News

Announcing new music commissions as part of the curatorial programming of EMPAC’s Curator of Music and 2020 Native Launchpad awardee Dr. Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti.

Although our fall program will look different than it has in the past as we continue to follow university policies related to the coronavirus, we are continuing work with artists on the commissioning and production of new ambitious performances and artworks across music, time-based visual art, theater and dance.

Joining hundreds of buildings and landmarks across the country, EMPAC will light up at dusk on August 26, 2020 with the suffrage colors of purple and gold, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and women’s right to vote in the United States.

Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has selected Ephraim Asili’s feature film The Inheritance to premiere at the prestigious September festival. Commissioned by EMPAC, The Inheritance was developed at the Center through a series of workshops and production residencies between 2018 and 2020.

TROY, N.Y. — New Music USA has awarded the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute a $6,000 grant to support Alarm Will Sound’s staged performance of Paper Pianos by Mary Kouyoumdjian as part of the 2021 season, and will provide the artists with multiple production residencies to develop the visual and theatrical elements.

The Foundation has awarded Rensselaer's Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) a $50,000 grant to support three new works of time-based visual art by Latinx, Caribbean, and Latin American women artists.

As a part of SFAI’s Video Art Projection event in @timessquarenyc, EMPAC's 2015 DANCE MOViES commission Ward of the Feral Horses by Orit Ben-Shitrit will be projected in Times Square June 10–15, 2020.

Los Angeles–based EMPAC-commissioned artist Clarissa Tossin discusses redefinitions of productivity and plays an excerpt from her recently composed musical score using 3D printed replicas of pre-Columbian instruments in US and Guatemalan collections.

HEARTBEAT OPERA—the daring young indie opera company whose unconventional orchestrations and stagings of classic operas have been called "a radical endeavor" by Alex Ross in The New Yorker—concludes its sixth season with its first adaptation of Verdi: LADY M, a reimagined and re-orchestrated work-in-progress, envisioning the story of Macbeth through the eyes of Lady Macbeth.

In light of the coronavirus pandemic the EMPAC team is working hard behind the scenes to bring you as yet unseen and unreleased videos from our extensive archive as well as livestreamed original works and discussions. These are generally being released on a weekly basis, and will be updated here as that happens.

 

New York, NY & Troy, NY (April 7, 2020) — Jaamil Olawale Kosoko and a team of collaborators including Everett-Asis Saunders, Nile Harris, and mayfield brooks present a series of remote events on Earth Day, April 22, 2020. Chameleon (The Living Installments) is presented by The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer and New York Live Arts.

EMPAC events through the end of the semester have been postponed or canceled to follow university protocols related to the coronavirus.