Corpus Festival
How do our bodies shape experiences and make meaning?
How does performance attune us to forms and formations among bodies?
Whether moving in rigid unison, standing heroically alone, or morphing responsively, performing bodies have an incredible capacity to construct our world. Join us to witness—and even participate in—a weekend of experiences by rule-breaking dance and theater artists who reframe how we participate in society by physically showing up.
This festival assembles creative experiments—performances, installations, talks, and video works—throughout the building, testing how movement and action build sensory, spatial situations that have social weight. Each invites us to notice the structures beneath the surface of our immediate attention. These structures direct and choreograph us into positions: leader and their people, performer and script, individual and society, human figure and surrounding scene, stage and audience.
The term corpus points to how a body can take center stage and to the connections formed across a body of work, or a collection of bodies. This festival turns EMPAC’s building into not only a gathered body of artworks, but also a gathering place to share food and ideas, including an artist-led community meal and book bar.
Here, collective activity and individual experience are closer together than they appear.
Here, we are implicated in each other’s experiences, playing our part in ecosystems of power, control, freedom, and mutual responsibility—but always with the potential to move differently.
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Main Image: (Clockwise from top left) Meg Foley & Carmichael Jones, Primordial, video still. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Carmichael Jones. Kate Ladenheim, Monumental Death, installation preview, 2022. Courtesy the artist. ArtCenter College of Design. Yanira Castro | a canary torsi, Raft, performance documentation, 2024. Courtesy the artist. Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center, Northwestern University. Thuto Durkac-Somo, Jonathan González & Mario Gooden, Black Holes Ain’t So Black, performance documentation, 2026. Performers left to right: Mario Gooden, Jonathan González. Photo: Michael Valiquette/EMPAC. Annie-B Parson & Alla Kovgan, The Oath, video still, 2025. Courtesy the artist. (Center) Still from Beach Birds for Camera (1992). Choreographed by Merce Cunningham, directed by Elliot Caplan, New York: Merce Cunningham Trust. © 1992.
Dates + Tickets
Black Holes Ain’t So Black is generously supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.
The Oath is funded by National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, Big Dance Theater’s Board of Directors, Debra Simon Arts Consulting, The Howard Gilman Foundation Starry Night Fund with additional support from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Materials for the Arts, and RED. It was originally commissioned by the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC), American Dance Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, and the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron (NCCAkron).
Primordial was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Primordial is part of Blood Baby, a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Painted Bride Art Center in partnership with Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Velocity Dance Center, Kinsey Institute, and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. For more information, visit www.npnweb.org.
Raft was developed with support from Northwestern’s School of Communication and Wirtz Center Chicago through the Hope Abelson Artist-in-Residence fund; Perelman Performing Arts Center | PAC NYC; Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) at The Ohio State University; and by the Studio Artists program of the NYC Public Schools Arts Office. Raft is made possible by New Music USA’s Organization Fund in 2024–25 and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
EMPAC programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
