At EMPAC in Troy, the body is not just subject matter—it’s a system, a site of inquiry, and, for one weekend in April, the organizing principle of an entire building. The inaugural Corpus Festival, running April 23–25 with installations extending through May 8, turns EMPAC into a kind of living organism: part exhibition, part performance lab, part social experiment.
Curated by Tara Aisha Willis, Corpus gathers a cohort of artists working across dance, theater, and time-based media to ask a deceptively simple question: how do bodies make meaning? The answers unfold across EMPAC’s theaters, studios, lobby, and public spaces, where installations, performances, talks, and communal gatherings bleed into one another. Rather than a sequence of discrete events, the festival operates as an ecosystem—one in which audience members are not just observers but participants, implicated in the choreography of the space itself.
Several anchor works establish the terrain. Raft, by Yanira Castro and her collective a canary torsi, invites direct participation, turning group movement into a form of social negotiation. Monumental Death, Kate Ladenheim’s ongoing installation, occupies the lobby as a durational presence, while Primordial, by Meg Foley and Carmichael Jones, and The Oath, by Annie-B Parson and Alla Kovgan of Big Dance Theater, use video and spatial composition to reframe how bodies register within architectural scale.
The live program sharpens that inquiry. Puerto Rican choreographer nibia pastrana santiago premieres “preámbulo,” while a hybrid talk-performance, “Black Holes Ain’t So Black,” brings together Thuto Durkac-Somo, Jonathan González, and Mario Gooden to explore the relationship between space, perception, and Black spatial practices. Elsewhere, writer Arabella Stanger joins María Firmino-Castillo for “Dancing Land, Dancing Power,” a conversation that situates movement within broader systems of land, labor, and control.
But Corpus is as much about gathering as it is about viewing. The festival opens with a community supper—long tables, shared dishes, and conversation as a form of choreography in its own right. A pop-up book bar curated by Troy’s Yellow Lab Vintage & Books and a designated low-sensory space further expand the definition of what participation can look like, foregrounding care, access, and the varied ways bodies move through space.
That emphasis on social choreography—on the often invisible structures that organize bodies into roles, hierarchies, and habits—is the festival’s throughline. As the curatorial framing suggests, Corpus is interested in how we are positioned: as audience or performer, individual or collective, agent or subject. The works here don’t just represent those dynamics; they enact them, asking participants to feel their way through systems of power, control, and mutual responsibility.
Set against the backdrop of Troy—a city where industrial history and contemporary arts practice continue to intersect—Corpus feels both site-specific and broadly resonant. EMPAC’s technologically sophisticated spaces on the RPI campus, designed for acoustic and visual precision, provide the infrastructure, but the festival’s real medium is the audience itself: bodies moving through rooms, assembling, dispersing, and reassembling in new configurations.
In that sense, Corpus is a proposition: that meaning is constructed collectively, and that even the most familiar gestures—walking, sitting, gathering—carry within them the possibility of being done differently.
All events at Corpus are free, though some require advance registration. View the full schedule.
