Spring 2019

Findlay and Sandsmark are in residence at EMPAC with their company to further develop the project’s body-sensor and animation content. In its use of this technology, >>returner<< demonstrates a wariness of the inflexible binaries that one-to-one body-technology interactions engender: including presence/absence, natural/manufactured, and real/virtual. The performance weaves between and around these binaries to question them without dismantling them entirely—a nod to their unavoidable if not regrettable ubiquity in our daily lives. Attempting to avoid the trap of technophillic engagement, >>returner<< creates an at-times chilling piece of performance.

Only Breath, Words is a theatrical production about language, identity, and intimacy by Anna Craycroft that has been in development at EMPAC since 2018 and will premiere in September 2022. 

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

Spring 2020 Residency

The last of four residencies to create Chameleon: A Biomythography— this residency will focus on completing set and technical elements as well as rehearsals toward the world premiere April 2, 2019.

Fall 2019 Residency

Continuing work on the hold, a multimedia performance project that explores the role of media archives in American Black diasporic communities. 

Spring 2019 Residency

Kosoko and a team of AV collaborators worked to conceive and develop their own archive of sound and visual material that will become central to the hold. In collaboration with the EMPAC team they created elements of a stage performance that moves fluidly between body, image, sound, and text. Continuing research during future residencies will work toward a film installation, podcast series, and live performance event at New York Live Arts in 2020.

The New York-based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger will be in residence to develop a new audio-visual work for a custom-built LED wall and a multichannel surround-sound system. EKO is the third work in his ongoing series staged in complete darkness.

He will perform the premiere of this piece on November 14.

Artist Clarissa Tossin is back in residence in the Concert Hall with composer Michelle Agnes Magalhães to work on the sound design, dramaturgy, and realization of her installation Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los Volcanes Canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing.

The moving image work utilizes a higher-order Ambisonic spatial audio system. Ambisonics is a specific audio format developed to record, mix, and playback audio in a scalable immersive three-dimensional soundfield. The listeners in the Concert Hall are surrounded by 64 loudspeakers distributed across the wall and ceiling surfaces, each contributing to the soundfield with their own audio channel.

Over the last several years, the principal photography for Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’/ Antes de que los Volcanes Canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing was filmed by Tossin and cinematographer Jeremy Glaholt in the Concert Hall and Theater at EMPAC with flautist Alethia Lozano Birrueta; at Sowden House and the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles with Lozano Birrueta and artist Tohil Fidel Brito; and in Guatemala with poet and artist Rosa Chávez.

Los Angeles-based artist Clarissa Tossin’s Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los Volcanes Canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing is scored by Brazilian composer Michelle Agnes Magalhães and performed by Mexican flautist Alethia Lozano Birrueta, Ixil Maya artist Tohil Fidel Brito, and K’iche ’Kaqchiquel Maya poet Rosa Chávez. The film takes a sonic approach to the articulation of architectural borrowings by Western architects of indigenous cultural motifs, utilizing 3D-printed replicas of Maya wind instruments from Pre-Columbian collections held in US and Guatemalan museums.

In this video Tossin and some of her collaborators, including the director of photography Jeremy Glaholt, discuss the production of the flutes, the composition of the score, and approaches to the film’s cinematography. These 3D scanned and playable replica instruments were created by anthropologist/archaeologist Jared Katz, the Mayer Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow for Pre-Columbian Art at the Denver Art Museum.

Turkish duo Taldans—Mustafa Kaplan and Filiz Sizanli—will be at EMPAC for an extended residency in Studio 1 in order to further develop the choreographic, stage, and audio elements of their work Dolap with EMPAC’s technical team and infrastructure.

New York-based quartet Yarn/Wire (two percussionists and two pianists) will record contemporary German composer Enno Poppe's EMPAC-commissioned piece Feld, and Tonband, Poppe’s co-composition with Wolfgang Heiniger.

Feld was premiered at EMPAC on September 22, 2017.

Glasgow-based Canadian artist Corin Sworn is in residence with two dancers to research the algorithms in domestic surveillance systems that purport to recognize “suspect’ movement and gesture.

For a recent sound work produced in the UK, Mark Fell collaborated with IRCAM/Paris to create a large database of extreme and unusual instrumental recordings. At EMPAC, he will explore the use of these materials and their behavior on the High-Resolution Wave Field Synthesis Array, which offers precise positioning of sound in space.