Dramatis Personae
Jack Ferver with curator Katherine C. M. Adams
Dramatis Personae is a combined film and talk program that takes inspiration from theatermaker and choreographer Jack Ferver’s practice, giving audiences the chance to engage with ideas and techniques relevant to their work and new commission. The program frames a live reading by the artist of a section of their in-progress work My Town, co-commissioned by EMPAC and NYU Skirball.
Dramatis Personae addresses the performance of self and features short films, including Nowhere Apparent, a short film by Jeremy Jacob starring Ferver, who also created the script and choreography.
Ferver’s work engages with queer performance, the fabrication of personas, and what the artist has called auto-mythology. As a choreographer, Ferver has been influenced by the work of Martha Graham, a pioneer of modern dance, characteristic of sweeping, expressive movements and a vivid relationship to power and vulnerability. Ferver’s choreography works in tandem with their script, which moves through psychological iconography.
Ferver’s theatrical influences have ranged from absurdist theatermakers like the French playwright Jean Genet, to performance in pop culture. Their theatrical work has also often been placed in dialogue with the legacy of camp, a minor genre of performance associated with a self-consciously exaggerated and artificial style.
Ferver knowingly takes up this style in a way that pushes it into new registers of embodiment and self-narration. Considering camp as one of the many ways of playing a role, Dramatis Personae also engages with the ways we are haunted by and re-perform personal and collective archetypes.
ABOUT EMPAC
Artist production residencies are the heart of the curatorial program at EMPAC. Much of the work that we commission and present is developed in collaboration with our curatorial and production staff during artist residencies. Artists benefit from unparalleled access to EMPAC's technological infrastructure for making their work, which includes dedicated support from an expert team of video, audio, stage, and production engineers and technicians. Residencies are often planned years in advance to afford time for extended engagement between artists and EMPAC staff. The number of residencies, as well as the structure and length of each, is tailored in conversations with the individual artist and for the specific project.