2023 spring program

EMPAC welcomes audiences back for their spring season. The curatorial program of the research and production center for time-based arts and technology presents an ambitious array of new commissions and productions by artists who foreground collaboration and exceed disciplinary frameworks.

Spring 2023 at EMPAC hosts some of the center’s largest and most intimate projects to date. Premieres by Daina Ashbee, Ana Navas and Mirtru Escalona-Mijares, Sarah Hennies and Terry Berlier with The Living Earth Show, Alarm Will Sound with Kevork Mourad, Bora Yoon and Joshue Ott, Sage Ni’Ja Whitson, and DeForrest Brown, Jr. accompany screenings, discussions, and previews with Ayo Akingbade, Armando Guadalupe Cortés and M. Elijah Sueuga, and Theater Junction.

The season begins on January 11 with the US premiere of J’ai pleuré avec les chiens (Time, Creation, Destruction) by choreographer Daina Ashbee. Saturated with poetics of explosion and trance, Ashbee’s first performance work for an ensemble cast considers pain and tenderness as sensory experiences without narrative boundaries. 

Cuando las nubes eran las olas (When the clouds were the waves) transforms EMPAC’s Concert Hall with an electro-acoustic performance and installation by artist Ana Navas and composer Mirtru Escalona-Mijares inspired by the Aula Magna of the Central University of Venezuela, which houses Alexander Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling (1953). Viewed from above and performed on a stage-scale floor-painting, percussionists Taylor Long, Robert Cosgrove, and Clara Warnaar play an array of instrument-sculptures by Navas, which fuse afterimages of 20th century modernism with traditional boat-building tools and techniques.

A Kind of Ache is a concert-installation from artist Terry Berlier, composer Sarah Hennies, and electroacoustic duo The Living Earth Show that reimagines a world designed from and for a queer identity. The drums-and-guitar duo plays on Berlier’s sculptures alongside Hennies, using objects, music, and their imaginations to wonder “What would it feel like to be the majority?”

Ayo Akingbade presents an artist talk and screening in partnership with iEAR Presents. The selection of films produced in the UK, Nigeria, and the US eloquently weave personal memory with communal history, longing with familiarity, and the quotidian with the magical in an intimate program grounded in the specific rhythms of place.

Mary Kouyoumdjian and Nigel Maister’s Paper Pianos, performed by Alarm Will Sound, bridges music and documentary-theater with animation by artist Kevork Mourad. Paper Pianos vividly explores the emotional landscape of the refugee experience, highlighting the ambivalence and hope of finding safety and transnational resettlement.

A conversation between artist Armando Guadalupe Cortés and curator and artist M. Elijah Sueuga explores Cortés’ multidisciplinary practice, and their shared relationship to the Mexican Sonoran region, as a lens through which to discuss how concepts of dryness might be communicated through performance, sound, and architecture.  

SPKR SPRKL is a new performance by electroacoustic composer, vocalist, and sound artist Bora Yoon, in collaboration with Joshue Ott. Commissioned for the EMPAC Theater and utilizing the center’s Wave Field Synthesis Array, the performance is based on a forthcoming album by Yoon.

Transtraterrestrial, a prequal and premiere of The Unarrarrival Experiments – Unconcealment Ceremonies, is a new performance work by artist Sage Ni’Ja Whitson designed to amplify the dark. An iterative performance installation, sculpture, and technological playground, Transtraterrestrial bathes audiences in a ritualized, cosmic blackness of a custom-built space|ship designed in collaboration with architect Valery Augustin.

Speakers That Speak To You is a new commission by DeForrest Brown, Jr., which uses Ambisonics to open up to the implicit origins of techno traced in his book, Assembling a Black Counter-Culture (Primary Information, 2021). Brown is in residence at EMPAC with curators Katherine Adams, Liv Cuniberti, Mary Fellios, Abel González Fernández, and Sidney Pettice from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. 

The 2023 Spring season concludes in May with a preview performance of Outside / In by Theatre Junction. It is inspired by the panopticon, science fiction and escape games, and uses a large four-room built environment to imagine and create a variety of worlds that share questions and reflections related to freedom and social control. 

Since its first commission in 2006, the EMPAC curatorial program has supported the commissioning, production, and presentation of ambitious performances and artworks that span the visual and performing arts. The program’s polyvocal curatorial approach resonates through each project, generating time-based artworks that are diverse in content, method, technology, and audience experience. 2023 Spring commissions by EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are produced with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA, New York State Council for the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.