Yara Travieso

October 12, 2018, 08:00PM

"The world premiere of Yara Travieso’s immersive theatrical experience designed for the EMPAC Concert Hall. Commissioned for 10YEARS, the new work uses monumental staging, experiential cinema, and sound to ignite the ceiling, side galleries, balcony, and stage of the Concert Hall with a sprawling live performance meant to stretch the parameters of the hall and expectations of its audience. The performance invites the audience to experience the scale of the hall and the women that will encompass it—the expansiveness of the performance giving way to the infiniteness of Travieso's female protagonists. Travieso will expand on the venue’s unique capabilities for music and opera, creating a rich theatrical world for the audience to explore and share in making it “breathe.” [...] Yara Travieso is an American director, choreographer, and maker of worlds. She creates films, stage works, immersive installations, and live experiences centered around female protagonists. Travieso will develop the work over summer 2018 along with composer and sound designer Sam Crawford and lighting designer Seth Reiser." (Quote Source)

Isabelle Pauwels

October 12, 2018, 07:00PM

"Commissioned and produced by EMPAC, If It Bleeds is a moving-image work inspired by recent events in the world of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). Historically, MMA was promoted as something very distinct from both boxing—a sport so corrupt that the best hardly ever fight the best—and from pro wrestling, which is totally scripted and driven by mic skills, costumes, and bad acting. But in seeking to expand the audience, MMA promoters increasingly court the artifice of wrestling to privilege the showman over the sportsman. If It Bleeds follows the fighters, commissioners, reporters and a promoter as they battle through post-fight pressers, promotional tours, and disciplinary hearings. The narrative unfolds in a game of one-upmanship as the characters are seduced by their public image and driven by the fiction that everything happens “for a reason.” If It Bleeds uses the pageantry of sports-entertainment to explore the grotesque and sublime spectacle that is everyday survival. [...] Canadian artist Isabelle Pauwels works primarily in video and installation. Her blend of performance and documentary realism explores the fraught relationship between narrative conventions and everyday social interaction. If It Bleeds follows Pauwels’s 2014 EMPAC-commissioned multimedia performance ,000,." (Quote Source)

Olga Neuwirth

October 13, 2018, 08:00PM

"Composer Olga Neuwirth’s Lost Highway Suite—derived from her opera of the same name, itself inspired by David Lynch’s cult classic film—evokes a mysterious tone and structure in a concert performance featuring immersive surround sound. Using a 64-speaker Ambisonic dome, built around the audience in the EMPAC Concert Hall, the suite distills Neuwirth’s 2003 opera to its instrumental core. Mixing live performance with electronic sounds that swirl around the listening space, Lost Highway Suite creates a hallucinatory experience not unlike the warped plotline and surreal characters of the Lynch epic. [...] Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth (born 1968) gained international recognition at the age of 22 for two mini-operas based on works of Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek. Since then, she’s written several music theater pieces including her first dramatic work, Bählamms Fest (also based on one of Jelinek’s works), The Outcast, American Lulu, and Hommage á Klaus Nomi. [...] International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is a 35-member artist collective that explores how new music intersects with communities across the world. Works by emerging composers have anchored ICE’s programming since its founding in 2001, and the group’s recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music’s present." (Quote Source)

Moved by the Motion

October 13, 2018, 09:30PM

"A newly commissioned ensemble performance for EMPAC’s 10YEARS celebration, One Image is a Lie, the Other Unavailable explores the interplay between the live and the pre-recorded. Moving fluidly between voice, movement, and image, Moved by the Motion resists the structural hierarchies inherent within and between artistic disciplines and reflects the spirit of the continually shifting improvisational ensemble [...] Moved by the Motion is an ongoing, iterative performance project initiated by Wu Tsang and boychild in 2013 that features a shifting group of collaborators including Patrick Belaga, Josh Johnson, Jeff Simmons, Fred Moten, and Asma Maroof, among others. The ensemble explores different modes of storytelling through an improvisational structure. Each performance is a series of translations between text, movement, film, theater, and music." (Quote Source)

Maria Hassabi

October 12, 13, 15–19, 2018, 12-11:30PM

"The US premiere of Maria Hassabi’s SLOW ME DOWN, a moving-image installation commissioned for EMPAC’s 10YEARS celebration. Partially filmed while Hassabi and her dancers were in residence this spring, the work features material from Hassabi’s live installation, STAGING (2017), which was presented internationally in public spaces, museums, and exhibition contexts. Blending collage and post-production effects, SLOW ME DOWN builds a hyper-real frame that augments this footage and participates in the construction of what Hassabi calls a “performative surreality." [...] Maria Hassabi (b. Cyprus) is a New York based artist and choreographer. Her practice utilizes stillness and deceleration as techniques in choreographies that oscillate between dance and sculpture, subject and object, live body and still image, testing conventional rhythms of viewership in the process." (Quote Source)

Trajal Harrell

October 12, 9:30PM & October 13, 7+10:30PM

"Choreographer Trajal Harrell’s In the Mood for Frankie is a dance trio performed along a runway-style stage in EMPAC’s lobby. Featuring fluid, sultry movements atop three square platforms—two of which are connected by a stream of swimming goldfish—the performance revolves around the figure of the muse. In the Mood for Frankie is inspired by the co-founder of the Japanese dance/theater form “butoh,” Tatsumi Hijikata and his muses. Along with Hijikata, Harrell’s other muses include butoh artists Kazuo Ohno and Yoko Ashikawa, modern dance choreographer Katherine Dunham, filmmaker Wong Kar Wai, fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, singer Sade, and Harrell's long-term relationship with dancers Thibault Lac and Ondrej Vidlar, who perform the work live with Harrell [...] Trajal Harrell has been working in residence at EMPAC on a new project focused on lighting and video to evoke memorial and ritualistic practices within theatrical environments. While this new project will not be completed until 2019, In the Mood for Frankie is itself performed as a muse for this next work, and in celebration of 10YEARS at EMPAC." (Quote Source)

Formosa Quartet

October 11, 2018, 7PM

"Kicking off the 10YEARS celebration, Formosa Quartet leads guests on a unique musical journey throughout the EMPAC building. Performing in all four EMPAC venues— the Concert Hall, Theater, Studio 1, and Studio 2—the ensemble will showcase classical repertoire particularly suited to the distinct acoustic profile of each space. Throughout the show, the audience will be led from venue to venue to hear how, in performance, the room is as important as the musicians and music. [...] Regarded as one of the very best quartets of their generation, Formosa Quartet formed in 2002 when the four founding members came together for a concert tour of Taiwan. Committed to championing Taiwanese music and promoting the arts in the land of their heritage, as well as exploring diverse and adventurous mediums for string quartet, Formosa have performed in major venues throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe. [...] With degrees from the Juilliard School, Curtis Institute of Music, and New England Conservatory, the members of Formosa Quartet—Jasmine Lin, Wayne Lee, Che-Yen Chen, and Deborah Pae—have established themselves as leading solo, chamber, and orchestral musicians and have been top prizewinners in numerous prestigious competitions, including both the First Prize and Amadeus Prize at the London International String Quartet Competition. Formosa Quartet performs on Joseph Curtin (2001) and Andrea Guarneri (1662) violins, an Enrico Catenari viola (1680), and a Vincenzo Postiglione cello (1885), on generous loan from the Arts and Letters Foundation." (Quote Source)