On Saturday, February 22, RMA will be hosting our annual Pops Concert! Our mythology themed Pops Concert is next Saturday (2/22) at 2pm in EMPAC Concert Hall! Come watch all the amazing performances!
Main Image:
Join the West Point Band for “West Point on the March,” an exploration of the most classic American military musical genre: the march, featuring some of Sousa’s best-known works alongside lively selections like “Americans We” and Ethel Smyth’s anthem of women’s suffrage, “March of the Women.” The West Point Brass Quintet will showcase the powerful music of a New Orleans funeral, followed by stirring pieces inspired by the 1963 March on Washington, including Bob Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The concert wraps up with the unforgettable movie marches from “Indiana Jones” and “The Music Man.”
February 7th, 2025 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC)
Hosted by Rensselyrics
[Event Program]
Featuring:
Dobbs 16 | The Masters School, Dobbs Ferry, NY
Encore | Plattsburgh High School, Plattsburgh, NY
Fermata Nowhere | Stafford Middle School, Plattsburgh, NY
For Good Measure | Mohonasen High School, Schenectady, NY
Foxtones | Fox Lane High School, Bedford, NY
Rhythm On Rye | Rye High School, Rye, NY
Stissingers | Stissing Mountain High School, Pine Plains, NY
Vocal Point | South Glens Falls High School, South Glens Falls NY
The top two finishing groups from this quarterfinal will advance to the ICHSA Northeast Semifinal
February 8th, 2025 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC)
Hosted by Duly Noted / Rensselyrics
[Event Program]
Featuring:
A Sharp Arrangement | SUNY Potsdam
Allegrettos | Boston University
Audiophiles | Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Partial Credit | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Pitch Please | University at Albany
Potsdam Pitches | SUNY Potsdam
Potsdam Pointercounts | SUNY Potsdam
Rusty Pipes | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Stay Tuned | SUNY Potsdam
Viridescent | University of Vermont
The top two finishing groups from this quarterfinal will advance to the ICCA Northeast Semifinal
Choreographer Leslie Cuyjet performs inside a cocoon of mediated memory, text, and gesture in her solo performance, With Marion. Cuyjet combines her own embodied archive of movement with looping archival, pre-recorded, and live-captured video in a multi-sided enclosure that serves as both projection screen and stage, dynamically shifting the viewer’s perspective on her bodily form over time.
Originally commissioned by The Kitchen (NYC) for an open-plan loft space, this evening-length performance now floats in the dark void of the EMPAC Theater, further emphasizing how Cuyjet displays and obscures herself—and her internal thoughts—amidst objects, images, and the camera’s lens.
Cuyjet grapples with questions of classism, privilege, and race that arise in her family’s archives and the legacy of her great aunt, Marion Cuyjet (1920–1996), a pioneer of 1950s dance education. As a teen, Marion Cuyjet passed as white to train in Philadelphia ballet schools and later created the Judimar School of Dance where Black dancers studied before they could do so at white studios, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Judith Jamison (1943–2024) and Philadanco’s Joan Myers Brown (b. 1931).
Layering her own memories of dance training many decades later alongside this complex family legacy, Leslie Cuyjet crafts a dense, fragmented, malleable, and intentionally oblique collage of memory within the sculptural structure and across her own body. With Marion at once fills in historical gaps and highlights where new fissures appear in the unstable relationship between self and the traces of the past that surround it.
Main Image: Leslie Cuyjet, With Marion, The Kitchen, 2023. Courtesy of artist. Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk.
This year, the RPI Black Students’ Alliance Fashion Show is presented in partnership with EMPAC Research and PULSE, the RPI student group exploring electronic dance music.
Amid an era of rapid environmental transformation, this show asks: How can experimental and multisensory media reimagine the future of sustainable design? Visionary couture, innovative research, and cinematic and sonic explorations synthesize artistry, scientific progress, and eco-conscious ingenuity.
PULSE invigorates the runway with an original soundtrack, and extends the celebration with live DJ sets following the show. This student-led production and its showcase of BIPOC world-building challenges outdated paradigms and inspires a future rooted in sustainable creation.
Main Image: Courtesy Black Students' Alliance
President Marty Schmidt ’81 and Mrs. Lyn Schmidt invite you to the RPI Bicentennial Holiday Concert, featuring performances by the Rensselaer Orchestra, Concert Choir, and Wind Symphony.
The program includes works by Johannes Brahms, Gustav Holst, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Richard Wagner, and Alexander Borodin.
