Capturing Balanchine’s Ghost: An Interview With Dancer and Choreographer Emily Coates

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.

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. Adam Lenz, the Public Engagement and Programs Manager, mentioned to me that the archivist there was in the process of reorganizing and creating finding aids for archival materials of the museum. They’d found one box called “the American Ballet box” that the previous archivist, who had been there 30 years, had kept over decades, but nobody had yet cataloged it. And so that got me interested in the archive of fragments related to Balanchine scattered across New England, where I live, and the relationship between the regional culture and material and the metropole, the center of the city where Balanchine wanted to be settled. He lasted a hot second in Hartford. There was something compelling about launching a story for this project through materials in the place where Balanchine was supposed to be settled but did not want to be.

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When I was looking through the materials, the very helpful archivist there put the photographs in front of me, and they were all performances from 1934. Not well labeled, but clearly, it was the American Ballet. I was looking at one, at the edge of the frame, and realized there was a figure standing in the wing, and that figure was Balanchine at 30 years old! And for 50 more years, Balanchine had stood in that wing. If you know the lore of New York City Ballet, that’s where he stood to watch at Lincoln Center. Clearly, that was his practice before or on arrival here, and there was something about that ghost there that launched the research for the performance and the content of the project.

Could you give an example of something that you discovered during your research that made it into the choreography in some way?

I’m thinking about what I don’t want to say because it would be giving away too much. I want it to be an enjoyable trail of surprises of things discovered wrought into performance poetics.

But I will say one thing I’m currently working with and developing, which isn’t going to be available this week but will be as the project grows. Balanchine has a large number of handwritten musical scores in his papers at Harvard. That felt like an intimate discovery for a choreographer so close to music: to be seeing the way he was training. There are music exercises where he’s learning harmonics and counterpoint—all little bits of original composition that he made. There is one show tune that he wrote. I have two fantastic musician collaborators, Charlie Burnham and Melvin Chen, a wonderful concert pianist. Charlie is a jazz violinist and improviser who runs the gamut in his musical genius, and he’ll be taking up some of the original composition fragments and making new music out of it.

What are some other favorite things that you’ve come across in the archives?

I can give you one oddity, a curio. In the Beinecke Library, there is a small locket with a photo inside. And the label is “Tanaquil Le Clercq?” but it’s her. It’s in the collection of a gay couple, Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell. The lovely surprise of research is that you’re into the unknown—your unknown as much as any unknown. I just searched “Balanchine Beinecke Library” online, and up this pops. It’s accessible digitally now, so I was able to pull up on my screen this odd piece of Tanaquil Le Clercq’s body, her head, her portrait in profile, older than when she was dancing actively, kept preserved and then passed on into their papers at the Beinecke Library. In that same collection, there are photographs of Tanny and George having lunch with Donald and Sandy in Weston, Connecticut. Tanaquil Le Clercq and Balanchine settled in Weston during their marriage, and it’s clear that she was the one who was friends with Windham and Campbell preceding her polio and well after.

So that’s been an interesting find, and it’s part and parcel of what you discover in archives—these relationships that are otherwise invisible and lost. Who knew that there was this friendship that ultimately led to little pieces of her and Balanchine ending up in this one repository in a library in New Haven?

Where are you now in the process with the piece?

The piece is also made transiently in a purposeful way. The archives are directing me here and there, and the making has been in residencies that have moved along with those archives. I had my first residency at the Fairfield University Quick Center for the Arts in Connecticut and, over the summer, a residency at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, where the School of American Ballet was to have been established but was not.

There is a theater there called the Avery Theater that the next year, in 1934, Balanchine brought the American Ballet, his new company, back to. We were able to work in that theater, which was so wonderful—it’s a historic space with its own history of avant-garde performance. And we were at Jacob’s Pillow in the fall. I will quote Norton Owen there, the archivist who did wonderful scavenging with me: “For a place that Balanchine never himself visited, there’s quite a lot related to Balanchine in the archive.” And here, at The Church in Sag Harbor, where it’s been quite wonderful and appropriate to arrive and then walk 0.2 miles east toward Balanchine’s grave in Oakland Cemetery and understand where his physical body has ended up.

