Rashaun Mitchell & Silas Riener are at EMPAC for a lecture and demonstration of their work for the New York State Dance Force annual convening, which will take place at EMPAC this year.

Mitchell and Riener have been working together since 2010 when they worked in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Since then the duo has developed numerous small and large scale works that have been produced worldwide. The artists were last at EMPAC for a remote residency to work on their current project Desire Lines, which they will continue to develop at EMPAC. They also previously worked at EMPAC in 2016 with Charles Atlas for Tesseract curated by Vic Brooks.

This private showing is co-produced with the New York State DanceForce.

Choreographer Adam Weinert is in residence in EMPAC’s Concert Hall with five collaborators to develop and stage a new dance performance, ANTHEM, which dissects the national anthem and considers what it means to evolve beyond nostalgia for an America-that-never-was.

Nothing is not borrowed, in song and shattered light is a ritualistic installation-performance of fragmented Renaissance polyphony, spatial audio, projections, and hanging brass instrument sculptures that creates ephemeral architectural spaces using overhead wave field synthesis and recordings of performance and improvisations by American Brass Quintet. The work is rooted in the legacy of the relationship between architecture and antiphonal music practices. 

“Wave Field Synthesis offers a unique opportunity to create aural architectures using audio holograms that you can explore, physically, without relying on the ‘sweet’ spot of many spatial audio systems. You can immerse yourself in an ephemeral, morphing, virtual architecture with the agency to sculpt your own experience and personal ritual.” 
—Nina C. Young

Nina C. Young began working with EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis system in early 2020. Her first sonic composition for EMPACwave, Phosphorescent Devotion (2021)—loosely inspired by the light and color combinations of James Turrell— premiered at TIME:SPANS festival and was recently presented at EMPAC for the Rensselaer campus community. Young’s works range from concert pieces to interactive installations that explore aural architectures, resonance, and ephemera. She dialogues with natural acoustic environments, instrumental performance techniques, and digital signal processing. Nina is a professor at USC’s Thornton School of Music. She was on the faculty of Rensselaer’s Department of the Arts from 2016–18. 

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This performance is being presented for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) only at this time.

Continuing her work with EMPAC's Wave Field Synthesis Array, Nina C. Young will be in residence to develop and finalize her EMPAC-commissioned multimedia work. Nothing is not borrowed, in song and shattered light is a ritualistic installation-performance of fragmented Renaissance polyphony, spatial audio, projections, and hanging brass instrument sculptures that creates ephemeral architectural spaces using overhead wave field synthesis and recordings of performance and improvisations by American Brass Quintet. The work is rooted in the legacy of the relationship between architecture and antiphonal music practices. The residency culminates in the premiere of a new work on April 21, 2022 in the theater.

This work-in-progress performance is a culmination of two development residencies of 7NMS's multi-year live performance project, PROPHET. The project's residencies at EMPAC explores spatial audio, mobile set elements, and moving-image content. 

Black Body Amnesia is a performance project by author, performance artist, educator, and curator Jaamil Olawale Kosoko. The project accompanies Kosoko’s forthcoming Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts (Wendy Subway, 2022), which blends poetry, memoir, conversation, and performance theory to enliven a personal archive of visual and verbal offerings. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythography, Kosoko’s archive refracts the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people within the American context to tell a complex narrative rooted within a queer, Black, self-defined, and feminist imagination.

Now, Kosoko brings their work to the stage for a live performance melding vocalization, music, spoken word, movement, moving-image, sculpture, and fabric. Black Body Amnesia is performed by Kosoko with an alternating cast of musicians, DJ’s, and vocalists including Raymond Pinto, DJ Maij, and sound designer/composer Everett Saunders. For the work, Kosoko uses complexity theory—which they define as the study of adaptive survivalist strategies inside complex networks or environments—as a choreographic device. From this artistic vantage point, the artist explores how minoritarianized communities record and affirm their existence through collaborative actions and protests, and how they then archive these personal freedom narratives to subvert culturally charged fields of systemic oppression, loss, and erasure. 

