Ephemeral Organ Festival

Ephemeral Organ is a series of residencies, performances, and talks by artists whose work explores choreography and bodily motion as technologies for transmitting memory, history, and Black lived experience. Each artist simultaneously navigates the ever-shifting nature of live performance and the urge to retain, return to, and generate traces of the past.

The word ephemeral suggests short-lived objects, activity that leaves residual evidence, and brief but intense durations. Archival materials not designed to be preserved but which are still potently present are often called ephemera. The word organ hints at the body and its parts, a series of interior vessels and chambers which intimately order—or organize—our modes of living. In dance and performance, bodies are often understood as having inherent archiving functions; archives are spaces of public record, systems which give purpose to what we want to keep. Our bodies hold experience, gain knowledge, recall behaviors, track gestures, and mediate infinite possible actions each time they move.

Interpreting archival materials, mining family memories, recording movement through technology—each Ephemeral Organ project holds past and present side by side, inseparably. Each of the artists has developed distinct choreographic devices through which performers can compose history through their bodies and which allows them to generate, keep, and even at times lovingly lose, a bodily record of their actions.

The series began with residencies and talks in fall 2024 with artists SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, Steffani Jemison, collaborative duo Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon, and series curator Tara Aisha Willis.

In April 2025, using EMPAC’s spaces simultaneously like a series of chambers, the series culminates in two days of events including performances by Leslie Cuyjet, an installation and performances by Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon, and artist talks by Steffani Jemison and Justine A. Chambers on their latest works which register archival and historical traces through gesture.

Jonathan González joins the artists during the festival as guest writer and interlocutor, documenting the events for future archives in relation to González's ongoing research on Black performance history and practice.

Food and refreshments will be available for purchase at Evelyn's Café throughout the festival.

Schedule

• THURSDAY, APRIL 17
• 3–8PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• INSTALLATION, PERFORMANCE
• Gestures Investigating the Good and Not So Good In Relationships – As Shown to Us by Blondell Cummings / Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon

  Reynolds and McClenon experiment with video installation and performance, meditating on domestic space and Blondell Cummings’s in a shifting, home-like interior. Live performance interventions intermittently on Thursday; then, the traces of their presence remain in the space Friday. Audiences may enter the installation at any time.

• 5:30PM, Theater
• TALK
• on In Succession / Steffani Jemison

  Jemison reflects on her fall 2024 residency for the latest iteration of a series of video and performance works exploring how bodies share weight and responsibility.

• FRIDAY, APRIL 18
• 3–8PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• INSTALLATION
• Gestures Investigating the Good and Not So Good In Relationships – As Shown to Us by Blondell Cummings / Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon

  Reynolds and McClenon experiment with video installation and performance, meditating on domestic space and Blondell Cummings’s in a shifting, home-like interior. Live performance interventions intermittently on Thursday; then, the traces of their presence remain in the space Friday. Audiences may enter the installation at any time.

• 4PM, Theater
• DANCE/THEATER, PERFORMANCE
• With Marion / Leslie Cuyjet

  Cuyjet performs inside a cocoon of mediated memory, text, and gesture in her solo performance, With Marion.

• 5:30PM, Theater
• TALK
• on The Brutal Joy / Justine A. Chambers

  Chambers shares new writing on and recent documentation of her dance work, The Brutal Joy, a scored improvisation which unfurls Black vernacular dance alongside sartorial gesture.

• 8PM, Theater
• DANCE/THEATER, PERFORMANCE
• With Marion / Leslie Cuyjet

  Cuyjet performs inside a cocoon of mediated memory, text, and gesture in her solo performance, With Marion.

All times are EDT