A path emerges when the same section of land is trodden repeatedly; where the grass has been trampled or the dirt stomped. These paths are called desire lines, which are alternate, unofficial routes or trails in nature and landscape architecture. Choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener apply this concept to a dance improvisation practice that maps individual and collective action. The resultant social and movement interactions between dancing individuals produce a choreographic world that is built of its own desires. The project, titled Desire Lines, is an extended work that the artists have developed over years. They have staged the practice for audiences in a theater, a gallery, and outdoors. With each iteration, shifting models for coexistence, assimilation, and rebellion emerge.

Rashaun Mitchell & Silas Riener have been working together since 2010 when they worked in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Since then the duo has developed numerous small and large scale works that have been produced worldwide. The artists were last at EMPAC with Charles Atlas for Tesseract curated by Vic Brooks in 2016.

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All current EMPAC residencies are being hosted remotely with support from EMPAC curatorial, administrative, and production staff and resources. While no artists are on site in Troy, our staff is continuing to collaborate with artists toward the development of new works.

DELIRIOUS Dances/Edisa Weeks will meet with the EMPAC production team to explore set and lighting design for 3 RITES: Life, which is part of a trilogy about life, liberty, and happiness.

Weeks is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work integrates theater, dance, food, discussions, music, and visual illustrations to create interactive performance experiences.

With her collaborators, You-Shin Chin (set), Tim Cryan (lighting), Sarita Fellows (costume), and Marýa Wethers (Producer). Weeks considers different proposals for a tour-able and environmentally sustainable set. The design will help to communicate the enormity of plastic waste in our contemporary culture; and how the production and consumption of plastics are impacting life, especially in communities of color. 

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All current EMPAC residencies are being hosted remotely with support from EMPAC curatorial, administrative, and production staff and resources. While no artists are on site in Troy, our staff is continuing to collaborate with artists toward the development of new works.

Graveyards and Gardens (working title) is a collaborative installation created and performed by composer Caroline Shaw and choreographer Vanessa Goodman with lighting design by James Proudfoot.

Co-produced by Shaw and Goodman, this new work examines memory as a process of reconstruction rather than an exact recall of fixed events, embracing the various elaborations, distortions, and omissions. The duet frames an immersive performative environment through focusing on the body as a chamber for both sound and movement. Regeneration and deconstruction of materials, body and sound frame this performative experience. Graveyards and Gardens examines the overlapping themes around human, ecological and technological memories.

Choose one of the following options:

OPTION ONE: WATCH THE LIVESTREAM

• Just head over to the Chameleon event and find the on the livestream at the beginning of the page starting at 11AM.
• You do not need to join in the Discord conversation, it will be streamed along with all the other events.

OPTION TWO: INTERACT ON DISCORD

• What is DISCORD?
• Discord is an application we will be using that has both text and voice chat capabilities to create a more interactive experience. If you are familiar and comfortable with apps such as reddit or teamspeak, then you'll be right at home in Discord.
• I want to participate with the Discord app, can i sign up now?
• YES! You can sign up anytime. In fact, we will be available to help you learn how to use the application on April 21 at 3PM EDT.

• How do i get started with Discord?
• Step One: If you haven't used Discord before, create an account.
• Step Two: You can then install the app on your device and login. We invite you to do this set up now so that you are ready to roll on April 22.
• Step Three: Have your account created, downloaded the app, verified your email, and logged in? Then just come find us by tapping the button (and don't forget to come visit us there on April 21 to test!).
• DISCORD SIGNUP DEADLINE: WEDNESDAY, 4/22 9AM EST

FAQS

• Do I have to create my own server?
• You do not have a create your own server to join Chameleon. If prompted to do so you can press “skip” and move forward in creating your login.
• I can't hear anything and nobody can hear me!
• If for some reason you are unable to talk or hear anyone you might want to try a different web browser or a different device.
• What about?!?!
• If you encounter individual obstacles sometimes a quick google search will provide troubleshooting options, or you can explore the Discord help links below.
• I'm Lost
• It's OK. Join us for the livestream!

