,000, is an EMPAC-commissioned multimedia artwork by Canadian artist Isabelle Pauwels. Layering sculpture, light, audio, and video, the performance guides the audience through the story of two entwined characters: a dying rust-belt town unable to let go of nostalgia for the “old days,” and a small-time actress struggling against the indignities of the film industry while making ends meet as a part-time dominatrix.

,000, tracks the history of the Canadian city of New Westminster, which lies on the periphery of Vancouver, alongside biographical details of its residents and the urban landscape that they inhabit. A former provincial capital founded by the United Kingdom in response to fears of an American invasion, New Westminster’s past is visible today only in the crumbling architecture, condominium marketing campaigns, community festivals, and grand landscaping. Its last economic lifeline comes from irregular use as a Hollywood film set, transformed for the screen into gritty industrial hub, a thriving west coast city, or a model of 1950s America. As a long-time resident of this “Hollywood North,” the aspiring actress Bijou Steal supplements her work by moonlighting as a dominatrix, producing hundreds of fetish videos for online clients.

,000, sets the proud but unattainable visions of city-hall marketing against the dirty narrative economy of the dominatrix and her clients behind closed doors. The audio and visual elements combine the competing voices of the players—the actress, her clients, the wives and girlfriends, the critics, and the town bureaucrats—into a collaged narrative, with the pre-recorded voice of each character embodied by a related object that includes props, sculptures, lights, speakers, and screens.

Narratively approached as an interwoven structure of the different characters’ views and interpretations, ,000, was composed by superimposing the structural logic of a crossword puzzle onto the city grid. Framed by the narrator and Paul Kajander’s score, Pauwels choreographs visual and auditory cues to guide the audience through a story whose differing associations and rapidly shifting references challenge viewers to assemble their own interpretations.

This performance has very limited capacity, please plan accordingly.

Isabelle Pauwels was born in Kortrijk, Belgium, and lives and works in New Westminster, BC. She received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2001, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. Working primarily in video, Pauwels’ blend of performance and documentary realism highlights the fraught relationship between narrative conventions and everyday social interaction. Focusing on the possibilities of non-linear editing, her video installations reconfigure popular genres such as the sitcom, the home movie, and the documentary. Recent exhibitions include the Power Plant, Toronto; the Western Front, Vancouver; National Gallery of Canada, Ontario, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Pauwels is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery.

Paul Kajander is a Canadian artist based in Seoul, South Korea. His practice encompasses video, sound, performance, installation, photography and drawing. Kajander’s recent works have been shown in various exhibition contexts (including the Daniel Faria Gallery; Toronto, the Seoul Museum of Art; Seoul, The Real DMZ Project; Cheorwon-gun, and ArtSonje Center; Seoul) and appeared in screenings, film festivals and publications. He has participated in residency programs at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Changdong International Studio Residency; Seoul, The Guesthaus Residency; Los Angeles, The Banff Centre; Alberta and “Rehearsal Research”; a residency partnership between the Scotiabank Dance Centre & Western Front Artist Run Centre; Vancouver. Kajander has been releasing independently recorded music projects on compact disc in various collaborations since 2001. His most recent recording project was released in 2014 under the moniker “Active Pass” and features 14 songs that combine electro-acoustic and popular music approaches to recorded sound.

An immersive performance set on a bus driving through post-industrial landscape surrounding Troy, NY. You will board at sunset and hear stories about time and separation. The stories will be accompanied by an ambient score that respond to the movement of the bus, subtly changing with shifts in speed and direction.

This EMPAC-commissioned work was conceived a year ago, while Aaron Landsman lived in central Illinois as his wife completed graduate school at the University of Illinois. Landsman’s work often took him out of town; to get home he flew back into Chicago, and rode a night bus for three hours, overhearing riders’ stories as they spoke to relatives on the phone or talked to one another. The stories were of financial desperation and separated families, reflecting the difficult circumstances of those left in parts of America that were being abandoned by the post-industrial economy.

Produced in collaboration with visual artist and filmmaker Brent Green, Empathy School combines theater, travel, and audio in a contained space where listening to another person’s stories is the only possible act of togetherness. Performed by Jim Findlay.

This event is very limited capacity—please plan accordingly.

