Choreographer Christopher K. Morgan is in residence with artistic collaborator Brenda Mallory to design and construct a set for the choreographer’s new work, Native Intelligence / Innate Intelligence. There will be a work-in-progress event at EMPAC before the work premieres at Dance Place in Washington, DC, in spring 2020.

Sondra Perry makes videos, performances, and installations that foreground digital tools as a way to critically reflect on new technologies of representation and remobilize their potential.

Perry’s engagement with consumer image-making technologies produces artworks that reveal the calibration, protocols, and algorithms inherent in these devices. She repurposes exercise machines, video games, chroma studios, and computer graphics in multidisciplinary artworks that together form a corrective against the unreflective naturalization of technology. Her works examine how images are produced in order to reveal the way photographic representations are captured and recirculated.

Lesley Flanigan came to EMPAC to record her work Residue for voice and speaker sculptures. The recording residency focused on longer forms, as originally conceived for her performance of this work at the Guggenheim.

Spring 2020

Choreographer and new-media artist Su Wen-Chi has returned with three collaborators to explore live interaction between a performer, EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis Array, and light. The artist will explore the concept of gravity and the residency will culminate in a work-in-progress event.

Fall 2019

Choreographer and new media artist Su Wen-Chi is in residence, attending the Spatial Audio Summer Seminar and meeting with Curator Ashley Ferro-Murray and production team members to discuss a potential production residency in January 2020.

>>returner<< is a performance work spanning theater and dance that illustrates different relationships between nature, people, and technology. Conceived by the Norwegian performance company Findlay//Sandsmark, led by Iver Findlay and Marit Sandsmark, the performance features motion-capture and animation technology, which interacts live with video and sound content. In addition to these digital media, the performers inhabit a world of natural stage elements including wooden sticks, a narrow wooden hallway, and a large cube that transforms over the course of the performance. What results is a performance environment in which audience expectations are both met and defied as the two performers play with perception and sensation. 

Findlay and Sandsmark are in residence at EMPAC with their company to further develop the project’s body-sensor and animation content. In its use of this technology, >>returner<< demonstrates a wariness of the inflexible binaries that one-to-one body-technology interactions engender: including presence/absence, natural/manufactured, and real/virtual. The performance weaves between and around these binaries to question them without dismantling them entirely—a nod to their unavoidable if not regrettable ubiquity in our daily lives. Attempting to avoid the trap of technophillic engagement, >>returner<< creates an at-times chilling piece of performance.

Choreographer Yanira Castro is in residence at EMPAC with sound collaborator Stephan Moore to explore possible uses of the Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) Array in participatory dance work.

Volunteer Day—Friday, December 6th at 2:30PM

EMPAC welcomes volunteers to assist the artists in the exploration of Wave Field Synthesis. Volunteers will be welcomed into the WFS Array to hear whispers and movement instructions that they can follow. As the bodies move through the space the sounds might follow them, or begin to sound different as others leave and enter the space.

At the end of participants’ time exploring the sounds, we will have a conversation with the artists about what people heard, perceived, and felt throughout their experience to consider the efficacy of using Wave Field Synthesis in live performance with audience members sharing a stage with performers.

How to Participate

If you are interested in participating, please meet in the EMPAC lobby at 2:30pm on Friday, December 6th. 

Filmed in residence in 2019, contemporary dance duo Taldans worked in Studio 1—Goodman on sound, rhythm and motion in their new production examining the dynamics of the music technique and theory Serialism.

The duo, who prepared their choreography by using mathematical scores, sets and loops, directed their questions to their source of inspiration; Serialism: where can series created by Serialism’s use of features such as tone, rhythm, timbre lead images of the body and movement? How would Serialism’s approach, having previously been reflected in music, literature, architecture and art, affect a choreographic structure? How is the system of structures built and how can creativity enter this process? How to move from one discipline to another using series and sets? Can these series be used when transitioning from dance to video, from music to dance?

In this new project, Taldans explored the mathematics of nature and emotions through series and sets and aims to reflect this exploration on the stage.

Eve Sussman, an award-winning film director and visual artist and Simon Lee, a film director and installation artist, along with their full creative team, engaged in research and development for this EMPAC commission. During a three-week film production residency, the team installed a large structural set, prepared all the props, costumes, lighting setup, as well as camera testing, leading up to a week-long filming period that transformed EMPAC’s Theater stage into a full-scale soundstage.

Eve Sussman creates work that incorporates film, video, installation, sculpture, and photography. In 2003 she began working in collaboration with The Rufus Corporation—an international ad hoc ensemble of performers, artists, and musicians—producing motion picture and video art pieces including 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2004) and The Rape of the Sabine Women (2007). With humble materials and straightforward means—found snapshots, plastic toys, pinhole cameras, and projectors—Simon Lee creates evocative, dream-like videos, projections, and photographs.

No food No money No jewels is a cinematic event in three episodes loosely inspired by the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker and the A.A. Milne book The House at Pooh Corner that conflates the “Zone” and the “100 Acre Wood” and the themes of escaping daily life to get ‘lost in the woods’ or ‘go to the zone’ that pervades both stories.

No food No money No jewels creates parallel characters that are sometimes human, sometimes anthropomorphic. The plot suggested by both the film and the book details a journey and an adventure. Episode 1 – At the FifthStroke introduces the protagonists as some of them attempt to escape their daily lives. Episode 2 – The Zone/The Hundred Acre Wood takes the characters in and out and around in circles on a journey that finally lands them in Episode 3 – Barroom Radio or “the room” (the goal of the protagonists in Stalker) that turns out to be the radio station, first heard as an audio broadcast during Episode 1 – At the FifthStroke.

Like the film and the book the characters strikeout on adventure only to end up where they started, back in the bar in time for “tea”. Each episode will have its own distinct set built for the EMPAC theatre space – the creation of Episode 1 is detailed below as the first part of our proposed three stage residency, the sets for Episodes 2 & 3 are to be developed.

Laurie Anderson with artistic and technical collaborators Jason Stern, Amy Koshbin, Jim Cass, and Bob Currie, were in residence recreating the virtual reality work Chalkroom into a human-scale video installation for the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC.