Danspace Project presents Emmanuèle Phuon & Emily Coates
Company:
Danspace Project
Danspace Project presents an evening of new work from Emmanuèle Phuon & Emily Coates, November 8, 9, & 10, at 8pm
Emmanuèle Phuon's Bits & Pieces (Choreographic Donations) is performed by Phuon and sound artist Zai Tang with choreography by Phuon, Vincent Dunoyer, Patricia Hoffbauer, Elisa Monte, Yvonne Rainer,and David Thomson.
Emily Coates's A History of Light is created by Coates in collaboration with artist Josiah McElheny, and performed by Coates with particle physicist Sarah Demers.
Choreographers Emily Coates and Emmanuèle Phuon bring all-new work to Danspace Project Thursday, November 8 through Saturday, November 10 at 8pm. The two choreographers share aesthetic lineages through their work as members of Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project and Yvonne Rainer and Group.
"This shared evening makes public a conversation that we began more or less ten years ago, when we both began to create our own work," Coates and Phuon say. "Over the years, we have discussed many aspects of moving from performer to choreographer-from the logistical to the lofty. We have talked about how to turn aesthetic influences into useful tools, and the ways our shared lineages play out very differently in our work, partly due to the differences in our backgrounds." Whereas Phuon's early training lies in Cambodian classical dance, Coates began her career at New York City Ballet.
U.S.-based Coates, who directs the dance studies concentration at Yale University, has danced principal roles with the New York City Ballet (1992-1998), White Oak Dance Project (1998-2002), and Twyla Tharp Dance (2001-2003), and performed works by Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown, Erick Hawkins, Deborah Hay, Mark Morris, and Sarah Michelson, among many others. She has performed with Yvonne Rainer since 2005. New York and Brussels-based Phuon's dance training began at the age of six in the Royal Ballet of Cambodia in Phnom Penh before her arrival in New York, where she performed with the Elisa Monte Dance Company and White Oak Dance Project (1995-2002). She has danced in the work of Martha Clarke, Merce Cunningham, Joachim Schloemer, and Meg Stuart, and with Rainer's group since 2010.
A History of Light, conceived by Emily Coates with New York-based visual artist and MacArthur recipient, Josiah McElheny, looks backward in time and outward in space, narrating a unique history of the Universe through formal images that layer choreographic material and visual elements. These images combine sensorial, embodied, and spatial views drawn from the stories of women who have pushed art, science, and technology forward.
Twentieth century cultural and scientific references inform the work, which is performed by Coates and particle physicist Sarah Demers. (They both appeared in in Coates' Incarnations at Danspace Project in 2017). McElheny's previous work has often engaged deeply with science, such as his well-known project An End to Modernity about "big-bang theory," currently on view at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. A History of Light builds on a number of other overlapping interests McElheny and Coates share, including light, cinema, dance, women's history, and modernist aesthetics.
Emmanuèle Phuon's Bits & Pieces (Choreographic Donations) looks backward and inward, narrating her personal journey through dance via Cambodia, France, New York, and Brussels with the help of 5 choreographers: Patricia Hoffbauer, David Thomson, Elisa Monte, Yvonne Rainer, and Vincent Dunoyer. Each of these artists have provided choreographic donations that intersect in an eclectic collage of sounds, dances, childhood wounds, anecdotes, and memories from Phnom Penh to New York, with an open return.
Phuon became inspired to investigate her own relationship to dance after working in Cambodia with young classical dancers on themes of tradition, innovation, and the relevance of traditional dance in a changing society. "Onstage, together with sound designer Zai Tang, who, like me, is half European and half Asian, I hope to share dance as I have come to understand it, guilt included," she writes.
On sharing their work together, Phuon and Coates explain, "We are not planning to bend our interests toward each other-this would be inorganic. Instead, any connections that arise will be due to the serendipitous effects of juxtaposing our work in the same evening."
Bits & Pieces (Choreographic Donations)
Concept: Emmanuèle Phuon
Performed by: Emmanuèle Phuon, Zai Tang
Dramaturgy and Direction: Vincent Dunoyer
Choreography: Vincent Dunoyer, Patricia Hoffbauer, Elisa Monte, Emmanuèle Phuon, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson.
Sound Design: Zai Tang
Lighting Design: Carol Mullins
A History of Light
Concept: Emily Coates
Conceived and Created by: Emily Coates & Josiah McElheny
Performed by: Emily Coates & Sarah Demers
Music Direction and Composition: Will Orzo
Lighting Design: Carol Mullins
Advance tickets, unless otherwise noted, are priced at $22 ($15 Danspace Project members) and can be purchased by visiting danspaceproject.org or by calling (866) 811.4111. When available, tickets can be purchased at the door on the night of the performance for $25 (cash or check only).
Danspace Project is located inside St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery at 131 East 10th Street (near 2nd Avenue) in Manhattan's East Village. Danspace Project's main entrance is fully accessible via ramp. Phone: (212) 674.8112. Email:info@danspaceproject.org.
Emily Coates is a dance artist whose projects move across cultural and disciplinary divides. She has performed internationally with New York City Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project, Twyla Tharp, and Yvonne Rainer. Career highlights include three duets with Baryshnikov, and principal roles in works by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown, Deborah Hay, Mark Morris, Karole Armitage, Erick Hawkins, Tharp, and Rainer, among others. Her solo and collaborative work has been commissioned and presented by Danspace Project, Ballet Memphis, Performa, Carnegie Hall, the Wadsworth Atheneum, Yale University Art Gallery, and Works & Process at the Guggenheim. In 2017, she premiered her first evening-length piece, Incarnations, at Danspace Project. Her recent fellowships and awards include a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in the category Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics (2015) and a fall 2016 Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts. Her book Physics and Dance, co-written with particle physicist Sarah Demers, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in January 2019. She teaches at Yale University, where she created and directs the dance studies concentration.
Josiah McElheny is a sculptor, performance artist, writer and filmmaker who investigates the history of modernism in hopes of expanding on its dominant narratives of aesthetics, politics, and culture, and the criticality of our relationship to them. Recognized for his conceptually rigorous approach, and physical mastery of materials, such as glass, McElheny explores vastly-ranging topics from astronomical cosmology and the infinite, to under-recognized artists or oeuvres. His practice mines the past to lay the groundwork for a path forward, giving a glimpse into not only what could have been, but visions for what might be. McElheny has exhibited widely including surveys at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio and the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts, as well as exhibitions at The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has often collaborated with performers, including the Laban Conservatoire of Dance, London and Susanne Sachße, for his 2016 exhibition The Ornament Museum at MAK - Österreichisches Museum für angewandte, Vienna, Austria. In addition to monographs on his work, McElheny has created and edited numerous book projects of new scholarship and is a frequent contributor to publications such as Artforum, Cabinet, and Bomb Magazine. In 2006 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
Emmanuèle Phuon is French-Cambodian and lives in Brussels, Belgium. She has studied dance at the Royal Ballet of Cambodia, the Conservatoire National de Danse (France) in Avignon, Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. In New York, she has performed with Elisa Monte Dance Company from 1989 to 1994, Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project from 1995 to 2002 and has had the privilege to work with Martha Clarke, Joachim Schloemer, David Thomson among others. She has been a member of Yvonne Rainer's informal company, the "Raindears" since 2010. Ms Phuon is a 2009 and 2015 Asian Cultural Council grantee for her choreographic work with Amrita Performing Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Her work has been presented at the Baryshnikov Arts Centre, the New Haven's Festival of Arts and Ideas (2010), the Spoleto Dance Festival in Charleston (2011), the Guggenheim Works and Process (2013), Singapore Da:ns festival (2016).
About Danspace Project
Danspace Project presents new work in dance, supports a diverse range of choreographers in developing their work, encourages experimentation, and connects artists to audiences. Now in its fourth decade, Danspace Project has supported a vital community of contemporary dance artists in an environment unlike any other in the United States. Located in the historic St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, Danspace shares its facility with the Church, The Poetry Project, and New York Theatre Ballet. Danspace Project's Commissioning Initiative has commissioned over 570 new works since its inception in 1994.
For more information, please contact Lily Cohen, (212) 674.8112, lily@danspaceproject.org.
Phuon and Coates, 1998. Photo by Pascal Lamaitre.
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