Works & Process Presents The Trail of Early Balanchine Archives with Emily Coates

Works & Process presents The Trail of Early Balanchine Archives with Emily Coates in partnership with the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The free event takes place on Thursday, October 23, 2025 at 6PM at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. RSVPs are requested; click here to reserve your spot.

Dancer, writer, performance-maker, and Yale professor Emily Coates spent two years mapping far-flung artifacts related to George Balanchine found in archives throughout the northeast United States. This research became part of her Works & Process commission, Tell Me Where It Comes From, scheduled to premiere in New York this November. A former dancer with New York City Ballet, Coates searched in holdings at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Harvard's Houghton Library, Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Archives at Jacob's Pillow, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts' Jerome Robbins Dance Division, and New York City Ballet Archives, among others. In this artist talk, Coates shares the idiosyncratic trail of ephemera and people she encountered along her journey to move closer to the source of his work, from a great remove, through archival shards. She will be joined by members of her creative team and fellow performers Derek Lucci and Charles Burnham, and special guest Adam Lenz, Public Engagement and Programs Manager at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Join us for this unique opportunity to see what goes into creating a new work about the afterlife of a legendary choreographer.

Emily Coates received the School of American Ballet's Mae L. Wein Award for Outstanding Promise and went on to perform internationally with New York City Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project, Twyla Tharp, and Yvonne Rainer. Widely commissioned and critically praised, her choreographic projects transform the marginalia of archival findings, collective memory, literature, and science into new forms. A Dance Research Fellow of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division (2019) and Fellow of the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU (2016), she is a Professor in the Practice at Yale University, where she founded the program in Dance Studies.