of Marlon T. Riggs, who died on this day 24 years prior. The procession ended in Studio 1 where the audience took their seats and Whitson and collaborator Kirsten Flores-Davis performed an extended stage duet. Whitson’s performance used choreography, film, and sound to underscore the historical importance of Riggs’ film during the early years of the AIDS pandemic and beyond. Whitson reconsidered Riggs’ focus on Black, gay, male identity to focus on what masculinities look like in the contemporary moment, especially in relation to the invisibility of lesbian and gender non-conforming bodies within the cultural dialogue on race.

The evening concluded with a reception hosted by the RPI LGBTQ Task force, who had screened Rigg’s film the week prior to Whitson’s performance. 

Ni’Ja Whitson is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and writer based in Riverside, California. They are an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of California Riverside and have had commissions and residencies at Gedgebrook in Seattle, ICA Philadelphia, American Realness at Abrons Art Center, Danspace at St. Mark’s Church, Dance in Process at Gibney Dance, and LMCC Process Space in New York. Whitson is a Bessie award-winning performer and recipient of funding through the Mertz Gilmore Foundation and Jerome Foundation Individual Artist Grant.

This Was The End was a multimedia performance inspired by canonical Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. In the play, Vanya asks, “What if I live to be 60?” This Was The End answered that question through a story told by four actors in their 60s. Director Mallory Catlett was in residence at EMPAC with sound designer G. Lucas Crane and video designer Keith Skretch to develop their theatrical production into a multimedia installation about memory and time.

Like the performance, the new installation featured the architectural façade of the original PS 122, an iconic NYC arts building, to physically frame and contextualize Catlett’s adaptation. Catlett, her collaborators, and This Was the End actors were in residence at EMPAC to shoot new footage for their installation. They used this footage to activate the historic façade with interactive video and sound from their theatrical production, drawing viewers into the installation to investigate what came before, what is now, and what might be. On the installation’s opening night, Crane performed live sound inside the space. 

Mallory Catlett is a New York-based creator and director of performance across disciplines. She is the Artistic Director of Restless NYC whose production of This Was The End won an Obie Award. Other works include City Council Meeting, a regional theater experiment in participatory democracy and multimedia music theater piece Red Fly/Blue Bottle that performed at EMPAC in 2010. She has shown her work in New York City at Here, Performance Space 122, Abrons Arts Center, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

G. Lucas Crane is a sound artist and performer from Brooklyn, NY. Major projects include the psych-rock band Woods, the cassette-collage project Nonhorse, and the experimental theater of Performance Thanatology.

Keith Skretch is a New York-based video designer whose work has been shown at the Brooklyn Academic of Music, REDCAT, The Old Globe, MCA Chicago, and Performance Space 122.

This Was The End is a multimedia performance inspired by canonical Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. In the play, Vanya asks, “What if I live to be 60?” This Was The End answered that question through a story told by four actors in their 60s. Director Mallory Catlett was in residence at EMPAC with sound designer G. Lucas Crane and video designer Keith Skretch to develop their theatrical production into a multimedia installation about memory and time.

Like the performance, the new installationfeatured the architectural façade of the original PS 122, an iconic NYC arts building, to physically frame and contextualize Catlett’s adaptation. Catlett, her collaborators, and This Was the End actors were in residence at EMPAC to shoot new footage for their installation. They used this footage to activate the historic façade with interactive video and sound from their theatrical production, drawing viewers into the installation to investigate what came before, what is now, and what might be. On the installation’s opening night, Crane performed live sound inside the space. 

Catlett is a New York-based creator and director of performance across disciplines. She is the artistic director of Restless NYC whose production of This Was The End won an Obie Award. Other works include City Council Meeting, a regional theater experiment in participatory democracy, and multimedia music theater piece Red Fly/Blue Bottle that was performed at EMPAC in 2010. She has shown her work in New York City at Here, Performance Space 122, Abrons Arts Center, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

G. Lucas Crane is a sound artist and performer from Brooklyn, NY. Major projects include the psych-rock band Woods, the cassette-collage project Nonhorse, and the experimental theater of Performance Thanatology.

Keith Skretch is a New York-based video designer whose work has been shown at the Brooklyn Academic of Music, REDCAT, The Old Globe, MCA Chicago, and Performance Space 122.

