Let ‘im Move You is a series of performance and visual works rooted in the J-Sette dance form. The most recent performance in the series, This Is a Formation, both agitates and plays with the energetic lead-and-follow form of dance, which originated in the Black femme communities of Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1970s and has been widely popularized by the Jackson State University Marching Band dance team, the Prancing J-Settes. 

Artists jumatatu m. poe and Jermone “Donte” Beacham are in residence at EMPAC to develop the next phase of the work, Let ‘im Move You: This is a Formation, designed as a three-part performance that will travel across historically Black neighborhoods, queer night clubs, and institutional art spaces and theaters. The artists will be joined by a team of collaborators, including seven dancers, lighting, audio, and visual media designers, as well as two ethical and artistic consultants, to expand the theatrical and technological elements of the work. The team will also conduct a series of workshops with Rensselaer students as part of the development of the piece.

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.  

Thomas F. DeFrantz is an artist and scholar who works at the apex of dance, technology, and critical Black studies. His historiographic and aesthetic focus opens shapeshifting conversations about the curation of art, ideas, politics, and bodies. DeFrantz will be at EMPAC as an advisor and collaborator to jumatatu m. poe and Jermone “Donte” Beacham’s Let ‘im Move You: This is a Formation residency. In conjunction with that project, he will present this public talk on his research. 

DeFrantz is professor in the departments of African and African-American Studies and of Dance at Duke University. He is co-editor of Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings, and Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. 

In response to the (age-old) complaint that there's nothing new happening in music, EMPAC modestly announces New Nothing, a series of concerts featuring national and international musicians working in the hybridized terrain of experimental-leaning popular music. These groups exemplify a global reality in which music hasn't just crossed borders but made them irrelevant. Popular music will never be the same.

DANCE MOViES Commissions support new works that fuse dance with the technologies of the moving image; these world premieres were followed by a panel discussion with the artists. 

TAO (11 min, Argentina, 2013) is the third collaborative dance film between Argentinian filmmaker Cayetana Vidal and choreographer and dancer Sofia Mazza. In an illusory world, two lovers living parallel lives, day for one and night for the other, with seasons inverted, only meet in the artful interlocking of image and sound. Vidal is a film director and writer who has written, directed, and edited several dance-for-the-camera projects, often in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Sofía Mazza.

In The First Place… (US, 5 mins, 2013) is comprised of 10 short films, shot in Rome, that reframe the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (an Italian pastoral romance published in 1499). Each film is a decisive moment in which the protagonist must use landmarks to reorient himself while pursuing his beloved. The film features music by Erin Gee. A Lecoq-trained actor, Colin Gee was a principal clown for Cirque du Soleil, and the founding Whitney Live artist-in-residence at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Recent commissions have included works for SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum. He has frequently collaborated with sibling/composer Erin Gee, providing the libretto for her opera, SLEEP (2009), which premiered at the Zürich Opera House, and Mouthpiece XIII, Mathilde of Loci, Part I (2009) presented by the American Composer’s Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. 

Observer Effects invites thinkers to present their highly integrative work in dialogue with the fields of art and science. This series of talks takes its title from a popularized principle in physics that holds that the act of observation transforms the observed. Outside the natural sciences, the idea that the observer and the observed are linked in a web of reciprocal modification has been deeply influential in philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, and politics.

Shadow Play is a series of films that tread nimbly between reality and illusion, acknowledging the artificial nature of cinema. Referencing the tradition of shadow puppetry, the origins of cinema in phantasmagoria, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” each film draws on the metaphors of light as reality and shadow as artifice.

In Plato’s The Republic, the allegory of the cave illustrates the difference between truth and illusion. Many writers have noted that “Allegory of the Cave” (written c. 360 BCE), bears great resemblance to the contemporary movie theater.

Orson Welles narrating the Allegory of the Cave

Pianist Marilyn Nonken and cellist Steven Marotto were in residence in EMPAC's Concert Hall to record composer Morton Feldman's Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981).

Two events, Okeanos and Sanctuary, bring sound and cinema into the EMPAC Concert Hall creating a unique experience of projected sounds and images. Using EMPAC’s spatial audio systems, Okeanos is a concert that takes the audience into a world of underwater sounds recorded around the globe that move above and around the listener; Sanctuary is a live cinema performance using hundreds of loudspeakers to sonically expand the story of an elephant and his mahout on a mystical journey.

Chris Watson (UK) is regarded as one of the world’s leading recorders and performers of wildlife sounds. The films, installations, and projects of the Catalan filmmaker Carlos Casas take form at the crossroads of documentary, fiction, visual, and sound arts.

Tony Myatt (University of Surrey) is a specialist in spatial sound recording and reproduction. He developed an underwater microphone system and subsonic speaker used to spatially reproduce elephant communication and low-frequency underwater sounds. The trio of artists has collaborated on performances, live cinema, and installations.

This annual event, featuring student performances as part of an electronic dance music mini-festival for the entire incoming class, is the culmination of a two-day workshop. Incoming freshmen participating in the workshop have the opportunity to work with fellow students and EMPAC staff to learn firsthand about the technology and work that goes on behind the scenes at EMPAC. The hands-on workshop paired students with EMPAC mentors, who guided them through the creative process with lighting, audio, video, and stage technologies.