The 2024 Rensselaer Concerto Competition winner, Luca Osborne ’24, will join the orchestra to perform the first movement from Jean Sibelius’ beloved Violin Concerto.
Free and open to the public. Refreshments to follow.
RPI, Opera Saratoga, and the Bergamot Quartet will present The Other Side of Silence, a new opera featuring synthetic and acoustic voices.
With music composed by RPI Lecturer Robert Whalen and libretto co-written by Faculty Fellow Katherine Skovira and Mark Steidl, a nonbinary person who uses augmentative and alternative communication, the opera tells the story of Zari, who uses new technology to overcome communication challenges despite opposition. This free workshop performance, part of the 2024 International Symposium on Assistive Technology for Music and Art, will take place on October 16, 2024, at RPI’s Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, NY.
I Dream tells the story of the final 36 hours of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life as seen through the eyes of his closest friend, Ralph Abernathy, as the Civil Rights leaders grappled with justice, identity, and the burden of leadership.
Written and composed by Douglas Tappin in collaboration with award-winning playwright Jonathan Payne, I Dream explores the Civil Rights Movement through powerful music, captivating storytelling, and vivid characters. This concert version is directed by Broadway’s Quentin Earl Darrington (Ragtime, Cats, Once on This Island, MJ The Musical), and features a stellar Broadway cast (including Tony and Grammy nominees).
About the Concert Event
I Dream takes place within Ralph Abernathy's consciousness as he nears the end of his life. Accompanied by Bria, a young modern-day activist, Abernathy confronts the struggles of his past and his relationship with Dr. King. Through Bria, the audience is invited to reflect on their own convictions as they experience the powerful and haunting journey through music and dialogue.
I Dream has been presented on Atlanta’s Alliance Stage, in-concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and has a track record of sold-out shows and meaningful community impact. Through its educational and engagement initiatives, the show continues to reach new and diverse audiences. In 2023, the Musical Dramatic Arts Foundation partnered with the Apollo Theater in New York City for focused book, music, and movement development of I Dream.
This concert event marks a significant moment in the development of I Dream, offering audiences a preview of what's to come in future productions. The Musical Dramatic Arts Foundation is proud to premiere its community engagement model alongside this new performance, empowering young artists and community members to be part of the creative process.
Main Image: Courtesy the artist.
This concert showcases the musical partnership of Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) and Terry Riley (1935– ) through the lens of time-delay techniques.
It features the world premiere performance of Oliveros’s The C(s) for Once (1966) for flutes, voices, trumpets and tape delay system, followed by Riley’s Keyboard Study #1 (1965), Oliveros’s piano solo dedicated to Riley, A Trilling Piece for Terry (2015), and correlated works by James Tenney and J.S. Bach.
The program concludes with a performance using the digital version of Oliveros’s Expanded Instrument System (designed by Oliveros, 1965–2016).
This is a multi-media performative lecture from a QSN-TV news anchor covering the latest global legal developments governing the uses of ‘land’—or any material that can be commodified as property and extracted for private gain—in outer space. QSN-TV is a subsidiary of Queer Space Network (QSN), which is a collaborative media and performance space laboratory that uses technology to create audio-visual investigations through queer drag performance, media production, and queer techné.
Deep space is the frontier of the 21st century. State and private actors are in a new race to stake formal territorial claims to ‘land’ in space. Outdated international agreements have created a diplomatic grey zone that allows state and non-state actors to frame space/land in neocolonial terms, creating new political, military, and commercial spheres of influence contrary to the ‘heritage of humankind’ principle of existing space treaties.
Frontiers like deep space have important visual components, and technology and media have historically played crucial roles in framing and reinforcing colonial narratives through the production and circulation of images. This research-creation project will use space/land as an entry point for examining international and national space law from an anti-colonial perspective, emphasizing issues of rights and access based on gender, sexuality, economic background, and residual dominance from the Western colonial period and the Cold War era.
The new deep space cultural and political frontiers are a site where subject-hood, ownership, and embodiment are presently being redefined. This research-creation project exposes underlying coloniality in Western narratives of ‘land’ in space through an interdisciplinary use of art, science, and international relations. This continuous, iterative, and collaborative process creates a queer counter-public in space: a new inclusive futurity that is both horizontal and plural rather than embedded in established norms of possession, extraction, and political dominance. The project aims to expand our theoretical and practical imaginary of space beyond the race for resources and a new habitat for white, cis-gender futurity.
Courtesy the artist.