Choreography by Yvonne Rainer.

Rainer’s first solo. Reconstructed in 2005 and subsequently performed throughout the U.S. and Europe, including at MOMA’s exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done (2018).

Choreography by Yvonne Rainer.

Performed by Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, Emmanuèle Phuon, Keith Sabado, Yvonne Rainer, and David Thomson.

Conceived and composed by Christopher Janney. Choreography by Sara Rudner.

Solo performer in a piece designed by Christopher Janney with choreography by Sara Rudner, featuring an amplified heart monitor. The piece was originally created for Rudner, then staged for Mikhail Baryshnikov. I performed a version with The Persuasions.

Choreography by Yvonne Rainer.

Performed by Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, Emmanuèle Phuon, Keith Sabado, and Yvonne Rainer.

Choreography by Yvonne Rainer.

Performed by Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, Emmanuèle Phuon, Keith Sabado, Sally Silvers, and Yvonne Rainer.

Choreography by Yvonne Rainer.

“Sara Bernhardt,” with (left to right) Sally Silvers, Emily Coates, and Pat Catterson.

Choreography by Yvonne Rainer.

Performed by Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Sally Silvers.

Choreography by Yvonne Rainer.

The pas de deux, with Emily Coates, Sally Silvers, and Pat Catterson (out of frame).

Choreography by John Jasperse.

Ensemble piece created for White Oak Dance Project, 2000. Pictured (from left to right): Michael Lomeka, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Emmauèle Phuon, Emily Coates, and Raquel Aedo.

Choreography by Neil Greenberg.

Restaged for White Oak Dance Project, 1999. Pictured (from left to right): Emmauèle Phuon, Susan Shields, Emily Coates, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Choreography by Karole Armitage.

Duet with Mikhail Baryshnikov, 1999. A new work created by Karole Armitage for White Oak Dance Project, which premiered in New York at the New Victory Theater in August 1999.

Choreography by Mark Morris.

Duet with Mikhail Baryshnikov, 2000. Mark Morris originally created the piece for six dancers. He later restaged the choreography as a duet.

Choreography by Angelin Preljocaj

A group piece commissioned by New York City Ballet for the Diamond Project. The image depicts the final duet, with Emily Coates and Benjamin Millepied.

Conceived, written, and choreographed by Emily Coates
Direction and dramaturgy: Ain Gordon
Staging developed in collaboration with Ain Gordon and Derek Lucci
Music composed/performed by Charles Burnham (violin) and Melvin Chen (piano)
Lighting design by Krista Smith

Premiering in 2025

My newest performance project draws on George Balanchine’s brief history in New England to reflect on how the body and spirit of a choreographer scatters, living on in unexpected places. Drawing on my background as a former member of New York City Ballet, I am working with a core group of collaborators to collage traces of Balanchine and related artists, discovered in archives.

Source materials come from special collections (Wadsworth Atheneum, Houghton Library, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Jacob’s Pillow Archives), as well as the bodies of dancers who danced with him. Amplifying the quieted voices and neglected histories that lie on the outer orbit of a legacy, the project will result in an evening-length dance-theater piece for a multigenerational cast of performers and musicians.

Commissioned by Works & Process, the project was provided with a Works & Process LaunchPAD residency at The Church in Sag Harbor, New York, home to George Balanchine’s grave, that culminated in a showcase at the Guggenheim Museum as part of the 2025 Works & Process Underground Uptown Dance Festival. The project continued to be supported with a Works & Process LaunchPAD residency at the Catskill Mountain Foundation.

Additional development support provided by the Quick Center for the Arts at Fairfield University, a Pillow Lab at Jacob’s Pillow, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and New England Foundation for the Arts Dance Fund. With support from the O’Donnell-Green Fund for Music and Dance.

Choreographed by Emily Coates, Iréne Hultman and Emmanuèle Phuon. Text by Yvonne Rainer.

Every morning for the last four years, Yvonne Rainer has consigned her dreams to a journal. Dancer-choreographers Emily Coates. Iréne Hultman, and Emmanuèle Phuon picked a handful as a point of departure to reflect on the nature of dreams, dance, creativity, and memory. Their unfolding choreography creates a stream of images that work in concert and in contrast with Rainer reading her dreams aloud. While she claims she has no more new ideas in her, Rainer’s unconscious mind reveals the pioneering artist still at work.

The project is built cumulatively and changes over time. Public showings offer glimpses into a constantly shifting process.

