Emily Coates and Emmanuèle Phuon: "The Creative Process" - Thursday, March 4 at 11:00 AM

The Quick is committed to providing resources and supporting artists in the creative process to make new work. In this unique opportunity, we invite you into that process as dance and science come together.

Acclaimed dance makers, Emily Coates and Emmanuèle Phuon, are each in the process of creating new work. For this engaging conversation moderated by Shelley Phelan, PhD, chair and professor of biology, the artists will be joined by James Biardi, PhD, associate professor of biology, and Pierre Christian, PhD, assistant professor of physics. In a conversation based on active research, the artists and scientists will further interrogate ideas and concepts as they navigate the creation of their work. 

The Quick previously presented Emily Coates in fall of 2015 as part of our Global Theatre Series titled It’s a Woman’s World, with her piece “Incarnations,” a work that studied the intersections between kinesthetic imagination and scientific ideas, with physicist Sarah Demers.

This is just the beginning of our partnership, and an opportunity to see first-hand how dancers work, learn more about the research artists engage in to create new work, and watch the experimentation of learning live.

Artist Statement

Emily Coates

“I mash up ethnographic and archival research, texts and images, and dance histories to create live, intermedia performances. I write and choreograph, and frequently engage with collaborators in the process, from visual artists to scientists. My new project builds on my previous work with dance and science, which includes “Incarnations” (2017), my first evening-length work, and “A History of Light” (2018), created with Josiah McElheny, both commissioned and presented by Danspace Project; and my book Physics and Dance (Yale University Press, 2018), co-written with particle physicist Sarah Demers. The performance piece is part of a larger project, Science Dances, in which I'm assembling stories of dance and science in dialogue over the past one hundred years (and as far back as 3,000 BCE), across geographies and cultures, manifesting in multimedia form: live performance, film, and writing.

“Emmanuèle Phuon’s intriguing collaboration with a paleontologist in her 2013 dance “Khmeropédie III: Source/Primate” launches my performance. From there I move into a playful, American postmodern dance breakdown of the politics of observation: “are you looking at me?!” The work collides dance with technologies of scientific discovery, through the creation of “cosmic dances” set in relation to an astronomical observatory and the stars. I’m interested in dance’s ability to decenter the human-centric control of the planet, which will demolish civilization if we don’t act fast.”

Emmanuèle Phuon

“Half Cambodian and half French, my artistic path has led me to reflect on issues of identity, memory, and displacement. Drawing from Cambodian culture, Cambodian classical dance, American modern and postmodern dance, I explore physically and conceptually ways in which tradition and experimentation can be synthesized to generate new forms of performance. My choreographic research has been focused on how these concepts simultaneously co-exist in one body, the way my own experience has shaped my dancing and dance-making. My cycle of three works, Khmeropédie I, II, and III, looked specifically at Cambodian classical dance vocabulary, pushing and pulling its modalities into new potential. The performance I am developing from my Khmer Project research at the NYPL includes a re-interpretation of an episode of the Reamker, the Cambodian version of the Indian epic Ramayana. Using contemporary Western theatrical strategies, I explore the traditions of shadow puppet theater (Sbaek Thom) and all-male masked dance-theater (Lkhon Khaol) to confront the rituals of the past in light of today’s new climate crises. The new work includes a movement installation among trees, as I seek to connect the animism in Cambodian cosmology with contemporary dendrology and environmental science.

Artist Biographies