The project proposes an immersive and participatory performance by involving virtual ‘props’ that can interact with as well as move from one position to another, by the audience. By doing so, the audience can actively participate in shaping the dancer’s performance. The dance takes shape as the dancer improvizes and choreographs the performance- live, based on her interaction with these virtual props.
I am a Visual Artist and New Media Designer exploring different storytelling media. I love to dive into intense research that leads to innovative ways of creating immersive experiences, engaging stories or the birth of fictional characters. My work includes a conglomerate of New Media, Film & Video, User Experience Design, and Performance art, with a background in Fine arts. My experience, along with my yearning for knowledge across disciplines and love for learning new things has helped me encompass multiple perspectives. I am currently working on a self-initiated Cyber-Ethnographic Research project to understand the relationship between identity and anonymity.
The Extra People is an immersive theater performance where 15 audience members sit and watch another 15 onstage. After half an hour, they find themselves replacing those onstage, only to discover that another 15 have appeared in the seats they’ve left behind. And so it continues, through the hours… The theater building—dormant, empty, and unlit save for your flashlight—seems unable to be deactivated. And within this strange process, wearing headphones and a “hi-viz” vest, you’re cast along with everyone else as some kind of extra. But an extra for what?
Starting with Rotozaza’s Etiquette (2007), Ant Hampton has created nine “autoteatro” works, including his recent Bessie-award-winning collaboration with Tim Etchells for library reading rooms (The Quiet Volume). The “protocol” behind autoteatro—automated processes (often audio) where instructions are given to audience members who find themselves experiencing the work from the inside—is now taken back to the theater building to operate on a larger scale.
Ant Hampton (British, b.1975 Fribourg, Switzerland) made his first show as Rotozaza in 1998, a project which ended up spanning performance, theater, installation, intervention and writing-based works, and often focusing on the use of instructions given to unrehearsed “guest” performers, both on stage and in public settings. Solo projects include ongoing experimentation around “live portraiture”: structured encounters with people from non-theatrical milieu.
Tesseract, a full evening theater performance created in collaboration with Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Reiner, consisting of Act 1: a stereoscopic 3D dance film and Act 2: a live dance performance with 3 live cameras mixed by me using VDMX and projected on a scrim in front of 6 dancers.
Charles Atlas
This project began at EMPAC in Troy, NY and had its premiere at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and had a brief US tour ending at Brooklyn Academy of Music in December. This piece will be shown in Europe sometime in 2018.
What is a “tesseract”?
“The hypercube or tesseract is described by moving the generating cube in the direction in which the fourth dimension extends.”
Robert T. Browne, The Mystery of Space
Robert A. Heinlein’s 1941 novella And He Built a Crooked House describes a California architect who designs a house based on a four-dimensional cube, a tesseract, comprised of eight cubed rooms.Unbeknownst to him or his clients, however,an earthquake has caused the invisible fourth dimension to shift prior to their first tour through the building. The tesseract house then takes its new inhabitants on a disorienting journey through multiple rooms, perspectives, and timescales that ends with another earthquake-induced slip of space/time as they are dropped with a jolt into the desert landscape of Joshua Tree National Park.
Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener’s Tesseract charts a similar course: worlds shift and flip, and dancers spin and fall across unstable planes.
Parallel timescales are reflected back on themselves, and emotions run high as speed, scale, and gravity refuse to remain constant.
This journey starts from the perspective of 3D stereoscopic vision and progresses to the performative dimensionality of the theater stage. Although the artists had previously worked together with Merce Cunningham, Tesseract marks their first independent collaboration, and like the architect’s project in Heinlein’s novella, this ambitious work is conceived of as a chance to explore the potential of imagined architectures that can drift from cinema screen to proscenium stage.
The word tesseract is derived from the Greek tessares, or four, and aktis, a ray of light. Atlas, Mitchell, and Riener’s Tesseract alludes not only to the romance of science fiction’s beaming rays, but also to light as the principal element of cinematography, projection, and theatrical technique. The artists combine aktis with the fourth dimension, usually understood as time. However, there is an extra-dimensionality here that is revealed through the interaction of the real and the imaged, the live and the recorded.
DESCENT reimagines the story of Greek mythical figures Venus and Andromeda as an interracial love story with choreography that conjures the aesthetics of August Rodin’s sculpture Toilet of Venus and Andromeda. Performing in wheelchairs, dancers Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson traverse a stage built with hills and curves. The duo climb to the summit of a ramp where they precariously balance on its edge and let gravity take over as they barrel back down, moving together and apart. Through emotional peaks and valleys, DESCENT explores themes of disability, race, and beauty to reveal how mobility is fundamental to participation in civic life.
