Join us for a series of lunch hour conversations with EMPAC-commissioned composers Bora Yoon, Lesley Flanigan, and Miya Masaoka facilitated by Curator of music Dr. Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti.

Korean-American composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Bora Yoon is an interdisciplinary artist who conjures audiovisual soundscapes using digital devices, voice and found objects and instruments from a variety of cultures and historical centuries—to formulate an audiovisual storytelling through music, movement and sound. Using sensory gloves to embody the sonic landscape of her compositions, she will create a work that explores the intimacy and delicacy of the human voice. Yoon will create an hour-long solo work for singer and electronics that explores the intimacy and delicacy of the human voice, using sensory gloves to embody the sonic landscape of her compositions, activating the Wave Field Synthesis Array through movement.

Lesley Flanigan is an experimental electronic musician living in New York City. Inspired by the physicality of sound, she builds her own instruments using minimal electronics, microphones and speakers. Performing these instruments alongside traditional instrumentation that often includes her own voice, she creates a kind of physical electronic music that embraces both the transparency and residue of process—sculpting sound from a palette of noise and subtle imperfections. Her work has been presented at venues and festivals internationally, including The Red Bull Music Festival at Saint John the Divine (New York), De Doelen (Rotterdam), Sonar (Barcelona), The Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park (Chicago), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), The Kitchen (New York), The Broad Museum (Los Angeles), ISSUE Project Room (Brooklyn), TransitioMX (Mexico City), CMKY Festival (Boulder), the Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art (Denmark) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Flangian's new commissioned work for EMPAC will further explore these themes within the unique acoustics of our Concert Hall.

Miya Masaoka is a composer, sound artist and musician based in New York City. Classically trained, her work operates at the intersection of spatialized sound, frequency and perception, performance, social and historical references. Whether recording inside physical objects or the human body, within architecturally resonant spaces or outdoor resonant canyons, American composer Miya Masaoka creates incongruencies that feed the paradox of the contemporary condition. Her new solo work for Wave Field Synthesis Array and solo performer will connect the artistic practices of notated composition, alternative personas, and hybrid acoustic-electronic performance on Japanese traditional string instruments such as the koto and ichigenkin.

This online event features historian and Stockbridge-Munsee Community Director of Cultural Affairs Heather Bruegl in conversation with Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) composer and EMPAC curator Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti. 

EMPAC is located on the ancestral homelands of the Mohican people who are the Indigenous peoples of this land. Despite tremendous hardship in being forced from here, today their community resides in Wisconsin and is known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. This conversation traces cultural strategies for the revitalization of Indigenous languages and frames the ways in which language shapes both our perception and environment.

Bruegl and Lanzilotti will discuss how “first voices” are central to their respective cultural work by introducing their intersecting approaches to decolonizing language, as well as the potential of such practices to reveal long-suppressed ecological, social, and artistic perspectives. Starting with an introduction by Bruegl of her cultural advocacy for, and historical inquiry into, the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, Lanzilotti will present examples of how she seeks to challenge inherited notions of the hierarchy of language in her work as both a curator and a composer. 

Lanzilotti’s recent composition hānau ka ua, for example, explores the hundreds of words for rain in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. This astonishingly complex vocabulary is able to reflect the time of day, color, intensity and sound of a rainfall. Through taking the instruments, sounds, and language of her own kanaka maoli heritage as a starting point, she reveals the perceptual role language has in Native Hawaiian culture in its relationship with the natural world.

This online event presents artist Clarissa Tossin in conversation with poet, artist, and activist Rosa Chávez and artist Tohil Fidel Brito. The conversation is moderated by curator and writer Mariana Fernández and features poetry by Chávez as well as Brito’s work with classical Maya glyphs. 

Traversing their intersecting references, interests, and modes of inquiry, the three artists discuss the potential of art and poetry to articulate suppressed narratives and histories. The conversation foregrounds the importance of Indigenous ancestral knowledge and cultural practice for Maya artists in order to counteract the systemic erasure of their culture. In particular, Chávez and Brito trace the ways in which K’iche’ (the widely spoken Maya language of Guatemala) and other Mayan languages are central to their approach towards artmaking. 

Chávez and Brito are collaborating with Tossin on her forthcoming EMPAC-commissioned moving image work Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the volcanoes sing. The strategies of linguistic and temporal decolonization explored in this conversation, and common to all of the artists’ work, are similarly reflected in Tossin’s collaborative approach to the production of her new film, which seeks to perform a gesture of repair for the trauma of cultural erasure and appropriation. 