Aaron Landsman creates participatory performances that combine formal experimentation with long-term community engagement. Fascinated by urban intimacy, absence, and the changing faces of cities, his works are often staged where people go every day—homes, offices, meeting rooms, and sidewalks. His current work, City Council Meeting, is being presented in New York, Houston, Tempe, and San Francisco, and has involved collaborations with church choirs, engineers, homeless people, a tourism board, high school students, and local government officials. Landsman’s upcoming works include Running Away From The One With The Knife, a play presented at the Chocolate Factory in New York, and Perfect City, with support from the Jerome Foundation, Stanford University, and ASU Gammage, where he is a resident artist. His ongoing project, Appointment, for single viewers in small offices, has been presented in New York, Oslo, and is upcoming in Phoenix in 2014. He has taught at the Juilliard School, the University of Illinois, and New York University, and has guest lectured widely.

Brent Green is a visual artist, filmmaker, and storyteller working in the Appalachian hills of rural Pennsylvania. Green’s films have screened, often with live musical accompaniment, in venues such as MoMA, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Walker Art Center, Hammer Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Wexner Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, Indianapolis Museum of Art, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Sundance Film Festival. Often, his sculptural work and large-scale installations are displayed alongside his animated films, most recently with solo exhibitions at the ASU Art Museum, Site Santa Fe, Art Without Walls, Diverseworks, and the Berkeley Art Museum. Green has crafted his rickety folk punk style into everything from a feature film (Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, 2010) to a hacked LCD and steel animation machine (To Many Men Strange Fates Are Given, 2012). He is a 2005 Creative Capital grantee. Green’s work is in fine public collections including the Progressive Collection, Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Jim Findlay works across boundaries as a theater artist, visual artist, and film-maker. His most recent work includes his original performances "Dream of the Red Chamber" (2014) and "Botanica" (2012), the direction and design of David Lang's "Whisper Opera" for the Museum of Contemporary Art and Lincoln Center and the soon-to-be complete 3D film adaptation of "Botanica". He was a founding member and collaborator in the Collapsable Giraffe and in partnership with Radiohole helped run the mythical and recently deceased Collapsable Hole from 2000-2013. In addition to his generative work, he maintains a long career as a collaborator with many theater, performance and music groups including Aaron Landsman, the Wooster Group, Ridge Theater, Bang on a Can, Ralph Lemon, Pearl Damour, Stew and Heidi Rodewald, and Accinosco/Cynthia Hopkins. His work has been seen at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, BAM, Arena Stage, A.R.T. and over 50 cities worldwide including Berlin, Istanbul, London, Moscow, and Paris and the tiny theater he built in David Lang and Suzanne Bocanegra's home. He has been awarded 3 Obies, 2 Bessies, 2 Princess Grace Awards, Lortel and Hewes Awards and residencies at MacDowell, UCross, MassMOCA and Mt Tremper Arts. Upcoming projects include Aaron Landsman's "Running Away from the One with the Knife" at Chocolate Factory, a new performance installation "Vine of the Dead" at 3LD Art + Technology in May 2015, and the exhibition of his video installation work "Meditation" made in collaboration with Ralph Lemon at the Walker Art Center in September 2015 following it's acquisition in the museum's permanent collection.

Join Grammy-award winning percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie as she works with percussionists from the Empire State Youth Orchestra in a masterclass setting. Watch, listen, and learn as these young percussionists showcase their talent to Dame Evelyn, receive miniature lessons, and go past the “notes and rhythms” of their works to investigate the complexities of phrasing, musicality, and performance.

This event will take place in the EMPAC concert hall.

PLEASE NOTE: Tickets for this event are FREE but reservations are required. Reservations can be made in person or by calling 518.694.3300. There is a $1 fee per reservation for online transactions.

Program Announcement: The masterclass program has been announced! These four talented students will be performing the following works.

Noel Holloway will be performing Eric Samut’s Rotations II
Jim Stagnitti will be performing Keiko Abe’s Michi
Hannah Dick will be performing Ney Rosauro’s Selections from Concerto for Marimba
Taylor Blakely will be performing Kevin Bobo’s Echoes

Get a one-of-a-kind sneak peek into the world of music as up-and-coming composers chosen from a competitive national selection process have their works read and performed by an orchestra for the very first time. This event is a unique glimpse into the creation of a piece of music.
Program

Michael-Thomas Foumai: Nataraja
Evan Fein: Newton’s Clock
Tucker Fuller: It Moves Us Not

PLEASE NOTE: Tickets for this event are FREE but reservations are required. Reservations can be made in person or by calling 518.694.3300. There is a $1 fee per reservation for online transactions.

