October 31, 2017 — Due to visa processing delays stemming from current federal immigration policy, Ali Moini will not be able to enter the US for his performance on November 9th. To honor his absence, the set of My Paradoxical Knives will be installed in the EMPAC lobby on Nov. 9. Please join us at 7:30PM for a Skype conversation with Moini and collaborator Fred Rodriguez.

Drawing on Persian cultural tradition, Ali Moini's My Paradoxical Knives includes poetry by the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi and movements reminiscent of the Sufi whirling dervish. Diverging from this tradition, Moini performs in a costume made of straps that connect metal knives to his body like appendages or prostheses. As Moini spins and sings, the knives ascend and point toward the audience as if to ask: What happens when poems are cut loose and become dangerous? What is a safe distance between the audience and the performer? How close can you get to someone who comes from a different culture?

Dialogue and reception with collaborator Frederick Rodriguez and curator Ashley Ferro-Murray.

Mary Armentrout Dance Theater is in residence developing a new EMPAC commission, Listening Creates an Opening, to premiere in fall 2018.

This work-in-progress showing will include a performance of choreography as well as footage from a year-long video time lapse taken onsite at EMPAC. The central focus of this new work is how our relationship to technology changes when we are conscious of our physical movements with and around it. Leading the audience between different performance sites, Listening Creates an Opening will also explore what types of histories and contexts reveal themselves from this consciously embodied perspective. This work-in-progress showing will take the audience from a turn-of-the-century Rensselaer classroom to the contemporary EMPAC building, while the final piece will extend this journey to various performance sites on Rensselaer’s campus and in downtown Troy.

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. We will have accessibility accommodations for those unable to walk long distances or stand for extended periods.

Choreographer/performer Elena Demyanenko and filmmaker Erika Mijlin offer a work-in-progress performance of their new collaboration, Echo/Archive, an EMPAC-commission currently being developed in residence.

For this performance, the artists will share their work thus far and describe the trajectory of the project. Echo/Archive will receive its world premiere at EMPAC on March 2, 2018. Echo/Archive explores the notion of bodily heritage—how one’s sense and memory of their body may be felt and communicated over generations. Within dance, this is the process that carries movement invention and somatic perspectives from artist to artist. The piece also explores the role of the mediated image - live or recorded - as an intervention and a partner in the creative investigation of past and present. Incorporating lighting, audio, and video, Demyankenko and Mijlin are working with performers Dana Reitz, Eva Karczag and Jodi Melnick, as well as video designer Ray Sun. Karczag and Melnick, like Demyanenko, both worked with the late American choreographer Trisha Brown. This work-in-progress is free and open to the public but capacity is limited. Please arrive early and check in at the box office to ensure your participation.

Performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist Andrew Schneider presents his Obie Award-winning show YOUARENOWHERE. This rapid-fire and witty theater performance cycles through expressions of laughter, surprise, and angst. Its dialogue traverses quantum mechanics and parallel universes, missed connections and YouTube videos in an existential meditation on time and presence. The New York Times lauds the show as “A chaotic mix of personal revelation and relativity theory, enhanced by some alarming and splendid visual effects...”

Andrew Schneider has been working in residence at EMPAC to create the follow-up to YOUARENOWHERE, which will receive its World Premiere at EMPAC this September. NOTE: YOUARENOWHERE uses haze, strobe lighting, and loud sounds.

VIDEO

The new two-part work, Tesseract, by artist Charles Atlas and choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, will be presented for the first time following several years of development at EMPAC on Friday, January 27th and Saturday, January 28th both at 8PM.

The evening will commence with the world premiere of the stereoscopic 3D video Tesseract ▢. A six-chapter work of science fiction, it is Atlas’ first “dance video” in over a decade. Filmed with a mobile camera rig that moves with the choreography, Tesseract ▢ traverses a series of hybrid and imagined worlds staged and filmed over a series of EMPAC production residencies. Each chapter combines a specific set, choreography, and camera motion to encompass pas de deux and ensemble pieces, choreographed and performed by former Merce Cunningham dancers Mitchell and Riener. Manipulating the 3D footage to combine live dance with animation, Atlas’ distinctive video effects reach into otherworldly dimensions beyond the stage.

For the second part of the evening, Tesseract ◯ expands the view from film frame to proscenium stage. A performance for six dancers and multiple mobile cameras—the footage of which Atlas will manipulate in real-time and project back onto the stage—Tesseract ◯ superimposes the space of dance with live cinematic production, rendering a choreographic analogue to the four-dimensional cube from which the piece takes its title.

In The Return of La Argentina, Trajal Harrell mixes postmodern/voguing styles with the Japanese dance/theater form “butoh,” co-founded by Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata. Harrell identifies the key sensibilities of voguing in Ohno and Hijikata’s signature work, Admiring La Argentina (1977). Where Harlem voguing is inspired by the movements of models, Admiring La Argentina was inspired by La Argentina, the stage name of the famous Spanish dancer Antonia Merce. In his interpretation, Harrell identifies Ohno as voguing La Argentina and director Hijikata as voguing Antonia Merce. Producing his own take on the classic, Harrell adds another layer of complexity: Harrell vogues Ohno and Hijikata voguing La Argentina and Merce. This web of danced relationships brings Harrell’s audience on a journey of remembering, forgetting, memorializing, and ritualizing Admiring La Argentina.