Kinetic Light is a collective made up of professional disabled artists Alice Sheppard, Laurel Lawson, and Michael Maag. Sheppard is the artistic director and choreographer for Kinetic Light who performs the role of Andromeda in DESCENT. Lawson, performing the role of Venus, is a collaborator in choreography, costume and makeup design, as well as the software developer for DESCENT. Michael Maag is DESCENT’s lighting and video designer.
Alice Sheppard: Alice Sheppard is a disabled choreographer and dancer from Britain.Sheppard started her career first as a professor, but later became interested in dance. She became a member of the AXIS Dance Company and toured with them. She had also found Kinetic Light and leads it, an artistic coalition created in collaboration with dancer, Laurel Lawson, and lighting and video artist, Michael Maag.
Influenced by James Whale’s Frankenstein films, Radiohole explodes the tumultuous and tragic life of Mary Shelley. Blood chilling and completely strange, Inflatable Frankenstein is brimming with whims, technological absurdity, and bodily fluids. A larger-than-life, Radiohole gothic teen sex dream. With Maggie Hoffman, Eric Dyer, Erin Douglass, Joseph Silovsky, and Mark Jaynes. Also introducing The Creature Without Organs.
Radiohole was birthed in a Brooklyn basement in 1998 by Erin Douglass, Eric Dyer, Maggie Hoffman and Scott Halverson Gillette. The company has produced ten original shows that have been presented at venues around New York City including PS122, the Kitchen and the Collapsable Hole (sic) and have toured nationally and internationally. Radiohole’s most recent show, “Whatever, Heaven Allows” was commissioned by PS122, The Walker Art Center and the Andy Warhol Museum through the Spaulding Gray Award. “Whatever, heaven Allows” had it’s European premiere in April 2012 at Katapult Teater at Godsbanen in Århus, Denmark. Over the years, Radiohole has earned a reputation as one of New York’s most tenacious and uncompromising ensembles.
The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) is a multi-venue arts center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, which opened on October 3, 2008.
The founding director of EMPAC is Johannes Goebel. He was previously the director and founder of the Institute for Music and Acoustics at the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Curatorial Program
EMPAC’s curatorial program is dedicated to the commissioning, production, and presentation of ambitious performances and time-based artworks that foster meaningful engagement among artists, artworks, and our audiences. Over the past 10 years, EMPAC’s curatorial program has brought hundreds of artists to Rensselaer to create and perform new works across three areas of expertise: music, theater and dance, and time-based visual art.
EMPAC is committed to the in-depth support of artists over extended periods of time to realize complex projects that require not only EMPAC’s acoustic, spatial, and visual technological infrastructure, but also the interdisciplinary expertise of its curatorial, production, and administrative staff.
EMPAC’s artists-in-residence generate the diverse range of events which open the studio doors for campus and the general public. The curated program provides visitors with a breadth of experiences from theatrical productions, concerts, audio and video installations to a rigorous interdisciplinary program of films, talks, and workshops.
Many artworks produced at the center are made in collaboration with peer institutions, presenters, and museums, expanding the audience for an artist or artwork beyond Rensselaer and the Capital Region, centering Rensselaer within the international discourse around time-based arts and technology.
Residencies
Curated Residencies
Artist residencies are the heart of the curatorial program at EMPAC. Much of the work that we present is first developed in residency. In some cases, residencies serve as preliminary work for co-commissioned performances that find their premiere elsewhere. In both cases, curated EMPAC residencies figure into the overarching programming vision of the attending curator and often provide space, resources, and expertise unavailable elsewhere.
Example: Commissioned and partially developed through the EMPAC artist-in-residency program, Extra Shapes is a performance for lunging figures, a musical concert for loudspeakers, and a light show.
EMPAC—The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is where the arts, sciences, and technology meet under one roof and breathe the same air. Four exceptional venues enable audiences, artists, and researchers to inquire, experiment, develop, and experience the ever-changing relationship between our senses, technology, and the worlds we create around us.
he 220,000-square foot building includes many firsts in the fields of acoustics, performing arts infrastructure, and architectural engineering. The integration of these features with audio, video, lighting, computer, and stage rigging networks makes EMPAC an ideal environment for human interaction with digital media.
Both a performing arts center and research and production facility, EMPAC provides an environment that supports the realization of complex artworks and research projects at any stage, from inception to completion.
