Today Simone is joined by Tara Aisha Willis, curator of the upcoming inaugural Corpus Festival at EMPAC in Troy, NY. Corpus Festival is a festival of movement-based art, and will take place April 23–25, 2026 with select works on view from April 16 through May 8. The festival assembles creative experiments throughout EMPAC’s theater, concert hall, studios, lobby, and shared public spaces, and each festival work draws attention to how power, control, freedom, and mutual responsibility shape our actions, and vice versa. Some projects use video screens to stage the human figure within EMPAC’s unique architecture, reshaping our sense of scale or shifting our relationship to place. Others invite the audience to get physically involved. While each artist draws on dance and performance, the festival has an expansive view of those genres, asking: How do we attune to the forms and formations among bodies? How do we play our part? What potential is there to move differently?

Simone sits down with local artists, community members, and the occasional "far off folks" who have a connection to the Hudson Valley area. Together, Simone and her guests ponder how life paths veer from the traditional or stick to it, or the dance between both. What is a traditional life path anyway, and does it even exist the way it once did? Each guest's own ride will also inspire a new topic every show. Settle in with a cup of coffee, tea, or bourbon and join us in the conversation.

Simone Stevens is a Hudson Valley-based voice actor and musician who, at times, plays in the visual arts realm as well (she can be found at the farmers market some days happily selling her and her mom's ceramic art tiles). She is also an educator, working as a teaching artist with the Ancram Theatre and coaching voice-over and storytelling. She can be seen around the Hudson valley enjoying all the nature and the creative community that thrives here.