Cold Spring is a battering ram for stage created by the Los Angeles-based composer Sean Griffin. A diversity of musicians, actors and dancers from all over the United States and Canada turn the EMPAC theater into a high-energy collision of charged musical and theatrical particles and their underlying ideologies. Among these is the Eugenics Archive in Cold Spring Harbor NY. This archive represents the breeding-ground research for the eugenics-based social policies that resulted in mass sterilization of undesirables, forced lobotomies and, ultimately, with support from the Carnegie Foundation, Nazi Germany’s master race policies. In Cold Spring materials from this archive intersect unexpectedly with the early 20th century spiritualism-meets-pop-supernaturalism of the 1970s. Through an operatic rendition of the 1961 Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction hypnosis tapes we follow the embattled, mixed-race couple as they navigate social complications through the hyper-vigilant sanctimony of their pre-civil rights world. Cold Spring is propelled by a collection of iconic musical and theatrical snap-shots, several performed by actors familiar to Capitol Region theater-goers. Ideas best forgotten and good intentions gone awry unfold onto one another, turning the theater into a crippled ceremonious procession.

Sean Griffin lives and works in Los Angeles.

Encompassing many languages, styles, media and forms, Griffin’s unusual compositional works rely on interdisciplinary incongruities positioned at the intersection of sound, image, performance, and the archive.

Manifesting as large and small-scale operatic works, collaborative sound and video installations, complex numeric choreographies, or historically weighted political works that defy categorization, Griffin’s works obsessively instrumentalize embedded cultures of injustice, racism, and wars of the recent past disturbingly mixed with dated-pop fantasies about self worth and class. Animated by rhythmic regimentation and improvisation, his compositions can be viewed as platforms for the performer's unique talents with whom he collaborates extensively.

Lars von Trier's only work in musical theater, Dancer in the Dark is an assault against escapism in film. Dancer in the Dark is an agonizing and unrelenting narrative of cruelty, hardship, and human nature. The film stars Björk as a single immigrant mother working in a factory in rural America who begins to lose her eyesight due to degenerative disease. The film's narrative is punctuated with sequences of song and dance, which were filmed simultaneously using one hundred separate cameras.

Lars von Trier was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in April 1956. Among the most influential filmmakers of the past decade, Danish director Lars von Trier became the figurehead of the Dogme 95 collective, calling for a return to plausible stories in filmmaking and a move away from artifice. His Dogme 95 contained eleven commandments (including prohibitions against genre films, artificial lighting, and the widescreen format) and invited artists of good faith to accept a “vow of chastity.” While ostensibly an attack on overblown commercial productions, the manifesto was effectively deployed in the promotion of a highly original series of low-budget films by von Trier and fellow directors associated with the Dogme movement.

He graduated from the Danish Film School in 1983 with his short film "Images of a relief" ("Befrielsesbilleder") which won the Best Film award at the Munich Film Festival the following year. His Breaking the Waves (1996), for which he won the Jury Prize at Cannes, was the director's first film in the Golden Hearted Trilogy that centered on the female sex; subsequent films in this trilogy include The Idiots (1998) and Dancer in the Dark (2000), which won the 2000 Palm D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Together with producer Peter Ålbæk Jensen, Lars von Trier owns Zentropa Enterprises, which produces Lars von Triers fims, as well as many others.

A group exhibition confronting anxiety in contemporary art, Uncertain Spectator asks individuals to cross a threshold — to place themselves in situations riddled with tension, confront deeply charged emotional content, and grapple with feelings of apprehension. The works presented deal with a general mood of uneasiness arising from recent political and economic events that frames a future rife with imminent threats. Uncertain Spectator not only responds to these unsettling situations, but also creates them by challenging individuals to step outside of a place of comfort both physically and emotionally.

The exhibition incorporates media works in the broader context of contemporary art landscape through the work of 10 artists spanning the genres of video, installation, sculpture, and interactive media. Occupying EMPAC's lobby, Marie Sester's commissioned installation Fear consists of a seating area with a table that pulses with a warm inviting light, until the viewer attempts to approach it. Anthony Discenza creates street signs that do not communicate a set of rules for public space, but instead convey doomsday predictions and poetic reflections on doubt. Jesper Just's black and white film, A Vicious Undertow, presents an enigmatic and open-ended narrative, which never allows the viewer to achieve closure.

Uncertain Spectator is contextualized by an exhibition catalog that considers the role anxiety has played in philosophical discussions of existentialism, psychoanalysis, and ethics. An accompanying blog, Uncertain Spectator(s), invited select philosophers, cultural theorists, and artists to focus on the prevalence of anxiety in current events, as well as its expression in philosophy and contemporary art.