The center has three curators focused on the areas of time-based visual art, theater, dance, and music. Within an interdisciplinary framework, each EMPAC curator is responsible for supporting the development and production of new works that stretch the boundaries of their field, interface with a diverse roster of international artists, and program challenging, adventurous performances for the Rensselaer campus and Capital Region communities. The team is led by founding director Johannes Goebel, who continues to be involved worldwide in the intellectual exchange on art, science, and technology, pursuing the questions of political, cultural, educational, and aesthetic relevance of the field.
Angela Stoecklin grew up in Iran and Nepal, and has been living in Switzerland since 1979. Practices in music and visual arts led her to dance. She was at Arts school Basel, got her dance education at ch- tanztheater Zurich, and holds a Master of Arts BFH in Contemporary Arts Practise. Angela worked and still works as dancer with numerous contemporary companies and productions in Switzerland, Germany and Belgium.
Creating her own projects, that lie more and more also in the interdisciplinary field, she closes the cycle of her artistic background. Fixed choreography which dismantels a specific form as necessity in the due of a process, as well as the momentary re/acting Instant Composition as direct interaction and absolute presence in the now are parts of her interests and means of working. She explores the multilayered facettes of communication and perception and explores process-oriented approaches. She has created choreography, performative and installation pieces, short to evening long productions, solo and interdisciplinary projects, and does intercultural work.
In 2019 she launched the first Festival Instant Composition for dance, artistics and music in Zurich. She is dance and movement pedagogue, acupressure therapist and Taijiquan and Qi Gong instructor.
“ghosts”, (Spazio Ludens2)
In „ghosts“, (Spazio Ludens2) a dacer, a musician, a visual spacial artist and a light designer interact in different spaces. Inspired by each specific situation they playfully transform them in installative performances. You find yourself in the midst of dream and nightmare, dense athmospheric imagry and silent shadows rushing by. Well tuned compositions meet the chaotic, childlike scenes with eerie ones.
Angela Stöcklin (concept, movement)
Matthias Rüegg (spacial design)
Anselm Caminada (Sound)
Antje Brückner (lighting design)
trans-form
on a white open field and a space continuously being structured by screens movement (Angela Stoecklin, music (Marie-Cécile Reber) and light and images (Jan Schacher) play and become entwined. They interact in multiple layers of tension between freedom and dependance, structure and limitation, and try themselves with the imposibility of communication. Reciprocal restrictions lead to breaking out and flight, mutual impulses to an approach, which allows flickering moments of synchronicity. Engagement densifies and transforms, and unnoticably perception shifts. The interdisciplinary performance „trans-form“ deals with in/dependency and control in relationships and encounters.
installative performance: In a circle, surrounded by more or less reflecting panels a game of view-point, eye-catching and relating increases towards a tumultuous chase between performer, light and sound.
SPACEnr1 floating
Light-apparitions dancing restlessly over walls and ceiling, plunging the space into darkness and light. A figure as secret tamer directs this play. Drawn out sounds put densifying atmospheres. Reflections, overlapping shadows, suddenly the face recognised in a mirror. Movement triples, eye is irritated as orientation gets disrupted and shifts. There is no story told, but many insinuated.
“Time out of Time: A Special Place” as a dance piece in progress produced by Amman based dance company Studio 8 in collaboration with artist duet of French sound artist François Donato and French/Iranian visual artist Golnaz Behrouznia. The in-progress result is a trans-disciplinary live performance which was presented to the audience of Jordan at 25th of August, 2019 as part of INTERNATIONAL DANCE ENCOUNTER AMMAN(IDEA) festival.
Director/Choreographer: Abd Al Hadi Abunahleh Assistant Director: Xiaoman Ren Dance: Emran Alamareen, Daniel Issa, Nadeen Dabass, Kate Port, Ziad Hajir, Anas Nahleh, Oliveira Jara Visual Arts: Golnaz Behrouznia Sound Designer: Francois Donato Trailer Video Edit: Golnaz Behrouznia Trailer Sound Design: Francois Donato Trailer Video-graphy: Mohammad Ali
INTERNATIONAL DANCE ENCOUNTER AMMAN(IDEA) is a dance encounter of international and local dance performances in Amman, Jordan. It consists of performances, public interventions, master classes, workshops, artist symposium and exchange of ideas. World class choreographers, performance directors and dance-makers join with Jordanian dance artists for a cultural celebration from the period of 22 August to 29 August 2019.
The collaborative trans-disciplinary live performance “Time out of Time: A Special Place” was presented with Brussels-based duet “The Gyre” at 25th of August, 2019.
Time out of Time: 