The world premiere of EMPAC commissioned echo/archive, choreographer/performer Elena Demyanenko and filmmaker Erika Mijlin’s EMPAC-commissioned collaboration. Developed over a year in residence in Studio 1, echo/archive brought dance, film, and light together in a three-part live performance featuring performers Dana Reitz, Eva Karczag, and Jodi Melnick.

echo/archive integrated live dance with live and pre-recorded video to represent the layers of memory and heritage that exist in each human body. Demyanenko, Karczag, and Melnick all worked with the late American choreographer Trisha Brown and carry that well-established movement style as an influence on their work. Reitz is known for her light and movement scores. Together, the four women bookend a generation and genealogy of dance history. With echo/archive, Demyanenko and Mijlin explored how dance legacies influence body and movement practice. With video designer Ray Sun and sound designer Jon Kinzel, the artists’ video mediation shaped the work into a statement about legacy, relationship, and female artmaking across generations. 

Elena Demyanenko is a Russian-born dancer and choreographer who has been performing, teaching, and choreographing in New York City since 2001. She was a member of Trisha Brown and Stephen Petronio Dance Companies, and has danced for choreographers such as Bill T. Jones. She is the recipient of New York Live Arts and EMPAC Dance Movies commissions, as well as a Jerome Robbins Fellowship. Demyanenko is currently on faculty at Bennington College.

Erika Mijlin is a producer, editor, writer, and founding partner of the media production company Artifact Pictures. In addition to producing her own films and videos, Mijlin wrote and directed Feldman and the Infinite, an original play that was staged for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. She was the recipient of the Art and Social Change grant from the Leeway Foundation and has served on faculty at Bennington College.

Fall 2018

Wu Tsang and boychild are in residence with their collaborators Josh Johnson, Patrick Belaga, Jeff Simmons, and Asma Maroof to continue work on a new performance for EMPAC's Theater to be premiered at the 10 YEARS celebration. Footage shot by cinematographer Antonio Cisneros during the August residency will be incorporated into the final performance.

Spring 2018

Wu Tsang and boychild are in residence in EMPAC’s Theater to experiment with light, scrims, and projection surfaces for the development of a new work in their Moved by the Motion series. The performance is conceived in collaboration with Fred Moten, Patrick Belaga, and Klein.

Spring 2016

Artist Wu Tsang was be in residence in the theater with her collaborators boychild and Patrick Belaga to work on the staging of a new iteration of their performance Moved by the Motion.

Performance maker Andrew Schneider is back at EMPAC for the world premiere of AFTER, an emotional story about time, bodies, death, and physics.

The sequel to his Obie Award-winning performance YOUARENOWHERE, which challenged audiences with a storyline drawn from quantum physics, AFTER goes a step further, probing the audience to consider where they are and how they got there. Working over the past year in residence at EMPAC, Schneider developed the show’s content in tandem with experiments in new theatrical technology. In an effort to create intimacy and take the audience to the edge of the human condition, AFTER incorporates projection mapping, lighting effects, and sound spatialization technology.

This will be the first time that EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis speaker array has been applied in the theatrical context, allowing sound designer Bobby McElver to precisely place and move sounds through the performance space. Please join us for a Q&A discussion with the curator and artists immediately following performance. This performance uses haze, strobe lighting, and loud sounds.

Andrew Schneider is an Obie Award-wining performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist who creates and performs in original performance works and videos and builds interactive electronic artworks and installations. Schneider was a Wooster Group company member (video/performer) from 2007–14 and has shown his work at 3LD in New York, the Melbourne Arts Festival, LIFT Festival, and in theaters across France, including Maillon, Théâtre de Strausbourg, and Théâtre de Gennevilliers.

Andrew Schneider and his team returned to EMPAC for the world premiere of AFTER, an emotional story about time, bodies, death, and physics. 

Following up on Schneider’s Obie Award-winning performance YOUARENOWHERE, which challenged audiences with a storyline drawn from quantum physics, AFTER goes a step further, probing the audience to consider where they are and how they got there. Working in residence at EMPAC, Schneider developed the show’s content with his collaborators Alicia ayo Ohs, Alessandra Calabi, and Bobby McElver. They developed Schneider’s original script in tandem with experiments in new theatrical technology. In an effort to create intimacy and take the audience to the edge of the human condition, AFTER incorporates projection mapping, lighting effects, and sound spatialization technology. 

This was the first time that EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis speaker array had been applied in the theatrical context, allowing sound designer Bobby McElver to precisely place and move sounds through the performance space. 

Andrew Schneider is a Brooklyn-based artist who creates and performs in original performance works and videos and builds interactive electronic artworks and installations. Schneider was a Wooster Group company member (video/ performer) from 2007-2014 and has shown his work at 3LD in New York, the Melbourne Arts Festival, LIFT Festival, and in theaters across France, including Maillon, Théâtre de Strausbourg, and Théâtre de Gennevilliers.