Currently in production, Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the volcanoes sing takes a sonic approach to reclaiming the Indigenous cultural motifs borrowed by Western architects in the 1920s Mayan Revival style through the study and performance of 3D printed replicas of Maya wind instruments from pre-Columbian collections held in US and Guatemalan museums. Principally filmed at Sowden House in Los Angeles, it animates the Mayan iconography that was co-opted and transformed into the building’s architecture through sound, performance, and poetry. These actions generate a kind of healing ritual that seeks to bring the appropriated Mayan motifs back into conversation with the contemporary Maya cultures that thrive in Los Angeles, where Tossin lives. 

This conversation is presented in Spanish with English subtitles. Translation by Mariana Fernández. It includes poetry by Rosa Chávez spoken in K’iche’.

Which tools are more useful: hammers or paintbrushes? Robots or glitter? This talk will share a notion of duality between function and expression that challenges the traditional answers to these questions, highlighting how expression supports function (and vice versa) and pointing to ways that traditional value models can create counter-productive imbalance, especially in movement design. Collaborations between artists and engineers, such as the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, the Bauhaus School, and Apple, often reach legendary status, seeming impossible or impractical to emulate. However, the talk will offer solutions to the real, pragmatic challenges of working across these disciplines, providing examples of work by artist-engineer teams that have contributed to research in robotics: designing styles of artificial gait for bipeds; translating movement between natural and artificial bodies; and building installations that give the public creative experiences with robots. Thus, the talk motivates constructing balance between art and engineering through collaborative work — work that reveals the practical value of play, the utility of dance, the urgent importance of glitter.

This event is a co-production with Rensselaer's departments of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering and Industrial and Systems Engineering. 

Amy LaViers is the director of the Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her choreography and machine designs have been presented internationally, including at Merce Cunningham’s studios, the Ferst Center for the Arts, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, and the Performance Arcade. Her writing has appeared in Nature, American Scientist, and Aeon. She is a co-founder of three startup companies: AE Machines, an award-winning automation software company; caali, an embodied media company; and, most recently, Soma Measure, a wearable device company. Her teaching has been recognized on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)’s list of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students, with Outstanding distinction. She is a recipient of DARPA’s Young Faculty Award (YFA) and Director’s Fellowship (2015-2018). She has held positions as an assistant professor in mechanical science and engineering at UIUC and in systems and information engineering at the University of Virginia (UVA). She completed a two-year Certification in Movement Analysis (CMA) in 2016 at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS) and her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech in 2013. Her research began with her undergraduate thesis at Princeton University where she earned a certificate in dance and a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering in 2009. From 2002-2005 she toured internationally as a member of the Tennessee Children’s Dance Ensemble (TCDE).

Alexa Echoes is a film in the mode of a chamber opera by visual artist Amanda Turner Pohan in collaboration with composer Charlie Looker, choreographer Dages Juvelier Keates and performer Katy Pinke. The first iteration in a series of three performances, Alexa Echoes recasts the relationship between cultural movements and commercial technologies through the history of women’s devocalization and disembodiment. It begins with mythical Greek figures, such as Echo, and leads up to Amazon’s smart speaker and digital voice-based assistant, Alexa. 

In this film, EMPAC is concurrently the site of production, setting, and subject that surrounds three manifestations of the voice: candid, staged, and disembodied. As in much of Pohan’s interdisciplinary oeuvre, the film looks at the body’s complicated relationship to technology as it relates to autonomy, animation, and the melismatic sound of breath. Alexa Echoes incorporates movement, speech, and an orchestral score to abstract the gendered decisions that frame new media technologies, gesturing to the corporate entities which choreographed them.

The film will be released on EMPAC’s website on Thursday, February 4 at 5PM (EST) followed by a conversation between Amanda Turner Pohan and curator Marisa Espe. This project is accompanied by a text version of the project’s script. 

Alexa Echoes is organized by Muheb Esmat, Marisa Espe, Bergen Hendrickson, Ciena Leshley, Ana Lopes, Liz Lorenz, Brooke Nicolas, Elizaveta Shneyderman, and Rachel Vera Steinberg from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies class of 2020, working with EMPAC curator Vic Brooks.

In this streamed online talk, performance scholar Paige Morgan Johnson discusses her decade-long research on contemporary Indonesian performance practice, queer cabaret scene, and waria (an Indonesian term for transgender women). Johnson will describe the function of genre within contemporary Indonesian performance practices as a means of showing how queer and transgender bodies in Indonesia shape, and are shaped by, performance.