The performance of Black Body Amnesia follows Kosoko’s remote day long April 22, 2020 EMPAC presentation titled Chameleon (The Living Installments), which repurposed the online social platform Discord as an interactive venue where the artist hosted audio streaming of original sound, footage from a new moving-image work, a multi-media zine, remote conversations, a somatic workshop, and an archive of images, videos, and links. Many of the theories and documents from this event will find themselves in Black Body Amnesia, now staged in person for deeper theatrical exploration. 

Kosoko and their team will be in-residence at EMPAC to develop and rehearse Black Body Amnesia in advance of their performance. This residency will support lighting design and set design, and will include a film shoot. The performance of the work will be open to Rensselaer faculty, staff, and students, and will be staged for a dynamic film shoot that will be streamed at a later date.

Black Body Amnesia is a performance project by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko that examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people within the American context.

Kosoko and their team will be in-residence February 7–18, 2022 to develop and rehearse Black Body Amnesia in advance of the premiere performance on February 18. This will be Kosoko’s fourth EMPAC residency. It will support lighting design and set design. The collaborators will also use the residency for a film shoot to create moving-image content for Kosoko’s live performance.

Black Body Amnesia will premiere for Rensselaer students, faculty, and staff in the Theater on Friday, February 18 at 3PM.

7NMS is at EMPAC for the first of two ten-day development residencies that will culminate in a performance of the company's multi-year live performance project, PROPHET, in fall 2022. For this first residency, the company will explore spatial audio, mobile set elements, and moving-image content for their project. 

Which tools are more useful: hammers or paintbrushes? Robots or glitter? This talk will share a notion of duality between function and expression that challenges the traditional answers to these questions, highlighting how expression supports function (and vice versa) and pointing to ways that traditional value models can create counter-productive imbalance, especially in movement design. Collaborations between artists and engineers, such as the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, the Bauhaus School, and Apple, often reach legendary status, seeming impossible or impractical to emulate. However, the talk will offer solutions to the real, pragmatic challenges of working across these disciplines, providing examples of work by artist-engineer teams that have contributed to research in robotics: designing styles of artificial gait for bipeds; translating movement between natural and artificial bodies; and building installations that give the public creative experiences with robots. Thus, the talk motivates constructing balance between art and engineering through collaborative work — work that reveals the practical value of play, the utility of dance, the urgent importance of glitter.

This event is a co-production with Rensselaer's departments of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering and Industrial and Systems Engineering. 

Amy LaViers is the director of the Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her choreography and machine designs have been presented internationally, including at Merce Cunningham’s studios, the Ferst Center for the Arts, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, and the Performance Arcade. Her writing has appeared in Nature, American Scientist, and Aeon. She is a co-founder of three startup companies: AE Machines, an award-winning automation software company; caali, an embodied media company; and, most recently, Soma Measure, a wearable device company. Her teaching has been recognized on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)’s list of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students, with Outstanding distinction. She is a recipient of DARPA’s Young Faculty Award (YFA) and Director’s Fellowship (2015-2018). She has held positions as an assistant professor in mechanical science and engineering at UIUC and in systems and information engineering at the University of Virginia (UVA). She completed a two-year Certification in Movement Analysis (CMA) in 2016 at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS) and her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech in 2013. Her research began with her undergraduate thesis at Princeton University where she earned a certificate in dance and a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering in 2009. From 2002-2005 she toured internationally as a member of the Tennessee Children’s Dance Ensemble (TCDE).

With this work, Vanessa Goodman and Caroline Shaw offer many pleasures, but two are of special note. Firstly, there is the chance to see a visual and sonic album emerge before one’s eyes: what these two artists make will live on, and this live-streamed genesis is, among other things, a powerful display of the creative process.

The second pleasure is a unique, revelatory melding of movement and sound. In Graveyards and Gardens, what is heard and what is seen do not merely complement each other, as they might in a more conventional dance performance; instead, they are fused in such a way as to make their effects seem indistinguishable.

The performance takes place among 400 feet of orange sound cables and an arrangement of plants—nature and technology being another synthesis the artists explore. Things begin with a long passage featuring an array of sounds—some come from tape decks, some from a record player, some from old Edison wax recordings.

This auditory wash slowly diminishes until only one part is left; the energy then shifts, and dance mixes with music until they become one. Entrancing, enveloping, and ultimately liberating in its innovations, this is experiential art at its best.