DISCORD HOW TO VIDEOS

• What is Discord?
• Install Discord
• Make an account
• Find a server
• Join a server
• Turn off the annoying notification noises
• Set up Push to Talk
• Discord Help & Support

A co-production by The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) and New York Live Arts.

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko and a team of collaborators including Everett-Asis Saunders, Nile Harris, and mayfield brooks present a series of remote events on Earth Day, April 22, 2020.

Chameleon is a multimedia live artwork that explores the ever-evolving ways in which digitality intersects the fugitive realities and shapeshifting demands that Black queer people employ to survive and heal within the contemporary moment. Kosoko and collaborators seek to locate space for healing both online and off. They will host a series of events that aim to hold grief while also centering themes of liveness, beauty, humor, care, and joy.

This one day of public engagement will be a series of live streamed remote events on YouTube Live. Audience members interested in an interactive experience can join Kosoko and collaborators in Discord  , which will offer a shared online space for performers and audience to collectively be together.

Sound artist and composer/performer Bora Yoon has been commissioned by EMPAC to develop a new performative piece in which she uses EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis Array as a new instrument for spatializing sound in space. In this first residency, she will explore activating the array through gesture and movement in collaboration with visuals and interaction designer Joshue Ott of Interval Studios (Brooklyn), creator of custom software superDraw and iPhone apps Thicket and Variant—to establish digital set design environments, and dimensional navigation systems for the larger developing staged work. In Spring 2023, they will premiere the work at EMPAC that integrates a composed sonic landscape with lighting and visuals—based on new forthcoming record and musical album by Yoon.

Yoon premiered SPKR SPRKL, an excerpt of this new work now titled PHONO KINETIC, at TIME:SPANS contemporary music festival in NYC, August 2021 where EMPAC presented new works for the Wave Field Synthesis Array in a series of concerts.

To “jump the line” in filmmaking means to break a basic rule of cinematic realism—moving the camera across an imaginary 180° line that normally allows viewers to maintain their natural sense of left and right within the film. This week-long film series celebrates jumping the line by presenting moving image works whose directors deliberately break the rules to reveal the unquestioned structural and stylistic conventions of image and sound production.

Jump the Line is a reflexive take on the multiple timescales and varied technical and dramaturgical strategies that make up films, recordings, performances, and broadcasts. By focusing on how, why, and for whom such things are made, Jump the Line represents what EMPAC stands for as an institution: the daily work of producing new artworks behind studio doors, invisible to the public until completion.

Spanning the week of film events, Gerard Byrne’s installation In Our Time is open to the public in Studio 1 where the film’s temporal reality is synched to the actual hours of each day. A radio host goes about the repetitive activities of a daily live broadcast, reinforcing Byrne’s questions around synchronicity, (in)visibility, and the dramaturgy of production.

In much the same way, Stan Douglas’s legendary jazz epic Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) is presented for the first time ever as a single six-hour theatrical screening. Luanda-Kinshasa depicts a fictional 1970s jazz-funk band engaged in a seemingly endless real-time jam turning EMPAC’s Concert Hall into the recording studio.

Two further screening programs are presented using the double-and triple-bill format: The first framed by Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Shoot for the Contents that renders “the real in the illusory and the illusory in the real” in a journey through Chinese storytelling, and the second anchored by Eric Baudelaire’s newly released documentary, Un film dramatique, that charts the artist’s four-year collaboration with a group of Parisian middle-school artists, who learn to use the camera in ways unique to their burgeoning points of view.

HEARTBEAT OPERA—the daring young indie opera company whose unconventional orchestrations and stagings of classic operas have been called "a radical endeavor" by Alex Ross in The New Yorker—concludes its sixth season with its first adaptation of Verdi: LADY M, a reimagined and re-orchestrated work-in-progress, envisioning the story of Macbeth through the eyes of Lady Macbeth.

