Photos: Ben DeFlorio / Paula Court
AMT Talks with Emily Coates and Ain Gordon
Writer/choreographer/dancer Emily Coates and writer/director/actor Ain Gordon embark on their 2nd collaboration “The Scattering” (working title) sourcing archival traces of ballet histories found in bodies and texts across New England. Both Coates and Gordon draw on neglected archives and marginalized histories in their work, from a fading 19th-century astronomical observatory in New Hampshire (Coates) to the Philadelphia psychiatrist who donned a mask and used a pseudonym to insist homosexuality was not a mental disease (Gordon). Together the pair will show excerpts and discuss their individual and collaborative work.
Emily Coates is a writer, dancer, and choreographer who has performed internationally with New York City Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project, Twyla Tharp and Yvonne Rainer. Highlights include duets with Baryshnikov in works by Erick Hawkins, Mark Morris, and Karole Armitage; principal roles in works by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins; and Rainer's work from 1961 to the present. Her choreographic projects have been commissioned and presented by the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Guggenheim Works & Process, Wadsworth Atheneum, Quick Center for the Arts, Hopkins Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, Danspace Project (NYT Critic’s Pick 2017, NYT Fall Dance to Watch 2018), Performa (Best Dance 2019, with Yvonne Rainer), and most recently in the performance exhibition Hard Return at the Neuberger Museum, among other venues, with support and fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Center for Ballet and the Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. She is Professor in The Practice of Theater and Performance Studies, and Professor in the Practice of Directing and Dance at Yale University. With physicist Sarah Demers, she co-authored Physics and Dance (Yale University Press, 2019). She co-edited with Yvonne Rainer Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets 1965/2019 (Performa, Wadsworth Atheneum, Lenz Press, 2023). emilycoates.art
Ain Gordon is a three-time Obie Award-winning writer/director/actor, two-time NYFA recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow in Playwriting, and a 2023 Creative Capital Awardee. Gordon’s work often frames marginalized/forgotten histories via the obscured figures found within. Recent projects include These Don’t Easily Scatter: a two-year collaboration with Philadelphia’s William Way LGBTQ Center, supported by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, focused on the first five years of the AIDS crisis; Radicals In Miniature: collaborating with Josh Quillen on collected requiems to personal icons, premiering in 2017 at Baryshnikov Arts Center (NY) and touring in 2018/19 to Arts & Ideas, Quick Center, Connecticut College (all CT), Williams College and The Yard (both MA); and 217 Boxes Of Dr. Henry Anonymous: culminating a multi-year residency at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania focused on Dr. John Fryer who, in 1972, disguised as Dr. Anonymous opposed the American Psychiatric Association’s classification of homosexuality as a disease, premiering in 2016 at the Painted Bride (PA), plus 2018 performances at Baryshnikov Arts Center (NY) and 2019 performances at Transylvania University (KY) and Center For The Art of Performance/UCLA. Gordon is a former Core Writer of the Playwright’s Center (MN), has twice held the post of Visiting Artist at the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (PA), a former Artist-In-Residence at NYU Tisch School of The Arts, former Resident Artist at The Hermitage (FL), and was a 2020 Pabst Endowed Writer-In-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Director of the Pick Up Performance Co since 1992. aingordon.nyc