This event has been postponed to follow University policies that have been put in place in light of new developments related to the coronavirus.

Artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is at EMPAC for the world premiere of Chameleon: A Biomythography. The result of four technical development residencies at EMPAC, Chameleon is a multimedia live artwork that explores: “the fugitive realities and shapeshifting demands of surviving at the intersection of Blackness, gender fluidity, and queerness in contemporary America.” In this new work, the stage is saturated with melanated tones and pigments—intensified by Africanist texts and iconography from Luther Vandross to Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, where the term “biomythography” originates.

The stage becomes a site of ecstatic spiritual fantasy in which grief is punctuated by moments of beauty, care, and pleasure. The setting features live and recorded performers who embody, film, document, and re-embody sources of curated archival imagery. Drawing from an ongoing fascination with Black diasporic spiritual practice and by what the artist calls “erotic digitality,” Kosoko uses the apparatus of the theater to conjure an environment of disarming emotional complexity.

The Spring tours have been canceled to follow University policies that have been put in place in light of new developments related to the coronavirus.

EMPAC building tours are offered throughout the spring season. In February, two tours—one with Curators Vic Brooks and Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti and another with Audio Engineer Todd Vos—will be led in conjunction with the matinee presentation of Stan Douglas’s six-hour film Luanda-Kinshasa in the Concert Hall. In March, the tour will be led by EMPAC’s Director, Johannes Goebel; and in April, Director for Stage Technologies Geoff Abbas will delve into the architectural and technological capabilities of the building.

FEBRUARY 8 at 2PM with Curators Vic Brooks and Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti

Join EMPAC's Time-Based Visual Art Senior Curator Vic Brooks and Music Curator Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti for a behind-the-scenes look at EMPAC’s extraordinary production facilities. From precisely calibrated studios, to a concert hall on springs, the Curators will discuss the acoustic and visual potential of EMPAC’s venues for the making of complex artworks, along with their approach to the connection of EMPAC’s artists and audiences.

FEBRUARY 8 at 4PM with Lead Audio Engineer Todd Vos

From the specialized sound-diffusive panels in Studio 1, to the frequency-calibrated Nomex ceiling fabric in the Concert Hall, and into the miles of fiber-optic cable that connect each of EMPAC’s performance spaces to its recording studios, Lead Audio Engineer Todd Vos will take audiophiles on a deep-dive into EMPAC’s acoustic design and capabilities.

These two tours are presented in conjunction with Luanda-Kinshasa in the Concert Hall (12–6PM) and In Our Time in Studio 1—Goodman (11AM–6PM). 

MARCH 21 at 11AM with Director Johannes Goebel

Join EMPAC’s founding Director Johannes Goebel for a tour of the building he guided through design and construction and an overview of the program he began establishing in 2001. Goebel will take visitors through the EMPAC building with an eye and an ear to the “human-scale” functions he strove to achieve in taking the project from a lofty vision to one of the most advanced centers for new artistic production and research in immersive environments.

APRIL 18 at 11AM with Video Engineer Ryan Jenkins

A general overview of the EMPAC building, with a focus on its architectural highlights and programmatic capabilities, this tour will take guests through all four EMPAC venues, audio and video recording facilities, and the many spaces in between.

This event has been postponed to follow University policies that have been put in place in light of new developments related to the coronavirus.

When we are close to something brilliant, what is the difference between that which lights our way, and that which impedes our journey? Young’s The Glow that Illuminates, the Glare that Obscures explores the intricacies of an old love—Renaissance architectural and musical practices—through new compositional forms and strategies. Architecturally, light and space have long been in conversation defining each other. Young uses EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis Array to allow the audience to follow the resonance of sound through architectural space.

Choreographer Michelle Ellsworth has a prolific body of work that skirts the disciplinary perimeters of dance, theater, film, carpentry, web design, and more. She has a knack for mixing humor and candor to perform elaborate systems with physical materials like wood and gears. Her work cleaves—paradoxically meaning both “divide” and “adhere”—the body and technology.

Ellsworth and her technicians will work with the EMPAC team in an exploratory collaboration. Residencies immerse us in the creative process of artists we trust and whose work we cherish as they work with our team to discover new ideas and approaches.

As a part of this residency and to introduce the artist to EMPAC audiences, Ellsworth will be in conversation with curator Ashley Ferro-Murray at a work-in-progress event to contextualize her body of work and illuminate her creative process in developing the new project.

