Filmmaker, writer, broadcaster, and musician Edward George records a live episode of his podcast The Strangeness of Jazz, an ongoing series that explores the historical, philosophical, and sonic dimensions of music through close listening and archival excavation. Blending commentary with extended musical excerpts played in full, the podcast unfolds as both lecture and listening session.  

For TOPOS 2026, George turns his attention to the generative possibilities of the slip—the mistake, stutter, or rhythmic deviation that opens new musical futures. At the center of the program is Jamaican drummer Sly Dunbar, whose dub recordings and subsequent remixes becomes a point of convergence for seemingly contradictory histories of rhythm and temporality.

George begins with a subtle slip in the groove of a 1985 Dunbar recording, tracing its unexpected resonance with the polyrhythms later associated with hip-hop producer J Dilla while also connecting it retrospectively to Milford Graves’s radical explorations of percussion, improvisation, and the body. In counterpoint, George considers the lineage of master timekeepers through whom Dunbar situated himself: Lloyd Knibb in reggae, Al Jackson in soul, and Earl Young in disco—drummers whose grooves fundamentally reshaped bodily movement and musical time.

Dunbar’s music becomes the connective tissue between these traditions: a space where rhythm fractures, stretches, repeats, and reorganizes our perception of time itself. What emerges is a meditation on drums not simply as instruments, but as technologies of memory, history, and embodied consciousness.

Join us in Evelyn's café starting at 7:30PM for snacks and a cash bar. 

IMA is electro-percussion collaboration of Amma Ateria (electronics) and Nava Dunkelman (percussion), who combine noise music, Japanese poetry, and spatialized sound into a visceral and immersive live performance. Through restraint and release, deep drones collide with metallic lightness and bursts of violence, producing expressionistic industrial intensities that move towards moments of unexpected serenity.

Working with extreme precision and dynamic range, IMA pushes silence and density driven to the brink of breakage, allowing fragility and impermanence to surface from within the overwhelming sonic force. Their music asks: What forms of beauty become possible in the aftermath of collapse?

Performed in the 39-channel ambisonic sound environment of EMPAC’s Studio 1, そして花びらは燃え、散りゆく And The Petals Burst Into Flames... unfolds as a stark and vibrant meditation on surrender, destruction, and transformation—an attempt to regenerate beauty through the unstable catalysts of pleasure, noise, and dissolution. 

Join us in Evelyn's café from 7:30–9:30PM for snacks and a cash bar. 

Commissioned by The Warburg Institute in London, filmmaker, writer, broadcaster, and musician Edward George’s Black Atlas explores the “Image of the Black” archive—a collection of over 30,000 images documenting representations of people of African descent from antiquity through the civil rights era. The American premiere of Black Atlas is presented in partnership with The Sanctuary for Independent Media (Troy, NY) and RPI Arts Department’s iEAR Presents.

Drawing from the archive, George creates a new film that reanimates historical imagery through narration, sound, and montage. Accompanied by an evocative score by Seymour Wright and Crystabel Efemena Riley, Black Atlas unfolds as a meditation on time, place, and presence—considering art as a medium of transcendence, a technology of power, and an affirmation of a humanist, anti-racist project.

In revisiting and recontextualizing these images, the film approaches the archive as both a site of cultural memory and a tool for speculative thinking: What might it mean to encounter the archive not as a fixed record of the past, but as a living structure through which histories can be reimagined?

The screening will be followed by a conversation between George and author, scholar, and NYU professor Fred Moten.

Kick off Pride with a relaxed, come-as-you-are evening of creativity, music, and good company. Make your own Pride gear, hang out with friends and coworkers, and help build some excitement for the weeks ahead. We’ll also have live music from Troy band Paintbrush Charlie, fronted by our very own Julia Alsarraf.

Everyone’s welcome—staff, friends, family, and community alike.

Bring a t-shirt to decorate.

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

What does music know about us that we don't yet know about ourselves?

It shapes the rhythm of our days, bends our perspectives, and gives form to the stories we carry. The rituals we return to, both ordinary and transcendent, pulse with the emotional frequency of sound. At a moment when the world feels especially lonely and fractured, gathering together to listen intently may be one of the most radical acts available to us.

The shape of music reflects the shape of our lives. In the contour of our narratives, the grain of our voices, the recursive and ever-unfolding stages of personal and communal becoming, our lives take on the form of song. As Schopenhauer wrote, “Music is the melody to which the world is the text.”

TOPOS 2026 is a space where audiences and artists converge to communicate the ineffable. Across performances, live podcasts, film screenings, and conversation, the festival creates occasions for deepened listening and critical encounters: music as a means of articulating that which resists articulation.

Featuring Vijay Iyer, Wadada Leo Smith, Miho Hatori, Edward George, Paul Abbott, IMA, Rock City Falls Trio (Improv Spaces), Sun Dogs (Improv Spaces), Fred Moten, and The Silent Light—TOPOS 2026 brings together different forms of music, not as genres but as provocative sites of experience.

Every presentation is a way into our own stories and of those around us, asking: do these stories have the potential to help us collectively reimagine new, and perhaps better, possible futures?

