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 originally scheduled for April 9, 2020 was postponed due to COVID-19 protocols, the film premiered at Toronto International Film Festival and had its US premiere at the New York film festival on Friday, September 18. 

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.