Public reopening

EMPAC welcomes audiences back with their fall 2022 season. Closed to the public since March 2020, the research and production center for time-based arts and technology has continued to work with artists throughout the pandemic to commission and produce new projects both in the building and off-site.

The resulting series of artworks spans four years of development and includes world premieres and previews of ambitious time-based visual art and performance by 7NMS: Marjani Forté-Saunders & Everett Saunders, Anna Craycroft, Miya Masaoka, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Clarissa Tossin, and Adam Weinert. Accompanying this expansive season of new productions are award-winning debut feature films by Ephraim Asili and Martine Syms, both co-produced by EMPAC during the pandemic; an intimate performance by Daina Ashbee; and a rigorous series of talks and screenings.

The season kicks off on August 26 with a preview of PROPHET: The Order of Lyricism by 7NMS: Marjani Forté-Saunders & Everett Saunders. Their work is a multi-genre performance that harnesses spatial audio, projection mapping, and sculptural elements to tell the story of a Hip-Hop emcee whose artistic quest for self-realization as a lyricist illuminates the distinctive practices, philosophies, and political ideologies that have shaped them.

The world premiere of Clarissa Tossin’s moving image work Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing undertakes a richly sensory journey across moments, languages, and music. It is presented in EMPAC’s concert hall with an immersive Ambisonic loudspeaker array that dramatizes the capacity of Maya wind instruments to give voice to Indigenous systems of knowledge. 

Anna Craycroft’s Only Breath, Words is conceived as a performance and installation that activates and extends the specific architectural infrastructure of EMPAC’s theater. Scored by composer Sarah Hennies, it conjures theatrical allusions through the exchange of light, sound, and space, and it points back to the fundamental processes by which we seek to communicate through the construct of the theater.

The world premiere of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s debut feature-length film Oriana is suffused with unexplainable encounters as it follows a band of feminist militants in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, unfolding across forests, caves, rivers, and the ruins of industry and colonial infrastructure.

Adam Weinert’s Anthem premieres in EMPAC’s concert hall and imagines choreography that may have accompanied “The Star Spangled Banner” as it seeks to reconcile dewy Americana with our society’s deep fissures, inequalities, and environmental degradation. Bluetooth in-ear monitors and interactive lighting elements enable choreographic choices that play with audience perception.

Daina Ashbee’s solo performance Serpentine will be staged in intimate proximity to its audience, and it centers on choreographic repetition and insistence in order to explore the occupation of space, time, and attention.

Ephraim Asili’s award-winning debut feature The Inheritance makes its homecoming at EMPAC where it was commissioned and filmed, and where the scripted action of the film was combined with cameos by MOVE’s Debbie Africa, Mike Africa Sr., and Mike Africa Jr., and poet-activists Sonia Sanchez and Ursula Rucker. 

Also co-produced by EMPAC, Martine Syms’s debut feature The African Desperate stars Diamond Stingily in an intimate and riotously funny journey across the course of a single night, traversing picturesque landscapes, artists’ studios, academic critiques, and backseat hookups, and tracing the arc from a wild graduation party to a lonely trip back home the next morning. 

Closing out the season on December 7, composer and artist Miya Masaoka presents Mapping an Infinite Universe of Sound, a work that extends Olivia de Prato’s virtuoso violin performance through EMPAC’s immersive Wave Field Synthesis spatial audio speaker array. 

EMPAC’s fall 2022 season also includes screenings, symposia, and talks by Amy Sara Carroll and Ricardo Dominguez, Ashish Ghadiali and Lucia Pietroiusti, Johannes Goebel, Heather Bruegl, The Undo Fellowship, Daniel Weintraub and IONE, and production residencies with Maika Garnica, Will Rawls, and Bora Yoon.