Photo: Peter Gannushkin
Hometown: Pittsburgh, PA
Current city: New Haven, CT
Age: 39
Attended an arts high school? Throughout high school, I divided my schedule between academic classes and pre-professional ballet training. At sixteen, I moved to NYC to attend the School of American Ballet and completed high school at the Professional Children's School.
College and degree: BA in English, Yale University, 2006 (completed at age 32)
Graduate school and degree: MA in American Studies, Yale University, 2011 (completed at age 37)
Website: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~ecc34/file/Emily_Coates.html
How you pay the bills: Currently, I'm a full-time faculty member at Yale, where I direct the dance studies curriculum housed in Theater Studies.
All of the dance hats you wear: Dancer, writer, choreographer/multi-media artist, curriculum devisor and professor.
Non-dance work you do: Some of the work that I do now may seem like "not-dancing"--such as producing student work, maintaining budgets, grading papers, designing syllabi, administrative work for the curriculum, etc. But in the end, all of these activities relate to being an artist in the world.
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Describe your dance life in your….
Teens.....
When I was a teenager, I wanted to write fiction. Actually, biomechanical engineering and brain surgery were in the mix then too, mainly because they sounded impressive and far beyond my reality. But it was dancing that most forcefully tapped me on the shoulder. I took my first dance class at age four in Brussels, Belgium, where my family lived for two years. When we returned to the States, I kept dancing, danced a lot, and continually advanced. Moving to New York at sixteen and eventually accepting the offer to join New York City Ballet sealed my fate, for reasons I had not anticipated: the daily ritual of dancing had become part of me and me of it. I knew and craved the feeling of dancing, and in this way it sneaked in and became my existence. That I became a dancer is as surprising to me as the many vivid experiences that the art form has brought me.
20s...
My career in my 20s began one way and ended up in another. The spring that I graduated from high school, Peter Martins offered me a job with New York City Ballet. I spent six years at NYCB, performing in a wide array of ballets by Balanchine, Robbins, some Martins, and others. Working with Jerry Robbins was a highpoint. I realized early on that I was mostly interested in the people who are dancing than in the dance they are doing, and I believe he was, too. He used to shout at us, "Know who you are, god damn it!"
My dancing peers during these years went on to locate their careers entirely in the ballet world. My career went in another direction, largely instigated by an encounter with Angelin Preljocaj during City Ballet's 1997 Diamond Project. We wore slippers, not pointe shoes, and bare legs, and performed a contemporary movement vocabulary.
At the end of his piece, La Stravaganza, I danced in a duet that culminated in a surreal kidnapping: I was shuttled away from the classical ensemble, and absorbed into the modern dance half of the ranks. Art sparked reality; by the end of that season, the pointe shoes, classical lines, taut buns, architectural makeup, tutus, and inherent hierarchies of the ballet repertoire felt alien to me. I was no longer the same dancer. In 1998, I decided to leave the company to explore "modern dance," which unexpectedly led me to Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Several months after I left NYCB, I got in touch with Misha through a friend at NYCB. He is, after all, the king of this crossover from ballet to modern dance, and I hoped he might be willing to offer me advice. I had been wandering around lower Manhattan, investigating different types of modern dance classes, and fallen into a rhythm taking class at the Cunningham Studio. I survived on unemployment, and went to see as many different performances as I could.
The next day, he told her to have me call him; he had a job to offer me. Two weeks later, I began rehearsing with his company White Oak Dance Project, and a number of months after that began to dance with him. I was twenty-four years old.
During the four years that I danced with Misha and White Oak, we performed new works by then-emerging choreographers Sarah Michelson, Lucy Guerin, and John Jasperse; older revivals such as the Erick Hawkins piece Early Floating and Trisha Brown's Glacial Decoy; the newly commissioned After Many A Summer Dies A Swan by Yvonne Rainer; and PastForward, a major retrospective of postmodern dance featuring works by Brown, Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay, David Gordon, Lucinda Childs, Simone Forti, and Rainer, among other things.
My new repertory had several notable features: I was now working with quite a few women choreographers--at City Ballet, they had been almost exclusively men. And I was learning the meaning of "postmodern dance," from the original artists themselves.
I was also dancing frequently with Misha. Over four years, I performed three duets with him, in works by Mark Morris, Karole Armitage, and Erick Hawkins. Outside of the technical feats of NYCB's repertoire (the 110th reason I left ballet was because I hated pirouettes!), I had more space to think about presence in performance. I had to amp up and grow up, especially in relation to Misha's formidable stage persona. Like playing tennis with a pro, dancing with Misha made me a stronger performer.
When White Oak ended in 2002, I began working with Twyla Tharp's touring company. Whereas White Oak's repertory had allowed me to think about presence, Twyla's shot me back into a fascination with movement itself. I loved dancing her choreography and the challenge she poses to individuals within it. If I have any "if only..." wish with regard to dance history, it is to have been part of her late 60s group, with Sara Rudner, Twyla, and Rose Marie Wright... I feel an affinity for those "three broads, doing god's work," as Twyla has described it.