The aesthetic conventions of drag, for example, offer waria ways to perform the complex relationship between local understandings of Trans*-ness and global, predominantly Western, iterations of nonbinary embodiment. Of special interest are the ways waria entertainers perform the racialized femininity of Black pop stars—a practice that enables movement across affective, cultural, and geographic borders.

Johnson’s talk will feature Indonesian choreographer Otniel Talsman’s work. As a part of the event, Johnson will screen a 30-minute excerpt of Talsman’s Amongster: Voyage of Lengger. Please see program notes for more information. 

Paige Morgan Johnson is Assistant Professor of Performance & Race in the Department of Theater at Barnard College/ Columbia University.

Venezuelan-Ecuadorian artist Ana Navas will be in conversation with curator Vic Brooks to introduce Navas’ work and the historical, artistic, and architectural backdrop to her forthcoming performance and moving image work Cuando las nubes eran las olas / When the clouds were waves. Featuring a new score by composer Mirtru Escalona-Mijares, Navas’ artwork is currently in its early stages of development. 

Cuando las nubes eran las olas responds to Alexander Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling (1953), which was conceived for architect Carlos Raúl Villenueva’s iconic auditorium, the Aula Magna, at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas and produced in consultation with the American acoustic engineering team Bolt Beranek & Newman.  Locally known as Calder’s “Nubes” (clouds) or “Platillos voladores” (flying saucers), the Acoustic Ceiling was the first instance of acoustic panels suspended across the ceiling of a hall of this scale. The artwork’s production history and integration into the architecture is key to tracing complex cultural exchanges unique to this period of Venezuelan modernism under military dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who commissioned the Aula Magna in order to host the 10th Inter-American Conference in 1954. 

Similar in approach to the acoustic innovation of the construction of the Aula Magna six decades before it, the architects and acousticians of EMPAC’s building also designed a concert hall that combines outstanding acoustics and refined materials, but with the flexibility and technology of the twenty-first century. In particular, the EMPAC Concert Hall’s ground-breaking fabric ceiling—under which Ana Navas and Escalona-Mijares will be working in residence next year—resonates across time and space with the aesthetic and acoustical concept of the Aula Magna’s clouds. 

This introductory talk marks the first in a series of interdisciplinary online conversations with experts from acoustics, art, architecture, and music that will explore the historic and contemporary resonances of the iconic Venezuelan hall. 

Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist making works for voice, electronic processing, samples, gesture activated MIDI controllers, and video. She has toured throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been presented at venues and exhibitions including Bang on a Can (NY), the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds (SF), the Venice Biennale, and the Dakar Biennale. She has composed scores for dance, film, and chamber ensembles (including Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird). Her awards include the Rome Prize, United States Artists, the Guggenheim, Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Herb Alpert Award.

Through video and audio examples and a bit of live demonstration, composer/performer and interdisciplinary artist Pamela Z will share her work and her process, and will discuss the increasingly blurred lines between disciplines in her practice.  Highlighting her use of voice, processing, gesture-based MIDI controllers, video, found objects, and sampled speech sounds, she will illustrate the various directions her work has taken over the years and consider the new work she’ll create during her upcoming EMPAC residency.

An online talk with composer Caroline Shaw and choreographer Vanessa Goodman discussing their work-in-progress collaborative installation Graveyards and Gardens (working title).

Theater maker Annie Saunders collaborates with theater/pop/new music band Wild Up and composer Emma O’Halloran on a new work called Rest. The work engages an audience with simple guidance on how to interact with each other and the performance space. Overall, Rest interrogates sensory overwhelm, sensory deprivation, hallucinations and the nature of consciousness. The audience experience is inspired by the idea that our perception of reality depends on agreements and disagreements with other people. 

Light and sound are central to the staging of Rest. These elements help to sculpt a performance environment that includes moments of near-silence, music, and field recordings from a diverse set of conversations. Materials include conversations with consciousness experts, people sharing their early sense memories, and reflections on our relationships to our smartphones. The work provides a visceral opportunity to feel and consider what ‘rest’ means to us in the modern world.

The artistic collaborators are in remote residence this fall to develop an EMPAC-commissioned online iteration of Rest. The commission will provide the artists an opportunity to explore their archive of material. The outcome is unknown, but the process of building and experiencing this online work will provide a look inside immersive, multidisciplinary theatrical practices.

The commissioned work will premiere in January 2021. Join us on December 3, 2020 for a conversations with the artists who will discuss the making of the work. 

Listen now on Anchor.fm, Breaker, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic, Spotify, Castbox, and Tunein.