A juxtaposition of works by Emmanuèle Phuon and Emily Coates, We is a multi-artist, hybrid performance/lecture utilizing text, video, installation and the body. The work is ultimately about human and artistic struggles to represent and connect with our natural world.

The artists each created an indoor and an outdoor section that are then intertwined.

More info on Emmanuèle Phuon’s sections here.

In Emily Coates’s We (Atmospheric Pressures), dance collides with scientific discovery and the stars, restoring the inherent physicality in human understanding of the universe. Through surprising sources—19th c. weather journals, galactic 1930s choreography, reimagined ancient astronomical rites, an astronaut’s 20th c. space walk—cosmic dances drift across the centuries, bodying forth the cosmos in love and science. Conceived and choreographed by Emily Coates. Directed by Ain Gordon. Performed by Emily Coates, Derek Lucci, and Emmanuèle Phuon with music by Taylor Ho Bynum. Costume design for the blue dress by Harriet Jung and Reid Bartleme. Lighting by Kelly Martin.

Conceived by Emily Coates. Including new works by Emily Coates and Amina Ross.

Some Things We Know (Pool Your Knowledge) was featured in the performance art exhibition Hard Return: Nine Experiments for this Moment, curated by Kate Gilmore and Jonah Westerman at the Neuberger Museum, SUNY Purchase College.

The project interwove a multichannel video installation with the creation of an original live performance that meditated on the trope of the cosmic dance—choreography designed to represent, translate, or otherwise embody celestial movements and processes—across time and geographies. Mixing cultural artifacts and performance lineages, personal and cosmic scales, Coates and her collaborators designed a cosmos for the twenty-first century out of the rubble of the twentieth, with the involvement of movers, musicians, and scientists from the Purchase College community.

The live performance folded in two other original works: Looking, after Shattuck, an installation by Amina Ross, and Invisible Universe, a film directed by Emily Coates.

Some Things We Know
Live performance, mixed media
Conception and choreography: Emily Coates
Direction and dramaturgy: Ain Gordon
Performed by Charles Burnham, Emily Coates, Soomin Kim, Derek Lucci, and Amina Ross, with movers and
musicians from the Purchase College community and cameos by Brent Hayes Edwards (4/8) and Sarah Demers
(4/9)
Music composition: Soomin Kim
Purchase College performers: Holly Belshaw, Avian Chang, Olive Fretts-Howard, Zorell Havercome, Doren
Johnson, Sydney Nocerino, Sophie Ortiz, and Eliot Walla
Blue dress designed by Harriet Jung and Reid Bartelme, with additional costumes drawn from their inventory
Sources for movement and texts include works by Ebenezer Adams Jr., Charlie Burnham, Emily Coates,
Michael Collins, Brent Hayes Edwards, Buckminster Fuller, Emily Greenwood, Soomin Kim, Francis de
Miomandre, Nyota Inyoka, Isamu Noguchi, Ruth Page, and Amina Ross

Looking, after the Shattuck Observatory
Multimedia installation and performance
Materials and duration variable
Amina Ross

Invisible Universe
Multichannel installation (excerpted from 2022 film of the same title)
Directed by Emily Coates
Director of Photography and Editor: John Lucas
Sound Design: Evdoxia Ragkou
Produced by Emily Coates, with Wright Laboratory, Yale University
Featuring (in order of appearance): Francisco D. Lopez, Emily Coates, Annie-B Parson, Richard Prum, Ni’Ja
Whitson, Dave Moore, Rashaun Mitchell, Reina Maruyama, and Silas Riener
Mixed by Quentin Chiappetta at mediaNoise
Artistic consultation: Brent Hayes Edwards, Ain Gordon, Will Orzo
Production support: Francisco D. Lopez, Victoria Misenti, Jeffrey Ashenfelter, Kai-Lan Olson
Installation support: Jacqueline Shikoff, Neuberger Museum
Invisible Universe was created while Emily Coates was artist-in-residence at Wright Laboratory at Yale
University, 2018-2020.

Choreographed by Emily Coates and Lacina Coulibaly with Maestro William Boughton directing the Yale Symphony Orchestra

The Yale Dance Lab presented a new version of Le Sacre du Printemps in February 2023 in partnership with the Yale Symphony Orchestra and the Yale Schwarzman Center.