A contrast of light and dark, harmony and dissonance, In Vain startles and captivates the senses. Performed by a 24-member chamber orchestra, much of this intense 75-minute composition takes place in total darkness. In this state, the musicians must perform from memory, communicating with each other and the audience only through sound. The cycles between light and darkness are accompanied by dramatic microtonal deviations in the musical plane, which underscore a desire for perfect harmony, while understanding the futility of achieving a perfect harmonic co-existence, both musically and in the world.

Returning to EMPAC for a second residency, Hans Tutschku workshopped and recorded material for Irrgärten, a piece for two pianos and live electronics. The electronics were realized with two iPhones or two iPods running custom software, one for each pianist. The built-in microphone was used to detect piano notes and to synchronize the electronic sounds to the live part. The composer described the work as being about memory and comparable to a walk through different mazes (irrgärten). As the composition progresses, material is repeated, though the electronics alter the piano parts. As when walking through a maze and trying to get a picture of the path—certain places look similar but in reality are different—one gets trapped. Irrgärten premiered in 2011 at the Klub Katarakt Festival in Hamburg, Germany. Hans Tutschku is a German composer who has also taught at Harvard since 2004.

A contrast of light and dark, harmony and dissonance, composer Georg Friedrich Haas’ in vain startles and captivates the senses. Haas is an internationally known composer of spectral music whose style focuses on micropolyphony, microintervals, and exploitation of the overtone series. Performed by a 24-member chamber orchestra, much of this intense 75-minute composition takes place in total darkness. In this state, the musicians must perform from memory, communicating with each other and the audience only through sound. Accompanied by dramatic microtonal deviations, the cycles between light and darkness express both the desire for perfect harmony and the futility of achieving such a harmonic co-existence, musically or in the world. During their residency, the Argento Chamber Ensemble recorded their performance of in vain over several days, in both audio and video.

Founded in 2000, Argento consists of nine core members and regularly expands to up to 30 musicians. Argento has toured widely in the US and abroad, and has worked closely with leading contemporary composers including Pierre Boulez, Beat Furrer, Georg Friedrich Haas, Bernhard Lang, Fred Lerdahl, Fabien Lévy, Tristan Murail, and others.

Aided by a young doppelganger straight out of silent film and an elderly entomologist, composer/performer Christina Campanella spins a sonic web that traces a young woman’s discovery of her companion’s deployment to a secret war and the steps she takes to make sense of his absence.

Staged as a concert that unfolds within a densely layered video installation, Red Fly/Blue Bottle conjures an associative visual landscape in which objects open up in unexpected ways, revealing worlds within worlds. Tightly crafted songs emerge from an evocative terrain of found sounds, ticking clocks, and analog tone generators. Miniature noir films are projected onto floating surfaces; live and pre-made video animates still objects.

Red Fly/Blue Bottle explores the mediating effects of memory and how we use the power of our imagination to surmount that which we have lost.

An evening of thoughtful exchange on how music, speech, language, birds, and whale songs interrelate, including three short lectures followed by a lively dialogue between participating speakers and audience. This discussion brings together the diverse fields of music, acoustics, evolutionary neurobiology, and naturalist philosophy. For an hour leading up to the talk, David Rothenberg will perform in Evelyn's Café.

The two musical compositions on this program were commissioned by EMPAC and created for and in the specific space of Studio 1 (Goodman Studio/Theater). The works each share a 44-speaker array placed in three rings from ear level to 30 feet in the air, and both immerse the listener in waves of sound, coming from all directions. Hans Tutschku's agitated slowness is a 24-channel electroacoustic composition by Hans Tutschku, is an intense perceptual journey. In this performance, the sound ebbs and flows, consuming and releasing the listener’s perceptual and sonic experience. Volmar Klien's entrancing composition, Kristallgatsch / Strahlung, uses a mathematical model of a virtual object to synthesize a vast terrain of sound materials. Both compositions were created during an EMPAC artist residency in 2009.

A single camera drifts through the 33 rooms of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, tracing Russia’s history from the 18th century to the present day. Filmed in one 90-minute continuous shot, Russian Ark subtly interweaves dance, opera, theater, and music in this poetic meditation on the flow of history.

Alexander Sokurov was born in 1951 in the village of Podorvikha, Irkutsk Region, USSR. One of most important contemporary Russian filmmakers, Sokurov worked extensively in television in his early career and later graduated from the prestigious film school, VGIK, in 1979 where he befriended Tarkovsky who became his mentor. His films are often plotless with emphasis on aesthetics and impressionism, and are notable for their philosophical approach to history and nature. Since 1980, he has lived and worked in St. Petersburg, directing feature films and documentaries. In 1995 he was declared one of the best international directors by the European Academy of Cinema.