EMPAC at RPI Annouces Fall Season of Concerts & More

Award-winning jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and his band wrap up EMPAC’s inaugural summer season at 8pm on Wednesday (August 16) – go here to enter to win FREE tickets – but the adventurous Troy performance venue has already announced the schedule of events for its fall season.

The schedule kicks off on Thursday, August 31 with a two-night stand of Andrew Schneider’s “After,” the world premiere of a new theater work that’s something of a sequel to his absolutely mindboggling “YOUARENOWHERE,” which he presented at EMPAC last week.

Here’s the full schedule of EMPAC at RPI performances for the 2017 fall season:

THEATER: AFTER
Thursday, August 31, 7:30pm
Friday, September 1, 7:30pm
$18; $13 students & seniors
Performance maker and Obie Award-winner Andrew Schneider is back at EMPAC for the world premiere of After, an emotional story about time, bodies, death, and physics.

VIDEO: “INCENSE, SWEATERS, AND ICE”
Wednesday, September 6, 7pm
$6
On the final night of her EMPAC installation, “An Evening with Queen White,” Los Angeles-based artist Martine Syms will screen her new feature-length video which examines the tension between surveillance and self-promotion that pervades our many avenues of self-documentation and broadcast.

MUSIC: HIEROGLYPHIC BEING
Friday, September 8, 7:30pm
$18; $13 students & seniors
Chicago-based producer Jamal Boss has spent decades prolifically releasing music into the outer orbits of house culture, sometimes donning such aliases as Sun God, IAMTHATIAM and Africans with Mainframes.

MUSIC: YARN/WIRE
Friday, September 22, 7:30pm
$18; $13 students & seniors
New York-based quartet of Laura Barger, Ning Yu, Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg performs an evening of work by contemporary German composer Enno Poppe, including the world premiere of the EMPAC-commissioned piece “Feld.” The program will also feature “Tonband,” Poppe’s co-composition with Wolfgang Heiniger.

FILM: “TELEPATHIC IMPROVISATION”
Thursday, September 28, 7pm
$6
Boudry/Lorenz present their film – produced at EMPAC in Spring, 2017 – which takes as its starting point the late Rensselaer Professor Pauline Oliveros’ 1974 score of the same name.

FILM/VIDEO: OTHER USES 2
Thursday, October 5, 7pm
$6
Films by Marwa Arsanios, Morgan Fisher, Mohammad Fauzi, Deimantas Narkevicius and Hito Steyerl that complicate the relationship between still and moving images.

DANCE: “ECHO/ARCHIVE”
Friday, October 6, 7pm
FREE
Choreographer/performer Elena Demyanenko and filmmaker Erika Mijlin offer a work-in-progress performance of their new collaboration, an EMPAC-commission which will have its world premiere at EMPAC in March.

FILM/VIDEO: OTHER USES 3
Thursday, October 19, 7pm
$6
Films by Doa Aly, Yto Barrada, Joan Jonas, Shelly Silver, Ana Vaz and Joyce Wieland turn the lens on unseen processes, people and objects. The motion we see in the works — whether produced through montage, camera movement, or distortion of the recorded image — directly connects the action on screen to the hand of the artist.

MUSIC: ACTRESS with TOXE
Friday, October 20, 9pm
$18; $13 students & seniors
Bringing together Swedish upstart Toxe with British veteran Actress, this promises to be an evening of hard-edged beats tinged with mystery and mayhem.

DANCE/VIDEO: MARY ARMENTROUT DANCE THEATER
Friday, October 27, 5pm
FREE
This work-in-progress showing of “Listening Creates an Opening” includes a performance of choreography as well as footage from a year-long video time lapse taken onsite at EMPAC. The work will have its world premiere at EMPAC in the fall of 2018.

DANCE: “MY PARADOXICAL KNIVES”
Thursday, November 9, 7:30pm
FREE
Iranian artist Ali Moini will perform the U.S. premiere of his 2009 solo dance which includes poetry by the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi and movements reminiscent of the Sufi whirling dervish. Diverging from this tradition, Moini performs in a costume made of straps that connect metal knives to his body like appendages or prostheses.

THEATER: “THEY ARE WAITING FOR YOU”
Thursday, November 16, 7pm
FREE
A work-in-progress look at the development of Laure Prouvost’s new performance, her first major commission for the stage.

MUSIC: LAURA LUNA
Friday, November 17, 7:30pm
$18; $13 students & seniors
A photographer-turned-video/film artist-turned-composer, the Mexican multimedia artist transforms the EMPAC Concert Hall with a site-specific concert performance.

FILM: OTHER USES IV
Thursday, November 30, 7pm
$6
Films by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz – including “Otros usos” – present moving-image works that pay attention to the geometry, composition and cinematic potential of everyday, neglected landscapes.

FILM: “INHERITANCE”
Friday, December 1, 7pm
FREE
The artist-filmmaker Epharaim Asili’s first foray into working with an ensemble cast, this film work-in-progress offers a behind-the-scenes peek at the film in which the protagonist inherits a house in West Philadelphia that becomes home to an urban collective for activists of color. The tension builds as day-to-day domestic issues compete with the collective’s political agenda.

MUSIC: MOHAMMAD REZA MORTAZAVI
Friday, December 8, 7:30pm
$18; $13 students & seniors
Acclaimed from Tehran to Berlin to Shanghai, the Iranian hand drum master has dominated elite international competitions since the age of nine. He is most well-known for re-envisioning the traditional ways of playing the Tombak — an ancient Iranian goblet-shaped drum. He brings his lightning-fast technique to EMPAC for a solo concert.