In 2004, Marlene Millar and Philip Szporer made a documentary, Moments in Motion, that followed the creative lives of seven Canadian choreographers from diverse cultures and backgrounds: Natasha Bakht from Ottawa, Byron Chief-Moon from Lethbridge, Day Helesic from Vancouver, Hinda Essadiqi and Audrey Lehouillier, both from Montréal, Malgorzata Nowacka from Toronto, Sarah Stoker from St. John’s. The film used cinéma-vérité depictions of their communities, studios, and homes to capture the essence of their day-to-day worlds, as well as dance sequences to reveal their creative process. Working in residence, Millar and Szporer considered a new phase of this project that would use both video and the web in a multi-platform documentary series.

Millar and Szporer founded Mouvement Perpétuel, a Montréal-based media production company specializing in arts programming, in 2001.

Using a modified one-armed bandit slot machine, MindBox is a viewer-driven dance video: insert a coin, work the machine’s lever and buttons, and directly remix the moves of the beatboxing man on three screens. Media artist Christian Graupner and choreographer Roberto Zappalà teamed up to make a vocabulary of sounds and movements that take beatboxing—a vocal percussion style that comes out of hip-hop—into the realm of interactive media. The soundtrack takes advantage of both the randomized real-time processes of slot machines and Zappalà’s rhythmic, beat-based performance. As lights flash, the viewer plays this media sculpture like an instrument, creating an idiosyncratic movement portrait.

Graupner is a Berlin-based artist, film composer, and the creator and developer of real-time media playback systems. Zappalà founded the Compagnia Zappalà Danza to widen and deepen his own research in choreography while extending the possibilities for the training of young contemporary dancers. The technology was developed by Nils Peters (Humatic) and Norbert Schnell (IRCAM).

In this collection of projects by New York-based artist Graham Parker, new film and audio work, made by the artist while in residence at EMPAC in spring 2010, is shown alongside a series of alterations to the building’s environment that range from the theatrical to the virtually invisible. Parker has long been interested in spectrality—the concealing of one set of operations behind the appearance of another. His 2009 book Fair Use (Notes from Spam), explored spam emails as the latest manifestation of a longstanding mode of deception that has accompanied nearly all new developments in human transport and communication networks (the book touched on such phenomena as Nigerian spam, 19th century railroad cons and medieval beggar gangs). The Confidence Man features work that has grown out of that research—including hacked ATM machines, rogue WIFI networks, monologues drawn from spam emails and a tribute to the 1973 film The Sting. 

Graham Parker is a New York-based multimedia artist and writer. His work considers contemporary digital phenomena against the historic contexts and antecedents from which they emerged—often finding unexpected, even uncanny connections between these different moments and modes. His work has been commissioned by the Tate Gallery, Henry Moore Institute, Center for Understanding the Built Environment, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Arts Council England, among others, and is held in public and private collections around the world. His 2009 book Fair Use (Notes from Spam) was described in Artforum as “meticulous historical research... a superb analysis.”

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 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.

Cinematic Chimera presents works that strive for a radical synthesis of artistic genres, reviving the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total artwork. United by their integration of theater, dance, music, architecture, literature, and visual art, these films also realize the Gesamtkustwerk’s technological imperative by making use of advanced cinematic techniques.

Produced in part during Laurie Anderson's multiple residencies at EMPAC last year, Delusion is a meditation on life and language by way of music, video, and storytelling. Conceived as a series of short mystery plays, Delusion jump-cuts between the everyday and the mythic. Employing violin, electronic puppetry, music, visuals, altered voices, and imaginary guests, Anderson weaves a complex story about longing, memory, and identity. At its heart is the pleasure of language and a fear that the world is made entirely of words. Delusion tells its story in the colorful and poetic language that has become Anderson's trademark.

Live Shorts is a series of performances for the stage commissioned for Filament. Invited artists were asked to create a performance for a specific period of time under 20 minutes that made use of the following constraints: a 20’ x 30’ stage, with the possibility of using only one screen, one projector, and a sound system. Standing in contrast to EMPAC’s typical embrace of flexibility and open-ended possibility, these create a platform for working within a specific structure. The result is a varied and vigorous set of short works created by a range of artists, from performers in the worlds of contemporary theater and dance, to experimental and electronic musicians, to visual artists whose work is typically exhibited in museums and galleries, all sharing the same stage and set of technical parameters. The interstitial space between performances is activated by dynamic lighting design by Wingspace Theatrical Design.

ST2A

Act Curtain — Like the grand drapes of the great old theater houses, this installation transfers the audience's attention from the performance area to the auditorium during the interstitial moments between performances. Using the medium of light, it animates the whole of the theater architecture through both space and time. ACT CURTAIN was conceived and installed by Scott Bolman, Zane Pihlstrom and Lee Savage of Wingspace Theatrical Design. Wingspace is a Brooklyn-based collective of artists, designers, writers, and thinkers committed to the practice of collaboration in theatrical design. Wingspace has created lighting environments for numerous projects at the Old American Can Factory, including the 2009 Beaux-Arts Ball for the Architecture League of New York. Wingspace members have collaborated with artists such as Robert Wilson, Isaac Mizrahi, the Kronos Quartet, Shen Wei Dance Arts and the Grammy-nominated Lila Downs. Their work has been appeared at the Roundabout, the Public Theater, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Alliance Theater, Baltimore Centerstage, the Old Globe, the Shakespeare Theater and the Guggenheim Museum as well as internationally at venues in Canada, Ireland, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands and South Korea. In addition to creating dynamic work of their own, Wingspace co-produces a salon series with XO Projects. Each salon brings featured artists together with the broader performance community for open-ended discussions of vital issues in contemporary theatrical design.

