Emily Coates with Derek Lucci. Photo courtesy of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

Tomorrow (January 9), dancer and choreographer Emily Coates will present her new genre-defying iterative performance about George Balanchine at the inaugural Dance Out East festival at The Church in Sag Harbor. From there, it will move to the 2025 Works & Process Underground Uptown Dance Festival at the Guggenheim on Sunday, January 12. The Scattering draws on Balanchine’s brief history in New England and Coates’ background as a former member of New York City Ballet, exploring how the body and spirit of a monumental choreographer scatters through time and space. Coates collaborates with Ain Gordon (director and dramaturg), Derek Lucci (performer), Charles Burnham (musician-composer), Melvin Chen (pianist) and archival collections throughout the northeast to create an evening-length work that collages dance, music and text—all related to Balanchine and his legacy.

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Observer spoke with Coates to discuss her work in process, some favorite archival discoveries and Balanchine’s ghost. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

Tell me how this piece started for you and about the inspiration.

I have done many things in my dance career, but I spent my formative years as a member of New York City Ballet. Last year, it celebrated its 75th anniversary. We all gathered at Lincoln Center for a beautiful Gala, and at the end of the performance, we were told we needed to move from the house onto the stage. In the darkness, there was the rise of the bodies, the migration out the doors, the flooding up backstage and onto the stage. Those few hundred bodies of dancers who carry this legacy made me think about choreographic legacy, transmission and the many other places it goes outside of the core central home—which are the ballets themselves and the company, New York City Ballet. I wanted to meditate on that and to say something about the far-flung fragments that exist outside of where we usually look for a choreographer’s afterlife.

How did that moment lead you to want to do archival research?

I’ve been doing archival research for a number of years now, both for my writing and my choreographic work. The last piece I made also involved an archival dig into the records of a 19th-century astronomical observatory. My home library is the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, where I’m on faculty at Yale. The first time I set foot in the Beinecke and was handed drafts of Langston Hughes poems, it blew my mind. The electric charge of these materials and the in-process nature of the archive, where you’re not seeing the public polished thing. You’re seeing the thinking and the motion as the artist is figuring out what that thing is going to be and how to express it and articulate it—all of that got me really interested in archives.

This project was launched when I was doing a public event at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, where—the other half of my career has been in postmodern dance, working with Yvonne Rainer. Yvonne and I were there doing a public event related to the 1960s performances she had done there.

© Observer