By then, I had been dancing professionally for eleven years and performed a wide range of repertory in three different companies. Each new company necessitated reinventing my skills and identity as a dancer. I loved it, and yet I was ready to take a hiatus from dancing in order to return to the dream that I had put on hold, to complete my degree at an Ivy League university. Bundling up ten years worth of credits that I had accumulated part-time at Fordham University, I applied and was accepted as a transfer student to Yale. I wasn't ready to stop dancing; I saw the degree as a way to expand my professional options and branch out as an artist.
The decision wasn't easy. I'm deeply grateful to certain advisers, for keeping me artistically moored. That year, I stood in a storage closet at City Center with Twyla, stumbling to explain my reasons for wanting to be a full-time student. Six months earlier, I had had a similar conversation with Misha in a dressing room while on tour in Italy. Both advised me not to stop dancing. Sara Rudner attended one of the last performances I did with Twyla's company in NYC, held my hand afterward backstage, and said with characteristic empathy: "It's a big change. But this will all be here for you when you're ready to return to it." While I was a student, Twyla wrote to me in an email: "Remember, you're a dancer."
I spent the first year of my full-time undergraduate existence at Yale desperately wanting to run back to my old life, and the second year realizing that I had made a solid decision and would survive. I became an English major in order to focus on writing. I took more pre-1800 literature classes than anyone rightly needs, as well as courses in linguistic and cultural anthropology, Chinese poetry, political science, performance studies, creative writing, and astronomy.
In my last semester, I began working with Joseph Roach, a scholar of performance studies. We spent hours discussing why Yale had no curricular representation of dance. He was the only professor I had met who encouraged me to find connections between dance practice and scholarly work. During one of our final meetings, he told me that he had received a large award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and offered me a position at Yale. Thus began my teaching career.
30s....
I've spent my thirties fostering a career that my late-twenty-something decisions enabled. I've been engaged in multi-faceted activities, including teaching and developing the dance curriculum at Yale, pursuing writing and other artistic projects, and continuing to perform.
Designing an arts curriculum where none had existed before is a unique experience. At Yale, we now have seven dance studies courses, a host of ancillary activities, and a co-curricular studio-based research initiative called Yale Dance Theater, which I also direct. The curriculum reaches outward in interdisciplinary dialogue with a variety of other arts, humanities, and social science disciplines. My own courses address postmodern dance in practice and theory, cross-disciplinary performance, the history of dance, dance on film and--in a co-taught venture with particle physicist Sarah Demers-- physics and dance.
Performing continues to feed me, as well. I've worked steadily with Yvonne Rainer since 2006. During this time she has created five new works for a small group of inestimably experienced dancers that has come to be known as the Raindears. Other performing experiences have folded into the mix, too. Over the past four years, I have worked on the piece Heartbeat, by Christopher Janney, for which Sara Rudner serves as the choreographic consultant. I have learned a tremendous amount from these projects.
When I turned thirty, I knew I needed to begin to develop my own work, and write for publication--any publication, I didn't know what or where. Both have unfolded. I've collaborated with Lacina Coulibaly on a duet and a group piece for Ballet Memphis. Co-creating and performing with him has been enriching and revelatory. For Performa 09, I worked with sculptor Ettun to create a performance installation. Bronwen MacArthur has been another important collaborator. Writing is important to me, too. I swore to myself that I would publish my first essay by thirty-five, which I have done, and more has followed. My collaboration with Sarah Demers has spawned workshops, public presentations, and a science-art video that is soon to be released. All quite surprising, as life tends to be.
Emily Carson Coates with Alex Ketley; photo by Ian Douglas
40s...
I'm not yet forty, so this is decade is uncharted territory, though it does raise the subject of aging.
This past Friday night, I saw Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton--artists of long-standing and astonishing investigation--perform in NYC. Yvonne Rainer is a force at seventy-nine. At sixty-nine, Sara Rudner lifts her pinky finger and you feel you understand dance anew. Ralph Lemon continually morphs and deepens. Just when he seemed to have reached an apex, Misha's dancing got even richer. These artists establish models of longevity that I believe we can all aspire toward. I hope to cultivate as devoted, curious, expansive, playful, profound and multi-faceted a practice as these artists whom I admire most. Above all, I aim for their integrity of purpose.
Can you talk about your teaching and artistic work right now?
My current teaching and artistic work synthesizes movement practice with writing, and operates across a range of disciplines. In my studio-based courses, I tend to teach postmodern dance repertoire and composition, as opposed to ballet technique. A friend once remarked that I "took the express train downtown" when I left City Ballet, and in a very humorous way he was right, insofar as "postmodern dance" takes shape downtown in NYC. I love the Balanchine style, but feel more home teaching the conceptual choreography that marks the second half of my career.