Stripping away the clichés that have accumulated around Lady Macbeth and her story, Heartbeat's version explores ambition, gender, and violence through a contemporary American lens. Heartbeat Co-Artistic Director Ethan Heard, known for his socially conscious adaptations of classics like a Fidelio that recruited real prison choirs as the chorus, directs. His LADY M holds a mirror to NY in 2020: hedge fund managers and escorts, in glass towers and back alleys; the ferocious ambition and the nonstop drive.

In light of COVID-19, Heartbeat Opera takes its LADY M rehearsals and performances online. Rather than cancel its production, the company launches a 10-day remote residency (April 20–May 1) with their artists rehearsing at home, followed by a series of intimate Virtual Soirées through Zoom video conferencing from May 11–20. The full production arrives in Spring 2021.

Each 60-minute Soirée will include:

• A welcome toast
• Introductory remarks
• Brief live performance by two cast members
• Q&A

Each Soirée will also feature two videos, newly unveiled for this project:

• A short documentary showing a behind-the-scenes look at Heartbeat's Remote Residency
• A music video of Lady M’s “Sleepwalking Scene” sung by Felicia Moore, played by the six-piece band, and featuring the five other cast members of LADY M

EXTENSION: Fourteen Virtual Soirées, each 60 minutes:

• Wednesday, May 27 at 2PM
• Wednesday, May 27 at 8PM
• Thursday, May 28 at 7PM and 9PM
• Friday, May 29 at 2PM and 8PM
• Saturday, May 30 at 8PM
• Wednesday, June 3 at 2PM and 8PM
• Thursday, June 4 at 7PM and 9PM
• Friday, June 5 at 2PM and 8PM
• Saturday, June 6 at 8PM

Eighteen Virtual Soirées, each 45 minutes:

• Monday, May 11 at 7:30PM and 9PM
• Tuesday, May 12 at 7:30PM and 9PM
• Wednesday, May 13 at 2PM and 8PM
• Thursday, May 14 at 7:30PM and 9PM
• Friday, May 15 at 7:30PM and 9PM
• Saturday, May 16 at 2PM and 8PM
• Monday, May 18 at 7:30PM and 9PM
• Tuesday, May 19 at 7:30PM and 9PM
• Wednesday, May 20 at 7:30PM and 9PM

Seth Parker Woods performs new works on the theme of “translation” for cello and electronics composed by Freida Abtan, Monty Adkins, Ryan Carter, Nathalie Joachim, and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay.

When translation is treated as a mere concept, misunderstandings can be discussed to try to overcome challenges. However, when the meaning of what’s lost in translation bleeds over into actual losses for living beings, the consequences of theoretical misunderstandings can be devastating. Joachim’s work The Race: 1915 uses newspaper texts from The Chicago Defender that used translation and specificity of words to empower its readers by challenging the way language could be used to gloss over the atrocities faced by African Americans during that time. In recalling this language, Joachim asks the listener to examine their own assumptions about the current situation in the United States.

Some of the other works approach this search for understanding through multimedia, such as the collaboration between Adkins and McLean layering textures of snow/sound, while others try to reach clarity of expression through a common memory of a shared past. The final work is accompanied by a new film by British artist Zoe McLean. 

Special physically-distanced screenings are available for Rensselaer classes of the EMPAC-commissioned film The Inheritance by Ephraim Asili during the week of 16-20 November. 

In addition to these in-person class-specific screenings, all Rensselaer students, faculty and staff can request to watch The Inheritance online and we will provide a link.

Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance weaves histories of the West Philadelphia–based MOVE Organization, the Black Arts Movement, and dramatizations of the life of the filmmaker when he was a member of a Black activist collective. Centering on what Asili describes as a “speculative reenactment” of his time in a West Philadelphia collective, the actors scripted lives on set are entwined with cameos by MOVE's Debbie Africa, Mike Africa Sr., and Mike Africa Jr., and poet-activists Sonia Sanchez and Ursula Rucker.

After the EMPAC preview of The Inheritance on April 9, 2020 was postponed due to COVID-19 protocols, it premiered at Toronto International Film Festival and had its US premiere at the New York film festival US premiere on Friday 19 September.