An online talk with composer Caroline Shaw and choreographer Vanessa Goodman discussing their work-in-progress collaborative installation Graveyards and Gardens (working title).
Main Image: Caroline Shaw and Vanessa Goodman. Photos: Courtesy the artists.
Theater maker Annie Saunders collaborates with theater/pop/new music band Wild Up and composer Emma O’Halloran on a new work called Rest. The work engages an audience with simple guidance on how to interact with each other and the performance space. Overall, Rest interrogates sensory overwhelm, sensory deprivation, hallucinations and the nature of consciousness. The audience experience is inspired by the idea that our perception of reality depends on agreements and disagreements with other people.
Light and sound are central to the staging of Rest. These elements help to sculpt a performance environment that includes moments of near-silence, music, and field recordings from a diverse set of conversations. Materials include conversations with consciousness experts, people sharing their early sense memories, and reflections on our relationships to our smartphones. The work provides a visceral opportunity to feel and consider what ‘rest’ means to us in the modern world.
The artistic collaborators are in remote residence this fall to develop an EMPAC-commissioned online iteration of Rest. The commission will provide the artists an opportunity to explore their archive of material. The outcome is unknown, but the process of building and experiencing this online work will provide a look inside immersive, multidisciplinary theatrical practices.
The commissioned work will premiere in January 2021. Join us on December 3, 2020 for a conversations with the artists who will discuss the making of the work.
Listen now on Anchor.fm, Breaker, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic, Spotify, Castbox, and Tunein.
Main Image: Courtesy the Artist. Photo: Annie Saunders
Theater maker Annie Saunders collaborates with theater/pop/new music band Wild Up and composer Emma O’Halloran on a new work called Rest. The work engages an audience with simple guidance on how to interact with each other and the performance space. Overall, Rest interrogates sensory overwhelm, sensory deprivation, hallucinations and the nature of consciousness. The audience experience is inspired by the idea that our perception of reality depends on agreements and disagreements with other people.
Light and sound are central to the staging of Rest. These elements help to sculpt a performance environment that includes moments of near-silence, music, and field recordings from a diverse set of conversations. Materials include conversations with consciousness experts, people sharing their early sense memories, and reflections on our relationships to our smartphones. The work provides a visceral opportunity to feel and consider what ‘rest’ means to us in the modern world.
The artistic collaborators are in residence this fall to develop an EMPAC-commissioned online iteration of Rest. The commission will provide the artists an opportunity to explore their archive of material. The outcome is unknown, but the process of building and experiencing this online work will provide a look inside immersive, multidisciplinary theatrical practices.
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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.
Main Image: Courtesy the artist. Photo: Johnathon Potter.
EMPAC continues to be closed for in-person events for the general public, however, please check back here and follow us on
Instagram for updates related to our curatorial program.
Although our fall program will look different than it has in the past as we continue to follow university policies related to the coronavirus, we are continuing work with artists on the commissioning and production of new ambitious performances and artworks across music, time-based visual art, theater and dance.
We look forward to sharing behind-the-scenes peeks into artist residencies along the way. Stay tuned!
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.
Main Image: Desire Lines in Madison Square Park, 2017. Photo: Paula Lobo.
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.
Main Image: Work in progress showing. Photo: Rebecca Fitton.
Courtesy the artist. Photo: Edisa Weeks
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.
Main Image: Caroline Shaw and Vanessa Goodman. Courtesy the artists.
Main Image: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Personal Archive, 1983. Courtesy the artist.
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko during one of their many residencies at EMPAC working on the Chameleon project. Courtesy the artist.
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.
Main Image: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko during one of their many residencies at EMPAC working on the Chameleon project. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Sara Griffith/EMPAC.
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.
Main Image: Bora Yoon. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Allison Spann
Joshua Ott, superDraw.