One of the main things I'm working on right now is my collaboration with particle physicist Sarah Demers. We co-teach a course called The Physics of Dance, and have a contract with Yale University Press to co-write an interdisciplinary textbook (I definitely never could have imagined that this would be my first book publication!) We're also just completing a project called "Discovering the Higgs," funded by the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. Out of this, we're in the final stages of editing a video called "Three Views of the Higgs and Dance," which we'll launch soon online. I hate literal translations of science into choreography, and this video is not that. We try to push both of our disciplines to be as complex as possible in dialogue.
You have performed with or performed in the work of several icons in modern and postmodern dance – Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainier, Twyla Tharp, etc. Can you share a few stories with college students who might just be learning about these artists? Can you share a little window into the process, the work, etc?
I gravitate toward performing the work of Lucinda Childs, Twyla Tharp, Yvonne Rainer, and Sara Rudner, because their choreography is strongly conceptual while also physically rigorous. These women are philosophers who think through movement, albeit in very different ways. Stepping into their work feels like pulling on, for an instant, their worldview. When I performed "Carnation," Lucinda Childs's 1964 solo, for instance, I learned a feminist exactitude of a variety that was not my own (granting that she denies any feminist intent in the work!.) Sara's work is so completely her, too: I love and respect the way she lives in her movement over time. Twyla's work is different again, at once ferocious and loving. Yvonne is the quintessential artist-theorist; her body of work has guided me these many years.
One of the most important things I have learned from working with these artists is knowing who you are and being true to it. Their work comes out of a depth of self-knowledge. They can only be who they are, and their work uncompromisingly reflects that.
While I know I'm not going to produce exactly the same kind of work that they have, I carry their influence inside me. To remember what they have done and how they did it, and teach and transmit the ideas in whatever form that may assume--this is an honor.
Why and how did you select your areas of study in college and graduate school, versus degrees in dance?
I had been a professional dancer for eleven years when I arrived at Yale. I knew I didn't need to study dance; in fact what I most wanted to do was look at everything but dance. The English major made sense for me because it allowed me to focus on writing. I went on to complete my master's degree in American Studies at Yale because, among other reasons, I wanted to deepen my thinking and writing with regard to artistic production, and American Studies is one home for cultural studies. I believe when you're an artist, everything you do has the potential to inform your sensibility. I did not see these degrees (or any higher degree) as incompatible with my artistic work, but rather complementary.
Do you still perform?
Absolutely! One of the reasons I wanted to finish my degree was not to stop dancing, as I've noted, but to gain a greater measure of control over my own artistic projects. I feel fortunate to have been able to support myself in my 20's dancing full-time. However, I had reached a point at which I didn't want to have to pay my rent through dancing, because that meant I had to perform in anything that was given to me. Usually, I believed in the work, but not always. The work that I perform in now--my own, Yvonne Rainer's and other projects--I'm able to do because I'm interested and believe in the ideas. The physics and dance workshops that I co-present with Sarah Demers are also a kind of performance, as is teaching. So what constitutes performing has gotten broader for me, as well.
What are you exploring in your artistic work over the next year?
So many things, including writing an interdisciplinary physics and dance book, for one!
Do you still take classes? How do you train and care for your body?
My dance practice has shifted over the years. As a ballet dancer in origin, I can say with certainty that it's helpful to step away from ballet class for extended periods of time in order to explore other forms of techniques, warm ups, and movement systems. It will make you a more versatile dancer. Ballet dancers tend not to value time not dancing--I have come to see the value of this, too. When I step into the studio now, I feel like a person first, and my actions feel more like me, as opposed to the brainchild of a specific training. In a way, going to school and taking a hiatus from dancing in my late twenties was part of some grand plan to produce this aesthetic effect... to ground me as a dancer. This is how art and life intertwine.
Advice to young dancers about teaching, learning how to teach, and the role teaching will play in their dance careers:
Teaching is one of the greatest gifts of being an artist, if you recognize it is a part of your practice. It can deepen your artistic work, as you can in class probe pressing questions that you are grappling with yourself. Most important, teaching forces you to think about the well being of others. It diminishes solipsism. I love teaching and I love working with students. I learn from them everyday.
Current passions and curiosities:
The history of science and its correlations to the history of aesthetic movements fascinates me right now....
Books, websites, blogs that interest you right now:
The students of Yale Dance Theater write a blog throughout the semester, based on their experience engaging with seminal works of choreography. Their work is a great example of having multi-faceted outcomes as an artist. For those out there interested in the intersection of movement and writing practice: http://ydt.commons.yale.edu.
Last performance you saw that really inspired you:
Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton in NYC. Longevity, humility, and commitment to the practice--whatever that practice may be--gets me every time. Who wants to see anything less?
Final advice to young dancers:
Be adventurous! Remain open! There is no one right way; there is only your way. Finding your way requires remaining curious and open to new ideas, without judgment.
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