The Dogs of Desire is the Albany Symphony Orchestra’s groundbreaking, eighteen-member, chamber ensemble. The ensemble performs all-new music from some of America’s most creative up-and-coming living composers. Since 1994, the Dogs have commissioned over 100 new works from emerging American composers, gaining a national reputation among young composers as a proving ground for emerging talent.

The group provides a unique medium for vocalists and a wide variety of amplified instruments to create a contemporary and energetic melding of orchestral chamber music – combining the power and punch of a rock band with the precision and clarity of a chamber ensemble.

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Join your Albany Symphony as we welcome back Dame Evelyn Glennie in her first visit to Albany since their collaborative 2014 Grammy win! This tasteful reception will allow you to mix and mingle with musicians, fellow symphony patrons, and Grammy-award winning musicians.

Tickets for the reception are $35, or $25 with the purchase of a ticket to the Dogs of Desire concert immediately after the reception.

To purchase tickets, call 518.694.3300 or click the “Buy Tickets” button.

Experience a whole new musical world – one you’ll never forget – and make history with us as we perform riveting music by some of today’s most talented composers, including a powerful, poignant work by Joan Tower that features Dame Evelyn Glennie in her return to the Albany Symphony. The concert also features works by Clarice Assad and John Harbison.

The genesis of Product of Circumstances began when, as Xavier Le Roy says, “i began to take two dance classes a week at the same time that I started to work on my thesis for my PhD in molecular and cellular biology.” Many years later, after ceasing work as a biologist, Le Roy was invited to present a lecture on theory and praxis in performance. That lecture then became a performance, Product of Circumstances, where actions subvert the traditional hierarchy of organization and form, and in turn inspire an awareness of the ways that hierarchies are manifested in society today—and the complex rationalizations that support them.

Le Roy holds a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Montpellier, France, and has worked as a dancer and choreographer since 1991. Le Roy develops his work like a researcher while simultaneously focusing on the relationships between process and product and his own involvement in the process. He regularly initiates projects to question modes of production, collaboration, and conditions of group work.

In Other Words included six artists who delivered lecture-performances, juxtaposed with talks by six thinkers in order to cross boundaries and make dialogue a continuous process of renewal. 

This performance is presented in conjunction with Avital Ronell’s talk The Test Drive.

A six-hour performance that combines live music, text, and video in a fully enclosed 24′ x 6′ capsule made of two-way mirrors. All performers are completely confined within this freestanding, soundproof box. The audience can see them inside, but the performers see only their reflections in the two-way mirrors, which stretch off infinitely in both directions. Audience members can listen to the performance through headphones stationed at windows in the soundproof box and are free to come and go whenever they please. This EMPAC-commissioned work calls into question the very nature of live events, with all sounds created by the performers captured, processed, and stored by a computer before being played back for the listener after a few seconds delay. The audience experiences the performance both as a live spectacle and a disembodied record of what has just been presented.

This semi-documentary performance without actors reconstructed the final moments of a young Lebanese man who takes his own life and, in a farewell letter, declares that his reasons are personal and have nothing to do with politics. The young man is dead, but everything in his bed-room lives on—the television, the answering machine, the computer—vibrating and communicating. Time pauses and begins anew; history is pieced together—never constructed, of course—from so many fragments of communication.

Mroué is a Lebanese actor, director, and playwright whose work draws attention to issues and events in the Middle East. Winner of the 2010 Spalding Gray Award, his work pits facts against made-up truths and propaganda imbued with a visual sensibility honed from years as a visual artist. Saneh is a theater maker, who in addition to collaborating with Mroué, writes and directs works utilizing physical theater as a way of addressing how our bodies are imprinted by sociopolitical conflicts and contradictions in the Middle East. 

In Other Words included six artists who delivered lecture-performances, juxtaposed with talks by six thinkers in order to cross boundaries and make dialogue a continuous process of renewal. 

This performance is presented in conjunction with Thomas Keenan’s talk New Media, New Documents.