How does a site choreograph us? How might we re-choreograph it—or at least allow its architecture to hold our sense of time differently?

In this two-part improvisation, spanning over both days of the festival, nibia pastrana santiago works with movement, light, sound, space, and objects gathered from around the building itself. Alongside lighting designer Migdalia Luz Barens-Vera and sound designer vaga, she inhabits EMPAC’s proscenium theater—re-choreographing the space and allowing it re-choreograph her. With tenderness toward the theater’s capacity to frame a performer’s figure before an audience, pastrana santiago persistently unsettles and dissolves the venue’s familiar infrastructure.

The work draws on an evolving archive of performance practices developed in public spaces across Puerto Rico and beyond, in which movement becomes a way of mapping her body alongside—and as—object, territory, climate, effort, and collective presence. Her title, which translates to “preamble,” holds a feeling of anticipation, incompletion, and openness to failure. It hints at both a way of being on stage and of participating in a political landscape. 

How does dance take up space in the world? Why pay attention to the histories of the places where people gather to create and watch choreography? What happens when those places are contested?

This dialogue between Arabella Stanger and María Firmino begins with a simple premise: dancefloor histories matter. Bringing their respective research into conversation, together they explore the often ambivalent relationships between concert dance and other forms of performance, land use, and histories of social struggle. Stanger and Firmino each approach choreography as a process both embodied and geographic, unearthing its relationship to territorial seizure, racialized displacement, and acts of defiance to such conditions. Both celebrating and complicating dance’s promise to release bodies into space, their conversation suggests that acts of hope might arrive through observing the power dynamics of performances—embedded in their material contexts—from Stanger’s analysis of the “violent ground” beneath Merce Cunningham’s utopic experiments at Black Mountain College, to Firmino’s engagement with “telluric” performance in the context of Mexican and Guatemalan necropolitics, and even to this festival at EMPAC.

Curious what’s inside?

Join us for a tour and step behind the scenes of a building designed for possibility. Each tour is led by a different member of our team, so no two are quite the same. You might find yourself discovering how light moves through a room, learning how a stage transforms, or discovering reproduced sound influences not just what you hear, but how you experience it.

Tours are free and open to all. They begin at 11AM in the Main Lobby on the 7th floor, off of the roundabout and run about 90 minutes. We recommend registering in advance and arriving 10 minutes early.

Whether you're an artist, a student, a neighbor, or just someone who's been curious about what goes on at EMPAC, come join us.

• May 9: Stephanie Van Sandt 
• June 13: Eric Brucker 
• August 1: Steve McLaughlin 
• September 5: Amadeus Julian Regucera 
• October 10: Dena Beard
• November 7: Francis Grunfeld 
• December 5:  Todd Vos

Join the EMPAC list and never miss a building tour.

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.

Low Sensory Space

During the festival weekend, April 23–25, a low sensory space will be available on Level 7, just south of the Lobby during open installation hours. In this quieter space, visitors will find dim lights, cozy seating, water bottles, tissues, and a few smaller rooms for privacy. Signage and festival building maps will show the way, and ushers will be available throughout the building to direct.

Low Sensory Space hours:
11AM–10PM Thursday and Friday
11AM–6PM Saturday

This year, the RPI BSA Fashion Show is introduced as Fashion Engineered, a student-led, multidisciplinary showcase featuring designers and artists from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and beyond.

Fashion Engineered celebrates originality in all its forms. Each featured piece encapsulates a distinct design language, shaped by the creator’s background, process, and vision. From experimental silhouettes and unconventional materials to technology-informed construction and conceptual storytelling, the work on display rejects uniformity in favor of thoughtful, intentional design. These pieces are not simply garments or artworks, but reflections of problem-solving, cultural narratives, and creative risk-taking.

The accompanying art exhibition further amplifies this individuality, presenting works that explore texture, movement, sound, and form. Together, the runway and gallery space highlight how unique approaches to design can coexist, converse, and push boundaries. Centering BIPOC world-building and local voices, Fashion Engineered challenges traditional notions of fashion and art, inviting audiences to engage with design as an evolving practice rooted in innovation, sustainability, and self-expression.

2026 Livestream - Fashion Engineered

2025 show, Eco-Futurism

Writer-filmmaker Thuto Durkac-Somo, choreographer-scholar Jonathan González, and cultural practice architect Mario Gooden are in residence to develop a performance and video work exploring the spatial practices of Black liberation on bodily, architectural, and cosmological scales. During their time at EMPAC, the artists will shoot new video material and bring their collaboration into three-dimensional form. Their developing project is shared publicly in April 2026.

With his composition Liquid Borders, Samson Young gives sound to the audio divide of a closed frontier zone where two territories meet. The four-part work traces both natural and manmade barriers, re-staging these as a textured symphony that flows from the industrial clang of metal to gentle shifts of water and wind.

Young developed the piece from field recordings made along the guarded boundary between Mainland China and Hong Kong, which he later notated for four immersive compositions. As parts of this forbidden barrier zone were redrawn to allow public access, he returned to explore the newly accessible terrain. Using contact microphones along fences and underwater microphones along the river dividing either side of the region, he captured the soundscape of this division and reimagined it as an evolving, resonant score.

In staging grounds, Young’s work fills the theater lobby alongside video by Na Mira. Both works animate seemingly inaccessible sites.

• FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20
• 6–10:15PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Liquid Borders / Samson Young
• SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21
• 11AM–5PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Liquid Borders / Samson Young
• TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24–FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2026
• 11AM–5PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Liquid Borders / Samson Young
• SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2026
• 1–5PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Liquid Borders / Samson Young

Korakrit Arunanondchai’s film Unity for Nostalgia (2025) follows an artist in pursuit of an origin culture that lives on in the form of a ghost who inhabits human flesh. The work’s scenes unfold in an abandoned cinema overrun by monkeys, and within a stage made of ashes that performers occupy. Containing elements of myth, choreographic performance, and ritual, Unity for Nostalgia stages clashes between secular and sacred powers. It animates dynamics of cultural inheritance, navigating encounters between forces of power and forces of culture. Unity for Nostalgia is screened as a haunting video installation that evokes ancestral presence with atmospheric intensity. At EMPAC, the work is presented on the theater stage amid traces of Arunanondchai’s commissioned performance.

• TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24–SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2026
• 11AM–5PM, Theater
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Unity for Nostalgia / Korakrit Arunanondchai

For staging grounds, Mira’s Autoasphyxiation is on view in EMPAC’s theater lobby. With shots tracking the Dragon Hill military garrison in Seoul, Autoasphyxiation fixates on the border surrounding this zone, which has been controlled by various state forces since its construction by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1906. Mira stages this landscape as a live transmission, where this boundary wavers between presence and disappearance, signal and silence.

• FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20
• 6–10:15PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Autoasphyxiation / Na Mira
• SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21
• 11AM–5PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Autoasphyxiation / Na Mira
• TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24–FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2026
• 11AM–5PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Autoasphyxiation / Na Mira
• SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2026
• 1–5PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Autoasphyxiation / Na Mira

On February 28, Jewyo Rhii leads a guided workshop on storytelling, beginning with a simple but radical question, What if we reimagined stories as cities—with public squares and hideaways, quiet back alleys and bustling main streets? “Cities are all about desires,” Rhii says. Through this workshop, she invites participants to explore how narrative absorbs the social, architectural, and emotional dimensions of urban life.

Using the architecture of Wing Theater as a jumping off point, workshop participants build a collective narrative. Starting from specific objects, participants share reflections, memories, and stories that reveal new ways of experiencing the city.