Originally designed to inhabit museum spaces, Harrell brought The Return of La Argentina to EMPAC in a mezzanine performance. 

Trajal Harrell is a choreographer who shows his work in a range of settings including performance venues such as The Kitchen, New York Live Arts, and Festival d’Avignon, and museums including MoMA, ICA Boston, and Centre Pompidou—Paris and Metz. Harrell is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, The Doris Duke Impact Award, and a Bessie Award. He developed The Return of La Argentina in a two-year Annenberg Residency at MoMA.

Choreographer Trajal Harrell was in residence to develop the stage environment for Calm House Terrace, an evening-length contemporary dance solo. The work ritualistically resurrects Japanese butoh artist Tatsumi Hijikata’s Quiet House (1973).

Choreographer Mary Armentrout was in residence to develop a new performance with media artist Ian Winters, composer Evelyn Ficarra, and performer Chris Evans. Together, the collaborators led a workshop in which participants explored the intersections of bodily experience and technology. The workshop began with an awareness-through-movement sequence based on the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education. It consisted of a series of gentle movement exercises that bring individual attention to the bodily experience, thus cultivating embodied awareness. The artists then led participants in compositional exercises using technology such as GoPro cameras to explore electronic mediation from a consciously embodied state. 

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. Armentrout brings her years-long collaborations with Winters and Ficarra to new work with music and dance artist Chris Evans, who participates in the House Full of Black Women Project, Bandelion Dance Theater, and Black and White Projects art collective in Oakland, CA.

Performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist Andrew Schneider completed a series of three development residencies at EMPAC with this work-in-progress showing of his new performance, FIELD (later titled AFTER). Picking up where his Obie Award-winning project YOUARENOWHERE left off, Schneider’s follow-up explores the physics and temporality of parallel universes and perception. Schneider and his collaborators Alicia ayo Ohs, Alessandra Calabi and Bobby McElver used lighting, projection mapping, and 3D sound spatialization to create an immersive environment inside of a non-linear narrative that prioritizes audience experience and leads viewers to consider where they are and how they got there. Choreographer Vanessa Walters worked with the Rensselaer Dance Club to develop original choreography for the showing that would inspire scenes in the final production of AFTER. 

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.

Can we re-enact the experiences and histories of others? Are there ethical implications when affect becomes a design material? Can the performative methods currently used in human-computer interaction (HCI) design be refined and expanded using dance improvisation?

These divergent questions were starting points for media scholar Susan Kozel’s talk about body-based approaches to design and HCI. Kozel’s method is informed by the Scandinavian design context and draws from a range of somatic and improvisatory practices that feed into movement and dance improvisation. This talk emphasized the applied qualities of performativity and phenomenology, exploring the potential for practical and material performances of bodies, memories, and data. Kozel’s personal research opens out various strands from the Living Archives research project at Malmö University in Sweden. 

Susan Kozel is a Professor with the School of Arts and Culture at Malmö University whose work explores the convergence of philosophy, dance, and media technologies. Kozel’s research is foundational to understanding the body and phenomenology in digital culture. She teaches for the Interaction Design program and is Project Leader of the major research project Living Archives funded by the Swedish National Research Council. Kozel has an active artistic practice and has published widely on topics from affect to archiving, ubiquitous technologies to electronic music. Publications include the monograph Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology; and the articles “Devices of Existence: Contact Improvisation, Mobile Performances, and Dancing through Twitter” in Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, and “AffeXity: Performing Affect using Augmented Reality” in Fibreculture Journal. Kozel’s current research considers politics, philosophies, and embodied practices of what Kozel calls Affective Choreographies.

Modern Living is a multi-chapter project by choreographers Gerard & Kelly made in collaboration with L.A. Dance Project to explore themes of queer intimacy and domestic space within legacies of modernist architecture. The project began as two site-specific dance performances, which the duo then took to EMPAC to translate into a gallery installation integrating architectural forms and video projection. This work-in-progress presentation took audiences behind the scenes of Modern Living.

In 2016, Gerard & Kelly choreographed nine dancers in performances at the landmark Schindler House in West Hollywood, CA, the site of an early experiment in communal living, and Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, CT, where the architect and his partner David Whitney lived for over 40 years. The performances investigated the livability of queer space—
its pleasures, tensions, and impossibilities—and were filmed for the next iteration of the project. Gerard & Kelly were in residence with their technical and artistic collaborators to build the installation to scale, experimenting with architecture, projection mapping, and sound. 

Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly have collaborated since 2003 to create installations and performances interrogating the formation of the couple and exploring the critical potential of intimacy. Driven by an inquiry of their own partnership, the duo uses choreography, language, video, and sculpture to address questions of sexuality, memory, and the formation of queer consciousness.