Schedule

• All nine events are included in the $50 Festival Pass TICKETS. 
  Single tickets TICKETSare available for $20.
• WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2
• 5PM, Sanctuary for Independent Media
• WORKSHOP
• BE THE MEDIA! WORKSHOP / Edward George 
• 7PM, Sanctuary for Independent Media
• SCREENING, TALK
• BLACK ATLAS / Edward George and Fred Moten 
• Both Wednesday events take place at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in North Troy.
• THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3
• 6PM, Studio 2
• TALK, PERFORMANCE
• THE STRANGENESS OF JAZZ / Edward George
• 9PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• PERFORMANCE
• そして花びらは燃え、華が咲く AND THE PETALS BURST INTO FLAMES... / IMA 
• FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4
• 7PM, Concert Hall
• PERFORMANCE
• DEFIANT LIFE / Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith
• 9PM, Theater
• PERFORMANCE
• PARIS SYNDROME / MIHO HATORI, with Michiko Ogawa and Dan Peck 
• SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5
• 12–1:30PM, Main Entrance, East Plaza
• BBQ, FREE
• Brooks’ bbq / sound house records / Community BBQ
• 2PM, Concert Hall
• PERFORMANCE
• IMPROV SPACES / Rock City Falls Trio, Sun Dogs
• 4PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• PERFORMANCE
• THE STRANGENESS OF DRUMMING / Paul Abbott and Edward George 
• 7PM, Theater
• SCREENING, PERFORMANCE
• A PAGE OF MADNESS / The Silent Light

How are our bodies formed by the shifting ground that holds us up? How do we reshape and reform over time? How are we aligned in space and time with the environment around us?

Beyond EMPAC’s glass walls, the horizon converges with printed and projected natural landscapes inhabited by a being that is both body and stone. In this site-specific, multi-channel video installation by collaborators and co-parents Meg Foley and Carmichael Jones, the shifting presence on screen becomes a vortex of gestational and geological time: Foley performs “rock drag,” embodying geologic processes by mimicking a boulder’s sped up evolution through movement while hidden beneath layers of fabric. Responding to the histories of the natural terrains where the footage was shot, the figure becomes both a character within and a physical extension of the landscape—a singular body that is deeply organic but never fully human.

Installed across multiple levels of EMPAC’s glass enclosed bridges, photographic stills printed on stretched lycra become projection surfaces, multiplying the figure so it can be seen from several vantage points as well as close-up within the bridges themselves. The sounds of Foley’s body in motion—heartbeat, breath—form an ambient soundscape, blurring the intimacy implied by the fabric-covered body with the expansiveness of the surrounding landscapes. The result is a meditation on queer gestation, selfhood, geology, and transformation, inviting a slower pace of attention and an expansive sense of scale.

Troy’s own Yellow Lab Vintage & Books hosts a pop-up bookstore and reading lounge filled with titles about space, place, performance, and embodiment, carefully selected by Yellow Lab’s Jessica DuPont along with selections by the festival’s artists and curator. Hang out on cozy couches with a wine or beer from Evelyn’s Café and peruse the shelves of new and used books for sale. Other books are just for display, offering glimpses into artists’ personal, annotated copies.

Why do we choose to move in unison—to relinquish individuality to collectivity? What harmonies become possible in group movement, and what are its limits? Can difference and distinction persist within bodily sameness?

The Oath traces a fictional and incomplete history of unison movement as the desire to become a single body. Over a nearly 24-minute film, screened on a continuous loop, it captures the power of mass gesture across a spectrum that ranges from the communal to the monstruous. Dressed in identical, unidentifiable white uniforms and staged within Alla Kovgan’s sweeping direction, a large ensemble of dancers perform Annie-B Parson’s precise cycle of poetic and vernacular gestures. Their movements encompass both utopian and dystopian choreographies of community, clan, club, army, congregation, and machine.

In EMPAC’s vaulted concert hall, the film’s abstract, colorful landscape becomes both larger than life and unsettlingly claustrophobic, calling attention to the spatial patterns the group forms within the contained world of the frame. As the dancers move in perpetual unison, individuality flickers, at once starkly visible and dissolving into the group. The Oath stages collective gesture as bond and bind, promise and battle, celebration and intimidation—at once ritual, rehearsal, and dance.

How does liberation feel in the body? How do structures of violence shape the spaces around our bodies and around our planet?

In this premiere of a new, multisensory performance-talk in development, cultural practice architect Mario Gooden delivers a rapid-fire oration drawn from an expansive bibliography of Black authors and references to outer space. Three-channel projections of archival images and film clips intersect with new footage shot by writer-filmmaker Thuto Durkac-Somo. These visual frictions are synthesized in the movements of choreographer-writer Jonathan González, performed both live and onscreen. By collaging spoken text, embodied movement, and moving image, these artists open a portal for imagining how the spatial practices of Black liberation unfold on bodily, architectural, and cosmological scales.

In A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (Bantam, 1998), theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking defines a black hole as a region of space from which escape is impossible: “It is a bit like running way from the police and just managing to keep one step ahead but not being able to get clear away!” Amidst the present planetary reckoning with  systemic oppression, Black Holes Ain’t So Black begins with this charged image, where cosmological space slips into social choreography. From there, the performance-talk moves through a cascade of juxtaposed images, gestures, and quotations, creating a barrage of sensory and conceptual connections. Following the presentation, the artists will join the audience in conversation, moderated by curator Tara Aisha Willis.

How are we implicated in the images of power that surround us? How do our actions mimic what we have learned from those that lead us?

Greeting visitors at EMPAC’s main entrance, this interactive sculpture premiere invites us to embody and witness the gesture of the “heroic” death: a dramatized cycle of falling and rising that has long served as a symbol of nationalist ideals. Kate Ladenheim draws on, while sharply critiquing, the formal conventions and political assumptions of monumental sculpture to create an anti-monument that repurposes military materials and trigger mechanics.

Provided with a set of “score” instructions, participants become a part of a system of rising and falling bodies. The sculpture requires not just a single participant but variations on a collective action: people falling on mats activate the rise of an inflatable torso atop a pedestal covered in bullet casings. Without the viewers’ performance of self-sacrifice, the figure of power remains inert and deflated. Together, participants physically rehearse this trope of monumental proportions, revealing how “heroic” figures are constructed, and how many bodies are required, invisibilized, or lost in the process of holding them up.