Coates and Phuon--and Mullins!--light up Danspace Project

Left: Emmanuéle Phuon
Right: Emily Coates
(photo: Pascal Lemaitre)

Emily Coates and Emmanuèle Phuon share an evening of new work. The two choreographers share aesthetic lineages, through working with Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project and Yvonne Rainer.

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. Their choreographic donations intersect in an eclectic collage of sounds, dances, childhood wounds, anecdotes, and memories from Phnom Penh to New York, with an open return.

A History of Light, Emily Coates’ new project with MacArthur recipient Josiah McElheny, looks backward and outward: tracing a history of light, by intertwining dance aesthetics and scientific knowledge, and the unique history of the universe through the stories of women who have pushed art, science, and technology ahead. Twentieth century cultural and scientific references inform the work’s content and form.

--from publicity for "Emily Coates & Josiah McElheny / Emmanuéle Phuon: A Shared Evening"

So, backward and inward, backward and outward, all in search of what is unseen or unacknowledged. A particle of light. The story that light can tell. The life of a dancer. The brilliance of a scientist ignored because she happens to be a woman. The subtle strands of connection within dance lineages and webs of influence. The struggles of refugees and of those who devote their lives to helping them. A passionate Black composer less well known to most of us than her world-famous husband. A lighting designer without whom this work--and Phuon's--would be missing a large part of its magic. Our world rushes forward with little awareness or valuing of any of these.

Both artists sharing an evening at Danspace Project--Emily Coates and Emmanuéle Phuon--radiate mature elegance and intelligence in every move as they serve as witnesses and reporters for us.

Coates is the former New York City Ballet dancer whose book on physics and dance, co-authored with CERN particle physicist Sarah Demers, comes out in January 2019. Demers appears as a narrator--though, unfortunately, challenged by audio issues last evening--in A History of Light. Sculptor Josiah McElheny, both integrates his work into the piece and plays a physical role in its scenario, further breaking down borders between disciplines. I especially enjoyed his simple, clear demonstration of relative distances in the cosmos and the profound sense of our planet's humble presence in a cosmos mostly made of dark matter.

"Why are ballerinas always dying?" Coates asks after her own "dying" in front of a filmed Dying Swan sequence. That irritable question lingers in the air, untouched.

Conceived/created by Emily Coates and Josiah McElheny

Performed by: Emily Coates, Sarah Demers and Josiah McElheny

Music direction and composition: Will Orzo

Lighting design: Carol Mullins

If, in some strange turn of events, I was forced to see only one more dancer for the rest of my life, I wouldn't linger over that choice. I'd select Emmanuèle Phuon whose performance, Bits & Pieces (Choreographic Donations), is an embodied, seamless memoir collage with a long, varied personal narrative about unfolding as an artist and person, contributions from several dance colleagues, and musical tastes as diverse as John Cage, Tina Turner and Eric Satie. Like Coates, Phuon makes room for a non-dance collaborator--her amazing sound wizard, Zai Tang--to physically and vocally stray into the dance. Although there was a point at which the thread seemed to be stretching out a bit too long, I ended up feeling sad to have to tear myself away from an artist--a human--I could watch and listen to forever. I wished, in that moment, for young artists everywhere to witness Phuon--her specificity of gesture and story-like pacing, her foxy sense of humor, her claiming of pleasure and freedom in movement despite the damaging messages she, as a vulnerable, developing artist, absorbed along the way. Her presence says victory to me.

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

Emily Coates & Josiah McElheny / Emmanuéle Phuon: A Shared Evening concludes tonight with an 8pm performance. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Stars talk star stuff: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Robert Krulwich at 92Y

What's your hurry? Whatever.
Dr. Tyson's here to drop some science.
(W. W. Norton, 2017)

Since its 1935 opening, there have been five directors of New York's beloved Hayden Planetarium. Okay, class. How many can you name?

