EMPAC’s Spatial Audio Seminar was a gathering of composers and programmers discussing technologies such as Wave Field Synthesis and High-Order Ambisonics. Taking place over five days, this intensive seminar covered the technical, theoretical, and practical issues surrounding spatial audio platforms. A collaboration with IRCAM and Stanford University’s CCRMA, the program gave participants experience with hundreds of channels of audio, including EMPAC’s new 500+ speaker wave field array.

On the seminar’s second night, workshop leaders Markus Noisternig and Rama Gottfried joined with experimental cellist Okkyung Lee to perform a program of music composed for spatial audio systems. In addition to playback pieces by composers Natasha Barrett and Olga Neuwirth, Lee and Gottfried performed the latter’s piece, Fluoresce, and Lee improvised with Noisternig, who spatially manipulated the performance through an Ambisonic dome.

andPlay recorded its debut album playlist, which contained works by Ashkan Behzadi, David Bird, and Clara Iannotta. Described by the multimedia website I Care If You Listen as “enthusiastic champions for new music and collaboration” and performing “with a welcoming and dynamic spirit,” andPlay is committed to expanding the existing violin/viola duo repertoire through performing rarely heard works and commissioning emerging composers. The “genre-busting” New York City-based duo of Maya Bennardo, violin, and Hannah Levinson, viola, has commissioned over 30 works.

playlist was released September 27, 2019, by New Focus Recordings.

DESCENT reimagines the story of Greek mythical figures Venus and Andromeda as an interracial love story with choreography that conjures the aesthetics of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture Toilet of Venus and Andromeda. Performing in wheelchairs, dancers Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson traverse a stage built with hills and curves. The duo climb to the summit of a ramp where they precariously balance on its edge and let gravity take over as they barrel back down, moving together and apart. Through emotional peaks and valleys, DESCENT explores themes of disability, race, and beauty to reveal how mobility is fundamental to participation in civic life. The performance at EMPAC featured a live broadcast. 

A newly commissioned ensemble performance for EMPAC’s 10YEARS celebration, Sudden Rise explores the interplay between the live and the pre-recorded. Moving fluidly between voice, movement, and image, Moved by the Motion resists the structural hierarchies inherent within and between artistic disciplines and reflects the spirit of the continually shifting improvisational ensemble.

Moved by the Motion is an ongoing, iterative performance project initiated by Wu Tsang and boychild in 2013 that features a shifting group of collaborators including Patrick Belaga, Josh Johnson, and Asma Maroof, among others. The ensemble explores different modes of storytelling through an improvisational structure. Each performance is a series of translations between text, movement, film, theater, and music.

The world premiere of Yara Travieso’s immersive theatrical experience designed for the EMPAC Concert Hall. Commissioned for 10YEARS, the new work uses monumental staging, experiential cinema, and sound to ignite the ceiling, side galleries, balcony, and stage of the Concert Hall with a sprawling live performance meant to stretch the parameters of the hall and expectations of its audience. The performance invites the audience to experience the scale of the hall and the women that will encompass it—the expansiveness of the performance giving way to the infiniteness of Travieso's female protagonists. Travieso will expand on the venue’s unique capabilities for music and opera, creating a rich theatrical world for the audience to explore and share in making it “breathe.” 

Yara Travieso is an American director, choreographer, and maker of worlds. She creates films, stage works, immersive installations, and live experiences centered around female protagonists.  Travieso will develop the work over summer 2018 along with composer and sound designer Sam Crawford and set designer Seth Reiser.

Commissioned and produced by EMPAC, If It Bleeds is a moving-image work inspired by recent events in the world of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). Historically, MMA was promoted as something very distinct from both boxing—a sport so corrupt that the best hardly ever fight the best—and from pro wrestling, which is totally scripted and driven by mic skills, costumes, and bad acting. But in seeking to expand the audience, MMA promoters increasingly court the artifice of wrestling to privilege the showman over the sportsman. If It Bleeds follows the fighters, commissioners, reporters and a promoter as they battle through post-fight pressers, promotional tours, and disciplinary hearings. The narrative unfolds in a game of one-upmanship as the characters are seduced by their public image and driven by the fiction that everything happens “for a reason.” If It Bleeds uses the pageantry of sports-entertainment to explore the grotesque and sublime spectacle that is everyday survival.

Canadian artist Isabelle Pauwels works primarily in video and installation. Her blend of performance and documentary realism explores the fraught relationship between narrative conventions and everyday social interaction. If It Bleeds follows Pauwels’s 2014 EMPAC-commissioned multimedia performance ,000,.