The Rite of Spring famously premiered in Paris in 1913 with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky. Both the music and the choreography hit a nerve, as harbingers of modernism at the turn of the 20th century. The music lives on in orchestral repertories, and the concert dance world has seen countless restagings that formally rework the original story to speak to contemporary concerns.

The Yale Dance Lab-Yale Symphony Orchestra production drew on maps and travel images from the Beinecke collection, tracing transnational networks of cultural exchange across time to meditate on planetary crises and care.

The production was co-choreographed by Emily Coates and Lacina Coulibaly, with musical direction by YSO conductor William Boughton.

Lighting design: Tom Delgado (‘09 MFA)
Costume design: Aidan Griffiths (‘23 MFA)

The performances took place on Saturday, February 18, 2023 in Commons at the Yale Schwarzman Center.

The performance was captured in a film directed by seven-time Emmy Award-winning director Habib Azar.

Directed by Emily Coates

Invisible Universe is a feature-length experimental documentary and dance film by Emily Coates that chronicles spontaneous collaborations between leading dance artists and scientists encountering each other for the first time within Wright Laboratory. Part performance, part cinematic essay, the film frames the intimate, sometimes awkward process of dialoguing across differences, staging choreographic investigation inside a physics laboratory tasked with studying unseen phenomena. Featuring paired interactions between acclaimed choreographers Annie-B Parson, Ni’Ja Whitson, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Reiner, and renowned scientists Richard Prum, David Moore, and Reina Maruyama, with a cameo by research and development technician Frank Lopez, Invisible Universe considers the poetic confrontation between the methods of the dance-maker and the metrics of the scientist. D: Emily Coates, US, 1h20m

Director of Photography and Editor: John Lucas
Sound Designer: Evdoxia Ragkou

Electronic Press Kit

Choreography by Yvonne Rainer. Reconstructed for Performa 19 by Yvonne Rainer and Emily Coates.

A full reconstruction and reimagining of Rainer’s 1965 dance Parts of Some Sextets, in which we drew on archival research in the Yvonne Rainer Papers at the Getty Research Institute and Rainer’s own memory of the work. Performed a mere five times in 1965—at the Wadsworth Atheneum and Judson Church—the dance had never been restaged until 2019.

Best Dance of 2019, The New York Times.

Best of 2019, Artforum.

Performed by Rachel Bernsen, Emily Coates, Brittany Engel-Adams, Patrick Gallagher, Shayla Vie-Jenkins, Jon Kinzel, Liz Magic Laser, Nick Mauss, Mary Kate Sheehan, David Thomson, and Timothy Ward.

Choreography by Emily Coates.

An homage and reimagining of Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus dances. With costumes designed by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, performed by Miguel Anaya, Reid Bartelme, Brittany Engel-Adams, and Megan Wright.

Created by Emily Coates and Josiah McElheny.

Concept by Emily Coates and Josiah McElheny. Choreography and text by Emily Coates. Performed by Emily Coates, Sarah Demers, and Josiah McElheny. The mirrored sculpture is McElheny’s “Walking Mirror I” (2012), wood, mirror, nylon webbing, metal hardware. Commissioned by Danspace Project, 2018.

Choreography by Emily Coates.

An evening-length meditation on the shift from classical to modern physics through a reworking of Balanchine’s 1928 ballet Apollo.

Choreography by Emily Coates.

Music by Igor Stravinsky, text by C.F. Ramuz. Music direction by David Shifrin, stage direction and translation by Liz Diamond. Featuring Michael Cerveris, Tom Pecinka, James Cusati-Moyer, and Mariko Parker. Produced by the Yale School of Music and Yale School of Drama, presented at Sprague Hall, Yale University and Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.

Directed by Emily Coates and Sarah Demers.

Drawing on interviews with physicists whose research is based at CERN, we composed this science-art video to educate the general public about the discovery of the Higgs boson—and in the process, educate the public about dance, too.

Sculptural design by Tamar Ettun, choreography by Tamar Ettun and and Emily Coates.

An intermedia, durational performance piece created for the X Initiative gallery, commissioned by Performa 2009. Performed by Emily Coates, Tamar Ettun, and Jane Ira Bloom.

Choreography by Emily Coates and Lacina Coulibaly.

Duet created in studios and sites in New York and Ouagadougou, 2007-2009. Performed in theaters (Baryshnikov Arts Center, St. Mark’s Church/Movement Research Fall Festival, Yale Center for British Art, Brown, Cornell, Harvard), as well as excerpted site specific performances in Grand Central Station and on the High Line, New York, NY.