Early on the evening of September 8, EMPAC 360: On Site + Sound began at the EMPAC construction site near the corner of College and Eighth Avenues. The event marked the near-half completion of EMPAC in time and was celebrated with music, aerial dancing, video, sound, and pyrotechnics. Entertainment included the New York string quartet Ethel, Pyrotechnics from Grucci, visual and sound effects by Benton-C Bainbridge and Stephen Moore, and aerial dancers from Flyaway Productions in San Francisco. Guests at the event were guided across the perimeter of the building, but no walking tour inside of the construction site was possible as the building was not safely accessible for all of the guests who would want to see it. Overall, the EMPAC project is about 28 percent complete—with 80 percent of the work under contract, a superstructure that is 40 percent complete, and substantial completion scheduled sometime in 2008.
After obtaining some refreshments on the lawn near the construction site, audience members partook in a string quartet performance that Johannes Goebel, director of EMPAC, described as sounding like a construction site. Audience members were advised by Goebel that some performances, like the first, would not appeal to everyone—but that subsequent offerings most definitely would. He was proved correct when a loud cacophony of skillfully-harmonied construction-site sounds rose forth from the stage. Some of the audience opted to leave at this point, but the majority of the nearly 2,000 member audience remained.
After the initial 20-minute Ethel performance, the audience was invited to walk to Eighth Street below the EMPAC site via a pathway stretching from the Folsom Library over to the Pittsburgh Building, and down the driveway. There, aerial dancers performed on the front-most walls of EMPAC accompanied mostly by a recorded performance of an Italian musical piece, and at times Ethel as well. The dancers jumped, pirouetted, and generally used the side of the building as a stage that had been tipped 90° on its side. The audience, a mixture of people from the surrounding Troy-Albany area, school supporters, and a number of students, was generally enthusiastic, and, following a small pyrotechnic display from the large EMPAC crane, moved up the hill of College Avenue to the next facet of the performance.
Upon walking up halfway up the hill, the audience turned as strangely realistic noises of what many described as “metal gears moving and breaking” filled the air and the College Avenue side of EMPAC glowed with an irregular blend of colorful swirls to accompany the sounds. At length, an artistically distorted video of the type of aerial dancing seen earlier made its way onto the wall projection and concluded to thunderous applause as students and visitors alike made their way back to the EMPAC construction site landing.
Upon returning to the EMPAC stage, currently housed under a curved metallic roof, Ethel began playing a far more traditional quartet piece than they had before. The piece ended with a thunderous complement of fireworks launched from the moveable EMPAC crane. As the fireworks in the air concluded, the performer who had been involved in many of the pyrotechnic parts of the performance detonated a shower of sparks from the top of his brimmed hat to a thunderous applause from the audience.