Theater maker Yara Travieso was in residence to create an immersive theatrical experience designed for the EMPAC Concert Hall. Inspired by the idea of transforming the hall into a living, breathing female form, Travieso used monumental staging, experiential cinema, and sound to ignite the ceiling, side galleries, balcony, and stage. Expanding on the venue’s unique capabilities for music and opera, Travieso undertook a film shoot while in residence to create material that was later projected inside the hall, creating a rich theatrical world for the audience to explore and share in making it “breathe.” 

Yara Travieso is an American director, choreographer, and maker of worlds. She creates films, stage works, immersive installations, and live experiences centered around female protagonists. Travieso developed the work over summer 2018 along with composer and sound designer Sam Crawford and lighting designer Seth Reiser.

The US premiere of Maria Hassabi’s SlowMeDown, a moving-image installation commissioned for EMPAC’s 10YEARS celebration.

Partially filmed while Hassabi and her dancers were in residence this spring, the work features material from Hassabi’s live installation, STAGING (2017), which was presented internationally in public spaces, museums, and exhibition contexts. Blending collage and post-production effects, SlowMeDown builds a hyper-real frame that augments this footage and participates in the construction of what Hassabi calls a “performative surreality."

Maria Hassabi (b. Cyprus) is a New York based artist and choreographer. Her practice utilizes stillness and deceleration as techniques in choreographies that oscillate between dance and sculpture, subject and object, live body and still image, testing conventional rhythms of viewership in the process.

A work-in-progress screening of Mariam Ghani’s feature film, What We Left Unfinished, which is currently in post-production at EMPAC. Following the screening, Ghani and the film’s composer Qasim Naqvi will discuss the relationship between sound and image in the film.

Based on the history of the Afghan Film Archive (the state film institute based in Kabul, Afghanistan), What We Left Unfinished reconstructs hidden and parallel narratives of both state propaganda and the experience of the Afghan Film Archive’s management and film directors during the period of Afghan Communism. Alongside his group Dawn of Midi, Qasim Naqvi has scored and recorded soundtracks for Mariam Ghani’s moving-image works for over a decade. The two artists began collaborating (with choreographer Erin Ellen Kelly) in 2006 with Performed Places—an ongoing site-responsive video and performance series.

DESCENT reimagines the story of Greek mythical figures Venus and Andromeda as an interracial love story with choreography that conjures the aesthetics of August Rodin’s sculpture Toilet of Venus and Andromeda. Performing in wheelchairs, dancers Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson traverse a stage built with hills and curves. The duo climb to the summit of a ramp where they precariously balance on its edge and let gravity take over as they barrel back down, moving together and apart. Through emotional peaks and valleys, DESCENT explores themes of disability, race, and beauty to reveal how mobility is fundamental to participation in civic life.

Kinetic Light is a collective made up of professional disabled artists Alice Sheppard, Laurel Lawson, and Michael Maag. Sheppard is the artistic director and choreographer for Kinetic Light who performs the role of Andromeda in DESCENT. Lawson, performing the role of Venus, is a collaborator in choreography, costume and makeup design, as well as the software developer for DESCENT. Michael Maag is DESCENT’s lighting and video designer.

Accessibility Information

• 60-minute performance with 20-minute intermission
• Audio description provided (please note in the comments section of your ticket order)
• ASL interpretation provided for pre- and post-show announcements (the performance has no text)
• Entire first row dedicated to wheelchair-accessible seating

NOTE: Please share any specific access requests in the comments form of your ticket, in order to help our Front of House team prepare to welcome you.

EMPAC is an accessible venue. The lobby is accessible via the double doors facing Rensselaer’s campus with an entrance off of College Avenue. All-gender wheelchair-accessible restrooms are available on all public-access levels of the building. The main audience entrance to the theater is wheelchair accessible and located on EMPAC’s 5th floor, which can be accessed from the lobby by elevator. If you have any questions about access, please contact EMPAC Box Office Manager John Cook or call 518-276-2822 (voice only).

SCHEDULE

• 4PM — Box office opens
  Level 7 Lobby
• 6:30PM — Tactile experience and audio description demos
  Level 7 — Lobby
• 7PM — Event venue (Studio 1) opens
  Level 5
• 7:30PM — Event begins
• DESCENT Part One
• Intermission (20 minutes) — Café open
• DESCENT Part Two
• Post-show meet and greet with artists
  Level 5 — Evelyn's Café