P. Staff’s residency in Studio 1—Goodman asks how we record the excesses of a body. Working with a thermal camera, Lidar, and audio recording designed to capture the body’s sonic impact on a space’s acoustics, Staff generates video documentation organized on principles of scanning.

Being & Becoming, a quartet of creative improvisors featuring Peter Evans on trumpet, vibraphonist and synth player Joel Ross, bassist and bass synth player Nick Joz, and drummer Michael Shekwoaga Ode, are in residence in EMPAC Studio 2 writing and recording new music.

Korakrit Arunanondchai, along with Alex Gvojic and Aaron David Ross, is in residence in Studio 1—Goodman to develop a live work of immersive cinema. The project involves the use of atmospherics, projection, and new footage and recordings from an in-progress film Arunanondchai has been developing around a decaying cinema in Thailand.

Jack Ferver and Jeremy Jacob are in residence in the EMPAC Theater to develop new material for the commissioned work My Town. Across two residencies, they develop scenography and lighting, and integrate Ferver’s choreography with projected video developed by Jacob. The residencies also support experimentation with the work’s dramaturgy.

In his residency in Studio 1—Goodman, DeForrest Brown Jr. tests and records material for a new album project Rhythmanalytics. Brown is developing virtual instruments and building out a sonic toolkit for the album. His process orients itself towards capturing sound’s motion within the studio, using the venue itself as part of his instrumentation.

During a residency in the EMPAC Theater, composer Natacha Diels and JACK Quartet create new video documentation for Diels’s multimedia work Beautiful Trouble (2024).

EMPAC building tours take visitors behind the scenes to experience the center’s infrastructure as few do. Each one is hosted by an EMPAC staff member with a different area of expertise—so whether you attend one or all this season, there’s always something new to learn and discover.

Join us! EMPAC Tours are offered at no cost and begin in the Main Lobby. Please register in advance and plan to arrive 15 minutes before tour start time. Each tour runs approximately 90 minutes.

SATURDAY, MARCH 15 AT 11AM WITH CURATOR AMADEUS JULIAN REGUCERA

Each of EMPAC’s performance spaces were designed as a blank canvas, endlessly customizable according to the needs of its diverse productions. In this tour, Music Curator Amadeus Julian Regucera discusses the acoustic and visual potential of each venue for the making of complex artworks, with stories from recent productions.

SATURDAY, MARCH 29 AT 11AM WITH ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR JONAS BRAASCH

Join Jonas Braasch, associate director for research, for a tour highlighting the center’s architectural acoustics and learn how the EMPAC panorama screen system led to the development of the Rensselaer CRAIVE-Lab (Collaborative Research Augmented Immersive Virtual Environment).

SATURDAY, APRIL 26 AT 11AM WITH LEAD AUDIO ENGINEER TODD VOS

Join Todd Vos, lead audio engineer, for this deep dive into EMPAC's acoustic design and production systems. Audiophiles and novices will explore the facility's infrastructure and have their questions answered as the tour moves through the building's production and performance spaces and evolving technologies.

Movement artist Justine A. Chambers shares new writing on and recent documentation of her dance work, The Brutal Joy, which is currently on tour across Canada. Emerging from traces of childhood memories of family gatherings on the South Side of Chicago, The Brutal Joy is a scored improvisation which unfurls Black vernacular dance alongside sartorial gesture in the lineage of Black dandyism—as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black-living.

Through the choreography of movement, sound, light, and attire, The Brutal Joy mines remembered and imagined pasts to build a relational, living counter-archive in and on her own body in the present.

In this talk, Chambers discusses how the piece oscillates between compositional structures of the riff, the vamp, and the break, letting provisional moments of self-actualization in the present surface through a dance of future possibilities.

Chambers’s choreographic practice is grounded in empathic and collaborative creativity, diasporic practices as knowledge reservoirs, and outward-facing activations of a cumulative bodily archive of the everyday. In The Brutal Joy, intergenerational inheritances of movement and personal style are tools for reclaiming Black existence and value through self-determination and collective ritual. Gesture, gait, gaze, rhythm, sonic texture, and shadow serve as materials for imagining otherwise.

Choreographer Leslie Cuyjet performs inside a cocoon of mediated memory, text, and gesture in her solo performance, With Marion. Cuyjet combines her own embodied archive of movement with looping archival, pre-recorded, and live-captured video in a multi-sided enclosure that serves as both projection screen and stage, dynamically shifting the viewer’s perspective on her bodily form over time.

Originally commissioned by The Kitchen (NYC) for an open-plan loft space, this evening-length performance now floats in the dark void of the EMPAC Theater, further emphasizing how Cuyjet displays and obscures herself—and her internal thoughts—amidst objects, images, and the camera’s lens.

Cuyjet grapples with questions of classism, privilege, and race that arise in her family’s archives and the legacy of her great aunt, Marion Cuyjet (1920–1996), a pioneer of 1950s dance education. As a teen, Marion Cuyjet passed as white to train in Philadelphia ballet schools and later created the Judimar School of Dance where Black dancers studied before they could do so at white studios, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Judith Jamison (1943–2024) and Philadanco’s Joan Myers Brown (b. 1931).

Layering her own memories of dance training many decades later alongside this complex family legacy, Leslie Cuyjet crafts a dense, fragmented, malleable, and intentionally oblique collage of memory within the sculptural structure and across her own body. With Marion at once fills in historical gaps and highlights where new fissures appear in the unstable relationship between self and the traces of the past that surround it.

Artist Steffani Jemison reflects on her fall 2024 residency for the latest iteration of an evolving set of video and live performance works. Her series, collectively titled In Succession, explores how we find the courage to be—physically, ethically, and collectively—the means toward ends that we may never ourselves get to see.

Across In Succession’s iterations, Jemison explores a range of scaffolded structures: sometimes sculpturally built to support performers in action, sometimes constructed with their very bodies, supporting each other. Shared weight and pressure create an exchange of physical and moral responsibility, an opportunity to absorb ideas from and find security in proximity to one another.

In her fall residency, Jemison turned to the medium of video to explore the potential afterlives of a 2024 performance that activated her most large-scale sculpture to date: a climbable scaffold structure. As in much of her work, in this developing iteration of In Succession, Jemison treats the camera as an extension of the moving body; the phenomena of perspective and perception operate as at once optical and embodied. The performers’ bodies and the camera are mutually implicated, and simultaneously influence the viewer’s experience.

As starting points for these bodily and material explorations, Jemison often seeks out the archival traces of historical events as they appear in journalistic accounts—with all their exaggerations, omissions, and idiosyncrasies of time and place. In this talk, Jemison shares her recent thinking on all these forms of porosity: how living, thinking, breathing human bodies absorb movements and ideas from each other.

In other words, how do we inspire (literally blow into, breathe in) and how are we inspired? Can we find freedom with rather than from one another? Where does the courage to seek possibility lie? To imagine beyond what we know?