Corpus Festival

Corpus Festival — April 23–25, 2026 — EMPAC, Troy, NY USA

How do our bodies shape experiences and make meaning? How does performance attune us to forms and formations among bodies?

Whether moving in rigid unison, standing heroically alone, or morphing responsively, performing bodies have an incredible capacity to construct our world. Join us to witness—and even participate in—a weekend of experiences by rule-breaking dance and theater artists who reframe how we participate in society by physically showing up.

This festival assembles creative experiments throughout the building, testing how movement and action build sensory, spatial situations that have social weight. Each invites us to notice the structures beneath the surface of our immediate attention. These structures direct and choreograph us into positions: leader and their people, performer and script, individual and society, human figure and surrounding scene, stage and audience.

• Performances
• Installations
• Talks
• Video works

The term corpus points to how a body can take center stage and to the connections formed across a body of work, or a collection of bodies. This festival turns EMPAC’s building into not only a gathered body of artworks, but also a gathering place to share food and ideas, including an artist-led community meal and book bar.

Here, collective activity and individual experience are closer together than they appear. Here, we are implicated in each other’s experiences, playing our part in ecosystems of power, control, freedom, and mutual responsibility—but always with the potential to move differently.

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