EMPAC building tours take visitors behind the scenes to experience the center’s infrastructure as few do. Each one is hosted by an EMPAC staff member with a different area of expertise—so whether you attend one or all this season, there’s always something new to learn and discover.

Join us! EMPAC Tours are offered at no cost and begin in the Main Lobby. Please register in advance and plan to arrive 15 minutes before tour start time. Each tour runs approximately 90 minutes.

SATURDAY, MARCH 15 AT 11AM WITH CURATOR AMADEUS JULIAN REGUCERA

Each of EMPAC’s performance spaces were designed as a blank canvas, endlessly customizable according to the needs of its diverse productions. In this tour, Music Curator Amadeus Julian Regucera discusses the acoustic and visual potential of each venue for the making of complex artworks, with stories from recent productions.

SATURDAY, MARCH 29 AT 11AM WITH ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR JONAS BRAASCH

Join Jonas Braasch, associate director for research, for a tour highlighting the center’s architectural acoustics and learn how the EMPAC panorama screen system led to the development of the Rensselaer CRAIVE-Lab (Collaborative Research Augmented Immersive Virtual Environment).

SATURDAY, APRIL 26 AT 11AM WITH LEAD AUDIO ENGINEER TODD VOS

Join Todd Vos, lead audio engineer, for this deep dive into EMPAC's acoustic design and production systems. Audiophiles and novices will explore the facility's infrastructure and have their questions answered as the tour moves through the building's production and performance spaces and evolving technologies.

Movement artist Justine A. Chambers shares new writing on and recent documentation of her dance work, The Brutal Joy, which is currently on tour across Canada. Emerging from traces of childhood memories of family gatherings on the South Side of Chicago, The Brutal Joy is a scored improvisation which unfurls Black vernacular dance alongside sartorial gesture in the lineage of Black dandyism—as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black-living.

Through the choreography of movement, sound, light, and attire, The Brutal Joy mines remembered and imagined pasts to build a relational, living counter-archive in and on her own body in the present.

In this talk, Chambers discusses how the piece oscillates between compositional structures of the riff, the vamp, and the break, letting provisional moments of self-actualization in the present surface through a dance of future possibilities.

Chambers’s choreographic practice is grounded in empathic and collaborative creativity, diasporic practices as knowledge reservoirs, and outward-facing activations of a cumulative bodily archive of the everyday. In The Brutal Joy, intergenerational inheritances of movement and personal style are tools for reclaiming Black existence and value through self-determination and collective ritual. Gesture, gait, gaze, rhythm, sonic texture, and shadow serve as materials for imagining otherwise.

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.

Artist Steffani Jemison reflects on her fall 2024 residency for the latest iteration of an evolving set of video and live performance works. Her series, collectively titled In Succession, explores how we find the courage to be—physically, ethically, and collectively—the means toward ends that we may never ourselves get to see.

Across In Succession’s iterations, Jemison explores a range of scaffolded structures: sometimes sculpturally built to support performers in action, sometimes constructed with their very bodies, supporting each other. Shared weight and pressure create an exchange of physical and moral responsibility, an opportunity to absorb ideas from and find security in proximity to one another.

In her fall residency, Jemison turned to the medium of video to explore the potential afterlives of a 2024 performance that activated her most large-scale sculpture to date: a climbable scaffold structure. As in much of her work, in this developing iteration of In Succession, Jemison treats the camera as an extension of the moving body; the phenomena of perspective and perception operate as at once optical and embodied. The performers’ bodies and the camera are mutually implicated, and simultaneously influence the viewer’s experience.

As starting points for these bodily and material explorations, Jemison often seeks out the archival traces of historical events as they appear in journalistic accounts—with all their exaggerations, omissions, and idiosyncrasies of time and place. In this talk, Jemison shares her recent thinking on all these forms of porosity: how living, thinking, breathing human bodies absorb movements and ideas from each other.

In other words, how do we inspire (literally blow into, breathe in) and how are we inspired? Can we find freedom with rather than from one another? Where does the courage to seek possibility lie? To imagine beyond what we know?

Visual, sound, and performance artists Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon experiment with translating their 2022 video collaboration from its previous online format into a three-dimensional, multi-channel installation with live performance interventions.

The artists riff on 1980s archival footage of influential choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings (1944–2015) performing at The Kitchen NYC, which also commissioned the original version of this project. Revisiting their own video work Reynolds and McClenon share Cummings’s preoccupation with domestic spaces and everyday, physical practices of sustenance and relation that occur inside them.

Cummings used a stop-motion–like choreographic practice she called “moving pictures” that manipulated how her quotidian, expressive gestures were perceived in time and space, like traces of memory in quick succession. Such choreographic processes turned Cummings into both photographic subject and photographer—choosing and ordering her own image, at once being surveyed and surveying the world closely.

Reynolds and McClenon build on the intimacy Cummings created between herself and her observations of the world through these embodied love letters to Black domestic experience: a partial buffer from an anti-Black world. How do visibility, opacity, public, and private function when framed at once within the stage, screen, and home?

This sequence of somatic, gestural “how to’s” for living a domestic Black life first took the form of a video work shot in the public but intimate space of an open lot in Chicago. Translated into Studio 1—Goodman, the videos are housed in a shifting, home-like interior holding moving image, soundscape, and body, allowing the artists to physically intervene in how and when the original videos are witnessed. In this simultaneously protective and exposed enclosure, the artists move through cooking, holding hands and holding their breath, silently weeping, and loudly surviving.

Audiences can enter the installation at any time. On the first day of the festival, the artists perform intermittently; then, the traces of their presence remain in the space on the second day.

Ephemeral Organ is a series of residencies, performances, and talks by artists whose work explores choreography and bodily motion as technologies for transmitting memory, history, and Black lived experience. Each artist simultaneously navigates the ever-shifting nature of live performance and the urge to retain, return to, and generate traces of the past.

The word ephemeral suggests short-lived objects, activity that leaves residual evidence, and brief but intense durations. Archival materials not designed to be preserved but which are still potently present are often called ephemera. The word organ hints at the body and its parts, a series of interior vessels and chambers which intimately order—or organize—our modes of living. In dance and performance, bodies are often understood as having inherent archiving functions; archives are spaces of public record, systems which give purpose to what we want to keep. Our bodies hold experience, gain knowledge, recall behaviors, track gestures, and mediate infinite possible actions each time they move.

Interpreting archival materials, mining family memories, recording movement through technology—each Ephemeral Organ project holds past and present side by side, inseparably. Each of the artists has developed distinct choreographic devices through which performers can compose history through their bodies and which allows them to generate, keep, and even at times lovingly lose, a bodily record of their actions.

The series began with residencies and talks in fall 2024 with artists SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, Steffani Jemison, collaborative duo Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon, and series curator Tara Aisha Willis.

In April 2025, using EMPAC’s spaces simultaneously like a series of chambers, the series culminates in two days of events including performances by Leslie Cuyjet, an installation and performances by Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon, and artist talks by Steffani Jemison and Justine A. Chambers on their latest works which register archival and historical traces through gesture.

Jonathan González and julia elizabeth neal join the artists during the festival as guest writers and interlocutors, documenting the events for future archives in relation to their ongoing research on Black performance history and practice.

Food and refreshments will be available for purchase at Evelyn's Café throughout the festival.

Special event parking for Ephemeral Organ festival in the College Avenue parking garage will be open at 2PM both days.

Schedule

• THURSDAY, APRIL 17
• 3–8PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• INSTALLATION, PERFORMANCE
• Gestures Investigating the Good and Not So Good In Relationships – As Shown to Us by Blondell Cummings / Katherine Simone Reynolds and A.J. McClenon

  Reynolds and McClenon experiment with video installation and performance, meditating on domestic space and Blondell Cummings’s archive in a shifting, home-like interior. Live performance interventions intermittently on Thursday; then, the traces of their presence remain in the space Friday. Audiences may enter the installation at any time.

• 5:30PM, Theater
• TALK
• on In Succession / Steffani Jemison

  Jemison reflects on her fall 2024 residency for the latest iteration of a series of video and performance works exploring how bodies share weight and responsibility.

• 6:45PM, Evelyn's Café
• RECEPTION
• FRIDAY, APRIL 18
• 3–8PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• INSTALLATION
• Gestures Investigating the Good and Not So Good In Relationships – As Shown to Us by Blondell Cummings / Katherine Simone Reynolds and A.J. McClenon

  Reynolds and McClenon experiment with video installation and performance in a shifting, home-like interior, meditating on Blondell Cummings's preoccupation with domestic spaces. Live performance interventions intermittently on Thursday; then, the traces of their presence remain in the space Friday. Audiences may enter the installation at any time.