Work-in-progress events offer a window into the research, development, and production of new works by artists in residence at EMPAC. These free events open up a dialogue between our audiences, artists, and EMPAC staff.

Refreshments will be served.

Contemporary-dance choreographer Christopher K. Morgan is artistic director of his namesake Washington, DC–based dance company, as well as Executive Artistic Director of Dance Place in DC and Director of the Dance Omi International Dance Collective in Ghent, NY. For his last work, Pōhaku (2016), Morgan diverged from his principal roll as choreographer of a contemporary-dance ensemble to create a personal solo that addressed his indigenous Hawaiian heritage and separation from his ancestral land. In Pōhaku, the choreographer explored the aesthetic and social complexities between Morgan’s Western modern and Indigenous Hawaiian dance lineages. Now continuing similar investigations with his company, Morgan’s new work Native Intelligence / Innate Intelligence incorporates modern dance, hula, Hawaiian chant, and live music to examine the location and meaning of home and belonging.

Morgan is at EMPAC to develop and build the set for Native Intelligence / Innate Intelligence by collaborating with mixed-media sculpture artist Brenda Mallory. Mallory uses cloth, fibers, beeswax, and found objects together with what she identifies as “crude hardware” to create works that imply tenuous connections or evidence of repair.

While Morgan and Mallory will be at work with EMPAC’s crew to construct the set of Native Intelligence / Innate Intelligence during the days of this residency, Morgan’s company dancers will work in the studio at night to develop a movement vocabulary from the materials designed for the stage set. These explorations  between the sculptural materials of the set in relationship to movement are the focus of this event.

In addition to the work-in-progress event, Morgan will be hosting a workshop for students. Space is limited, please contact the box office for more information.

Work-in-progress events offer a window into the research, development, and production of new works by artists in residence at EMPAC. These free events open up a dialogue between our audiences, artists, and EMPAC staff.

A public reception will follow the performance. Refreshments will be served.

• Un Film Dramatique (2019)
• By Eric Baudelaire

Eric Baudelaire’s principle that “we would make a film that starts as a film about them, slowly becoming a film made with them, and eventually, after four years, it would end up as a film by them,” produces a brilliantly incisive and intimate feature film that was shot over four years with a group of middle-school students from the Dora Maar School in Saint-Denis, France. Riffing on their own lives, and all that is happening politically and socially around them, the young artists use the implicitly collaborative process of filmmaking as an explicit way to make their own voices heard. Going up against the power structures inherent to the world they will one day inherit, they debate issues of discrimination in the face of the current struggles around racism and immigration in Europe to attempt to answer the central question: “What are we doing here together?”

• ENSAIO / THE REHEARSAL (2018)
• By Tamar Guimarães

Bubbling underneath the wryly comedic attempts to rehearse a dramatization of Machado de Assis’s nineteenth-century satirical novel, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, lies is a searing critique of the racism and sexism of Brazilian society. O Ensaio follows a group of performers directed by a young artist, Isa, as they encounter multiplying difficulties putting together a play for an exhibition. Punctuated by the neurotic repetitions of rehearsal structures and the accompanying group dynamics, the screenplay was developed by Tamar Guimarães in tandem with the cast of largely nonprofessional actors. Described by the artist as a film about “short-lived revolutionary actions,” O Ensaio delves into 1880 Machado de Assis’s prediction that, although the end of slavery would come, “everything would remain the same.”

Refreshments will be served.

• Specialised Technique (2019)
• By Onyeka Igwe

Specialised Technique is one of a trio of films made with images from the British Colonial Film Unit archives of the Aba Women’s War of 1929, the first major anti-colonial protest to British authority in West Africa, and a struggle led specifically by women. Onyeka Igwe’s own film delves deep into the technique of the Colonial Film Unit’s practice, and draws out how certain actions and gestures, like sequences of West African’s dancing, propagandized a positive image of British rule. A methodical and at times joyful reflection on questions of how, why, and for whom such images are produced, Igwe in turn develops her own filmic language in the reframing of these archival images in direct resistance to the violence of the colonial gaze.

• Tales from Planet Kolkata (1993)
• By Ruchir Joshi

Filmed in 1990s Calcutta, India, Tales from Planet Kolkata is a sharply canny satire on the city’s continued portrayal by the western media as a “black hole” and “the worst place in the world.” As lovingly photographed as it is acutely observed, the film is shot through with references from Godard to Hollywood, opening with Ruchir Joshi’s take on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, as the director leads us on a riotous journey through the city along with a local Patua (a traditional Bengali scroll painter) and an African American video artist. In search of answers to perennial questions of cultural identity and belonging, Tales was originally commissioned by the UK’s Channel 4 television to shift the perspective of the dominant western gaze towards that of the global south.