That's right: Neil deGrasse Tyson

L-r: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Robert Krulwich

And there you have it. A solid scientist---astrophysics, for heaven's sake!--with top-notch communication skills, irrepressible charm and the celebrity of a rock star. Raised in New York's very own Boogie Down Bronx by a Black father and Puerto Rican mother. Able to tap into his own life-long wonder and intellectual curiosity to help the rest of us mortals wrap our brains around stuff like the possibility of dimensions beyond the mere three we perceive with our puny, survival-oriented senses.

Last night, when Dr. Tyson strode out onto the stage of 92Y's Kaufmann Concert Hall, cheers went up from the audience, so much so that host Robert Krulwich (himself a celebrated broadcast journalist and co-host of NPR's Radiolab) had to wave us into silence so the two friends could get down to their conversation and the business of promoting Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Tyson's latest book.

While waiting for your morning coffee to brew, or while waiting for the bus, the train, or the plane to arrive, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry will reveal just what you need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe.

Science and scientists have taken a severe beating in Trump's New American Order. In this toxic atmosphere, Tyson's educational mission, visibility and accessibility loom even larger, approaching heroic status. While no one, onstage or in the audience, broached political or needlessly politicized issues during the 92Y appearance, anyone who thinks Tyson shirks from speaking up for rational policy needs to look at this video. The informal and wide-ranging chat revolved around both men's interest in stripping science facts of their austerity and their abilities to approach all of this with a storyteller's ready wit.

Tyson: "I have a photon joke. Can I tell it?"

Krulwich: "Go ahead."

Tyson: "Photon checks into a hotel, and the bellhop asks, 'Do you have any luggage?' Photon says, 'No, I'm traveling light.'"

And if you ever run into Tyson, you must ask to hear the entire hot cocoa/whipped cream story, which I will not spoil here. No worries. Just thank me when you see me later.

To be honest, I'm more of a casual science geek (and Tyson fangirl) than a deeply knowledgeable one but, as a neo-pagan, I share the agnostic Tyson's sense of wonder and admire his dedication to a cosmic perspective that rescues spirituality from being defined, confined and ultimately smothered by religious orthodoxy.

Excerpts from "Reflections on the Cosmic Perspectives," Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone.
The cosmic perspective is humble.

The cosmic perspective is spiritual -- even redemptive -- but not religious.

The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.

The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place, forcing us to reassess the value of all humans to one another.

The Virgo in me--sorry for the astrological reference, Dr. Tyson--completely gets his resistance to calling the color violet anything but "violet" as in "Roses are red, violets are...violet." The poet in me forgives him for that and grooves on the very idea of things called dwarf galaxies and runaway stars. The nosy person in me likes the question "What's going on between planets?" OMG, what, indeed?

I'm sympathetic to the notion that humans are simply not smart enough to figure out universes that might be trivial to the brain of a more intelligent species. I've seen what my fellow Americans are capable of unleashing on this planet. So, there's that. And how's this for real talk from Tyson? "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you." Oh, yeah. That much is clear every. damn. day.

For information on Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, click here. And to learn about other cool programs at 92Y, click here.

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For all you Rosanne Cash fans

Rosanne Cash and the Many Meanings of Love
by Ron Rosenbaum, Smithsonian Magazine, June 20, 2012

Somewhere out there...

Parallel Universes: The History of an Idea

Saturday, June 12 at 2:30pm

Roundtable: Eva Brann, Christa Davis Acampora, David Morgan, Paul Park (moderator), David Weinberg

The notion of the parallel universe—the idea that a replica or near replica of the worlds we know, have known, or will know—has permeated imaginative thought in both science and art throughout the ages. Vedic philosophy introduces the notion of the wheel. Nietzsche propounded the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence around the same time that the French mathematician Poincaré introduced his Eternal Recurrence Theorem. Parallel universes appear in numerous science fiction works, such as Phillip K. Dick’s Man in a High Castle, and have appeared as motifs in numerous films, including the Clarence Oddbody sequence in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and in Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors. This roundtable will examine the history of the idea of the parallel universe, and the confluence of thinkers from fields as varied as non-Euclidian geometry, Hinduism, romantic comedy, science fiction, and astrophysics who have wrestled with this imaginative concept.

Complete information and participant bios

Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination

247 East 82nd Street, Manhattan
646-422-0544
info@philoctetes.org