• 4PM, Theater
• DANCE/THEATER, PERFORMANCE
• With Marion / Leslie Cuyjet

  Cuyjet performs inside a cocoon of mediated memory, text, and gesture in her solo performance, With Marion.

• 5:30PM, Theater
• TALK
• on The Brutal Joy / Justine A. Chambers

  Chambers shares new writing on and recent documentation of her dance work, The Brutal Joy, a scored improvisation which unfurls Black vernacular dance alongside sartorial gesture.

• 6:45PM, Evelyn's Café
• RECEPTION
• 7PM, Evelyn's Café
• TOUR
• Building Tour w/ EMPAC Curators

  Meet in the café on level 5 for a building tour with an EMPAC curator, going behind the scenes to experience the center’s infrastructure as few do.

• 8PM, Theater
• DANCE/THEATER, PERFORMANCE
• With Marion / Leslie Cuyjet

  Cuyjet performs inside a cocoon of mediated memory, text, and gesture in her solo performance, With Marion.

All times are EDT

A ubiquitous fixture in DJ and electronic music for the better half of the last century, the record turntable has been utilized as an instrument in innumerable ways since its conception. Experimental musicians Victoria Shen and Mariam Rezaei explore and push the musical limits of turntablism in a thrilling and dizzying concert performance of new music for unorthodox instruments and objects where DIY sensibilities meet the audio technological capabilities of EMPAC's Studio 1. Extreme sonic textures and physical gesture substitute for traditional musical elements like melody and harmony, questioning commonly accepted modes of music and meaning making.

Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco, whose sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body.

Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award winning composer, turntablist, and performer. She previously led experimental arts projects TOPH, TUSK FRINGE, and TUSK NORTH. Rezaei’s acclaimed music has been described as “high-velocity sonic surrealism” (The Guardian) that “harness[es] extreme technical prowess” (Boomkat).

In this program with video and performance artist Claudia Pagès Rabal, the artist shares various facets of her artistic research. Pagès’s past works have often engaged with palimpsests in which informal, vernacular languages and customs are at cross-purposes with official operations and the semantics of power.

Her recent work often swerves from intriguing cultural symbols to the raw material structures that underlie them and back to the unstable substance of language. A recent work Typo-Topo-Time Aljibe at SculptureCenter New York focused on a Moorish cistern successively rebuilt across many centuries, such that each architectural update coincided with new forms of displacement and cultural erasure. Through performance, video, and sculptural installation with a custom-made LED screen she fabricated, Pagès and her collaborators move through the graffiti in the cistern. The marks on its walls become a kind of found score that enlivens a complex flow of economic exchange and evolving cultural systems.

Pagès’s work often occupies what the artist refers to as the gerund: a space of language and movement that is detached from any particular subject.

Circulating, administering, grouping, and ungrouping—Pagès’s projects explore how discrete actions turn into endless tracings of motion and generate new forms of power. Pagès is particularly interested in the cultural life of logistics, often focusing on patterns of trade as they are reflected in material culture.

For this event, artist Jewyo Rhii is in conversation with curator Katherine C. M. Adams to discuss her artistic practice. Jewyo Rhii’s work engages with the long afterlife of artistic labor and builds public links to patterns of transit, movement, and storage we rarely see.

Her practice often bears the mark of itinerancy, reflecting on the experience of passing through places where one cannot stay and making meaning out of encounters with transient situations. Love Your Depot (2019– ) is a large sculptural installation using principles of storage to activate a workspace for younger artists; Night Studio (2009–2011) developed through turning Rhii’s studio space into an open house; and the exhibition Of a Hundred Carts and On (2023) activated art storage systems to give a shifting tableaux of works new meanings through their mobile, expandable installation. As Rhii interrupts objects on their way to being stored, shipped off, filed away, or compartmentalized, she affirms material culture in its moments of incompleteness. By engaging with states of personal and material precarity, and casting artwork in relation to the (im)possiblity of its preservation, Rhii allows us to see how ephemeral structures in our lives build their own stories—and hold ours together.

In this program, Rhii speaks in particular about how her work uses sculptural machines and architectural storage processes to create new possibilities for collective storytelling. The event will also touch on the collaborative facets of Rhii’s practice, which often directs itself to local communities and artist groups.