• Shoot for the Contents (1992)
• By Trinh T. Minh-ha

Shoot for the Contents is a richly layered documentary that hinges on the protests that sparked the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Trinh T. Minh-ha draws out the expansive relationship between images, sounds, and the process of filmmaking itself in order to translate the complex motifs of Chinese allegory through the moving image. Titled after a Chinese guessing game, Shoot for the Contents delicately layers the voices of women artists and philosophers with Chinese music in an intimate meditation on Mao’s iconic phrase: “Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend.” All the while questioning conventions of the documentary format and questions of veracity in terms of political representation, structures of power, and the production of cultural identity.

Refreshments will be served.

Stan Douglas’s Luanda-Kinshasa documents a jazz-funk recording session at The Church, Columbia Records’ legendary New York studio that was shuttered in 1981. The film telegraphs a group of contemporary musicians back to the 1970s to improvise in a reconstruction of the original Columbia 30th Street Studio, the site of such diverse and seminal recordings as Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979), and Glenn Gould’s Bach: The Goldberg Variations (1955).

Luanda-Kinshasa connects the New York music scene of the 1970s with its African roots, moving through funk, jazz, and Afrobeat to produce subtle pancultural connections played by musicians brought together by jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran. At EMPAC, the recording session is projected theatrically and into a concert hall for the first time, reinforcing the real-time durations that exist between production and performance in the film. Edited sequences are cut together in homage to Miles Davis, with loops and repetitions integral as much to the experience of listening to the music as to the temporal flow of the images themselves. The film’s six-hour duration stretches far beyond the usual confines of the cinema and into the time of production, as the camera focuses on the band while technicians, producers, and groupies populate the edges of the frame.

Luanda-Kinshasa is a film by Canadian artist Stan Douglas and features musicians Jason Moran, Kahlil Kwame Bell, Liberty Ellman, Jason Lindner, Abdou Mboup, Nitin Mitta, Antoine Roney, Marvin Sewell, Kimberly Thompson, and Burniss Earl Travis.

Refreshments will be served throughout.

Irish artist Gerard Byrne’s video installation In Our Time unfolds, in real time, the inner workings of a recording studio during the golden era of analog radio. 

On first look, the video has the familiar register of a period piece set in a meticulously recreated control-booth of a radio station of its day. However, the linear timeline of the broadcast—with its repetitions of commercial breaks, the lilt and timbre of the radio host’s voice, the classic pop, and the weather segments—slowly disengages and falls apart. Soon, the songs played are not those that have been announced, the station’s name sounds different, the news events skip from decade to decade, and all the while the band simply continues to tune-up. In this radio booth, where the repetition of broadcast rhythms dictates the consecutive daily events, the image and soundtracks appear to remain resolutely synchronous. But the gradual disconnection between what is seen and what is heard produces a surreal uncertainty around the fixity of time within the temporal monotony of the radio station.

In Our Time brings into focus not only the time of broadcast—its rhythms, in-jokes, and pop riffs—but reinforces the temporal reality in which we all exist, on the sublevel of our daily routine to the looping of political and historical cycles. The record might change, but our cultural and technological concept of time remains constant. 

Taking into account robotics technologies’ increasing presence in our lives, labors, and wars, scholar Jennifer Rhee visits EMPAC to present the following questions: How is the human defined in these robotic visions and technological relations? What are the histories of erasures and exclusions that brought this definition of human into being? Whose lives and labors are excluded from these considerations of the human? This talk draws on Rhee’s book, The Robotic Imaginary: The Human & the Price of Dehumanized Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), which argues that robotic and AI systems reflect historical gendered and racial devaluations around labor.

Rhee’s talk will begin by briefly plotting how labor devaluations are proliferated by AI assistants, vacuum-cleaning robots, and emotion-recognition AIs. She will then focus specifically on U.S. military drone warfare, which requires the racialized dehumanization of drone-strike victims. In conversation with contemporary artistic responses drone warfare, she will connect this to the U.S.’s history and continued present of racialized state violence.

The Robotic Imaginary will be available at a signing table hosted by Market Block Books following the lecture.

Jennifer Rhee is associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.