"There are no conventional walls at EMPAC," says Ash Bulayev, who has been theater and dance curator at RPI's Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center since last February. "We had to build one."

He's speaking specifically about EMPAC's small performance studios, which have walls covered with angled, textured sound panels that were unsuited to the flat-wall needs of the upcoming show "Primal Matter," by avant-garde Greek stage director, choreographer and visual artist Dimitris Papaioannou.

But Bulayev's observation is also a metaphor for the philosophical approach at EMPAC and the art made there, often in residencies that have minimal or no public performance.

Papaioannou has for decades made giant stage spectacles, including the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens and a follow-up work that sold more than 100,000 tickets. But with the Greek economy in tatters and the country riven by social unrest, he wanted to work on a smaller scale.

Bulayev, who knows Papaioannou from the five and a half years he lived and made theater in Greece, challenged the director to come to EMPAC to create the most minimal piece he could.

For "Primal Matter," Papaioannou, who has worked on an epic scale with casts the size of battalions, uses little more than two dancers and a wall, which had to be specially built by EMPAC's technical crew. On view Saturday for one free performance after a three-week residency, "Primal Matter" is described in promotional material as an "exploratory journey of balancing our physical existence (body) with our second nature (soul), at a time when the issue of paramount concern is, ultimately, what is indispensable — what constitutes the essence." (See related interview with Papaioannou.)

Though Bulayev has worked at EMPAC for most of this year, "Primal Matter" is the first residency and show that he was responsible for as its second curator of theater and dance. (The venue schedules up to a year or more in advance.) He chose Papaioannou after a conversation in the spring.

"Artistically, it really seemed like Dimitris has achieved a zenith. He's been lucky and talented enough to do whatever he wanted," says Bulayev. "I said to him, 'Are you curious about another model of working?'" The director mulled the matter, says Bulayev, adding, "He called back a week later and said, 'OK, I'll make a performance with two people, a wall, a garbage can and a chair.' I said, 'OK, let's do that.' "

After being initially presented at a festival in Athens, "Primal Matter" came to EMPAC for further development. Though some of the duties of Bulayev and his fellow curators — who program music, "time-based arts," and films and lectures — are to schedule performance-ready acts, a larger part of EMPAC's mission is as an arts incubator. Throughout the year, artists come from around the world to spend time at EMPAC, use its facilities and create new work. They receive a stipend and housing.

For the remainder of his first academic and performance season, Bulayev has seven more companies — from the U.S., Canada, Belgium, France and Greece, and ranging in size from three to 15 people — that will work at EMPAC in stays lasting from 10 days to four and a half weeks. Six of the troupes will offer a public performance or other presentation; some will be fully finished while others will be in progress.

"In America, a facility like this is very, very, very rare," says Bulayev. "In Europe, it's so much more common; it's accepted and even expected" for artists to be given time, space and funding to make new work.

A native of what is now Ukraine, Bulayev, 39, relocated to the New York City area with his parents in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. After a dozen years based in America, much of it spent making work abroad, Bulayev moved to Europe. Long stays while working in Greece, Berlin, Amsterdam and Brazil were separated by shorter stints in farther-flung locations, including seven months in Ghana. Bulayev estimates he's lived in more than 15 countries so far.

"Do not ask me where home is; I have no idea," says Bulayev. He has an apartment in downtown Troy, but as a result of being from a country that no longer exists and spending more than a decade as an itinerant artist, the larger question of where he belongs is unanswerable.

"If I stopped and had some free time to think about it, I suppose I would have to deal with the issue," he says. "I know there are people all over the world I love and who I spent a lot of time with, but if I have not seen them in years, is that just nostalgia?"

Bulayev was working in Brazil last year when he saw the job listing for a new theater and dance curator at EMPAC. (The three curators who opened the facility with Director Johannes Goebel in 2008 have all left.)

"I wasn't actually planning to come back to the States. I'd been enjoying my time (abroad)," he says. But the opportunity to be at EMPAC, and to help artists develop new work, was too alluring.

"I hope that EMPAC and the way that it's functioning now ... as a house for developing work, is going to last forever, but I know it is not; it is finite," he says. "I wanted to be able to be here now, when somebody can come here for a month and try things out, and maybe it will fail, but that is OK. That doesn't exist in (the) U.S. anymore except here. This was my opportunity to contribute a little bit to the folks ... in the more experimental dance and theater world in this country."

Bulayev's curatorial choices, discussed with his colleagues but ultimately made at his discretion, are guided in part by the world-class technology and production capabilities available at EMPAC.

"There is a lot of dance and theater that I truly, truly respect, but if somebody doesn't need the infrastructure of the space, they shouldn't be here," Bulayev says. "One of the things I said in my interviews for this job — it has now become more of a joke, but it's also important — I said, 'I will not bring anything here that does not have a plug.'"

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