ST2B

Sheepspace (SUE-C & Laetitia Sonami) — Sheepspace is a live film inspired by the writings of Haruki Murakami. Adapted from the Sheep Man character in Dance, Dance, Dance and The Wild Sheep Chase, the film is brought to life through the manipulation and projection of photographs, drawings, scale models and various three dimensional objects, along with the processing and amplification of electronic music, nostalgic songs, and field recordings. The artists draw from their palette of a suitcase-sized animation booth, miniature televisions, a train-propelled camera, motors, sensors, flash bulbs, and talking lamps to blur the boundaries of the real world and the cinema world. It is up to the audience to determine where dreams end and reality begins.

Intervention #2 (Created by Wally Cardona + a local expert) — Each Intervention is the meeting of Wally Cardona and a local specialized expert. Through their intimate encounter, they generate a new version of Cardona’s “empty solo,” designed to make itself completely available to an outside eye or opinion. The re-conceived solo is performed as a new entity. Intervention is a game leading to other games of meaning, intent, and form that can create multiple interpretations of “a dance.” It is also the first stage of development for Tool Is Loot, a collaboration between Cardona and Paris-based choreographer Jennifer Lacey.

You Don’t Know What You're Talking About (MTAA) — Internet artists M.River and T.Whid (MTAA), like you, have often wished while listening to a lecture, speech, or newscast to stand up and tell the speaker, "You don't know what you're talking about." MTAA, sitting behind a desk with two laptops and two microphones, and with a projection screen behind them that displays a timer and the text “#mtaa,” will invite the audience to start twittering. For the duration of the performance, they will read any and all texts sent to Twitter with the hash tag "#mtaa."

ST2C

A Narrow Vehicle (Trouble) — Performers acting like ushers and doubling as shaman enact a cleansing ritual on the audience, which becomes a screen for projections of familiar spiritual imagery and the five elemental lights. Culminating in a performance of trance R&B saxophone meandering, a narrow vehicle brings up a promise — made by universities, militant groups, spiritual organizations, and pop culture. The promise is of freedom and self-actualization via transmutation of defiled elements, and we locate this process in (or on) each audience member. Imparting the message evokes a claustrophobic, aggressive style, but the promise is kept.

Another Circle (Jen DeNike) — Using video, performance, and sound as live ritual magic, a series of circles transforms the space into a vessel for scrying, an act of obtaining spiritual visions by peering into a reflective surface. In DeNike's video a prima ballerina in classical tutu and toe shoes performs what appears to be an infinite pirouette. The ballerina's circular movement becomes the pendulum for scrying. A live ballerina (Lucy Van Cleef) will perform abstract choreographed movements in reaction to and mirroring the video in collaboration with Rose Kallal who will perform an improvised sound accompaniment using a combination of vintage analog synth, guitar, and tape delay; her dark ambient sonic drone providing a complementary yet contrasting circular soundtrack.

AMAZINGLAND IN TROY EMagicPAC (Steve Cuiffo, Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle) — Amazingland is the second in a trilogy of theater pieces that embrace and subvert American popular entertainment. The piece is about illusion, delusion, and the role of deception in American culture. Cuiffo, Lyford, and Sobelle will enter magic contests as their illusionist personas, Louie Magic, Dennis Diamond, and Daryl Hannah, and, succeed or fail, create faux-documentary video to be integrated into performance. Their goal is to expose the pathos behind the gloss of popular Vegas-style illusion shows — and also to blow your mind out of the back of your skull with some incredible magic.

Based on the true tale of Kentucky hardware clerk Leonard Wood, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then uses live action and hand-drawn stop-motion animation to tell an inspiring, poignant, and darkly humorous love story of a man who built a bizarre and sprawling home for his wife by hand in the hope that it would cure her of terminal cancer. Accompanied by a stellar band of musicians that include Brendan Canty (Fugazi), Howe Gelb (Giant Sand), Catherine McRae, and others, Green uses intense narration ranging from quiet, vulnerable storytelling to cathartic fumes bordering on the evangelistic. 

Brent Green is a storyteller, singer, songwriter, and self-taught filmmaker. Green often performs his films with live musicians, improvised soundtracks, and live narration in venues ranging from rooftops to art institutions such as the Getty Center, the Walker Art Center, the Hammer Museum, the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, and MoMA. He lives and works in the Appalachian hills of Pennsylvania. 

DANCE MOViES was a screening series showcasing short films and experimental videos made by contemporary choreographers and filmmakers. 

World premieres of five new commissioned dance films chosen by an international panel; the screenings were followed by a panel discussion including the filmmakers and curator.

Hoop (Canada, 4.5 minutes) Directed by Marites Carino and performed by Rebecca Halls; floating in a black void, swinging through shafts of light, a woman keeps an incandescent and familiar circular childhood toy in perpetual motion.

Anatomy of Melancholy (US, 6.5 minutes) Directed by Nuria Fragoso; visual metaphors about space portray the melancholy that underlies contemporary society. Recursive imagery and gesture accumulate to reveal the catharsis of individuals who are faced with profound isolation in today’s communicative processes.

Quince Missing (US, 16.5 minutes) Directed and choreographed by Rajendra Serber. In this exploration of urban isolation, three strangers tracing their solitary paths through empty streets at night become locked in anonymous antagonism when trying to pass each other.

The Closer One Gets, the Less One Sees (Brazil, 10.5 minutes) Videomaker Valeria Valenzuela and choreographer Lilyen Vass collaborated on this intervention in the everyday lives of three street jugglers/beggars in Rio, which transforms the objective action of their juggling into the abstract vocabulary of contemporary dance.

MO-SO (US, 12 minute looping video installation) Directed by Kasumi; performed by Chan U Hong. Multiple video screens installed side-by-side layer film samples and a dancer’s gestures to create counterpoints of movement and image.