Who are your collaborators?

I have two fantastic musicians, and then I have two theater collaborators who are also stellar artists in their own right. One is Ain Gordon, who’s director and dramaturg, and the other is Derek Lucci, who is a performer and actor and also working with us on the mise-en-scène. The makeup of the collaborators is exactly right for the vision. I work with quotations and collage. I mix language and movement. In this particular work, one thing that’s clear in the ballets themselves is when Balanchine is thinking about the afterlife, he actually moves away from choreographic steps into theatrical images. So, there was something about this project where I needed theater artists. And, of course, I needed the musicians. I’ve worked with these other artists over an extended period of time. We all have histories together.

Who will be performing?

Myself, Derek and Charlie will be here at The Church. When we get to the Guggenheim, Melvin will join us. And there will also be a surprise cameo for a New York City Ballet dancer.

What is your vision for the full-length piece? Do you feel you already know what it will be, or are you still figuring that out?

I love Works & Process because they support process. And there is a way in which I am allowing the process to lead. But as you go, of course, you get a kind of map of what you think is there, and what you have made, and then what more you want to make. Certain things are understood. There’s a first half, and there’s a second half. There’s known material in part one, there’s growing and developing material in part two. I have an outline we’re working with, but of course, something can happen along the way where you’re like, “Twist! Pivot! Set that aside. We’re going to go in this direction.” But I would say the first half of the piece is very much in view, and it’s now the second part that’s growing.

When will the completed work premiere?

At Works & Process, next fall. We return to the Quick Center for the Arts in March, and then through Works & Process, we’re going to Catskill Mountain Foundation and doing a tech residency there in early April. Then we’ll work toward the premiere in the fall.

But I have to tell you an amazing thing that happened here. The day we arrived, we set down our bags and went to Balanchine’s grave. Duke Dang texted me to say Are you all settled in at the church? How are things? I sent him a picture of the gravestone. Yup. This is amazing here. Thank you, Duke. And then half an hour later, he texted me to say, You were awarded the grant from the O’Donnell-Green Music and Dance Foundation. This was a grant for a music and choreography collaboration that I had applied to in the fall. Works & Process is the fiscal sponsor for it, and it is a hefty amount of money in support of the project—it arrived at their office by registered mail with a check exactly at the moment we were visiting Balanchine’s grave. It felt like “Woah! Cosmic synchronicity!” Because the grant is to support taking his musical papers and actualizing them in a new way.

Sounds like he’s happy about that!

Exactly! Thank you, George! And thank you for expressing your opinion from the great beyond!

So that will go toward the music of the second half. What is the music in this first half?

Everything in the piece is recycled and found. In the first half, the music that we’re making comes from another research thread which is Charles Ives. When you look at Balanchine’s repertory, there’s one glancing contact with anything that might be thought of as a “New England” aesthetic, and that’s in the music of Charles Ives in the piece Ivesiana. And the piece that remains from Ivesiana is “The Unanswered Question,” which was brought back into repertory after a long period of time If you look at Ives’ music, he is all about quotation and collage, and so what we’re working with now in part one comes from not full Ives works, but the little bits of the compositions that went into his compositions. The experience of it is one of understanding that there are all these sources feeding into it that have different histories. What we have done is create new poetics from them.

Is this the first time you are working with recycled and found art? Or is that something you’ve played with before?

I have definitely used these methods before, of quotation and collage, but I would say this is giving me the opportunity to push even further down that path. The deepening of the collaboration, in particular with Ain and Derek, has been so helpful because verbal language and writing are always part of my making, but it’s not part of the choreographic examples I had as a young performer where the way of making was the Balanchine way of making choreography. The music guided the architecture, and the movement was crafted and built in relation to that. This is for sure the most that I’ve pressed into this way of working. Everything is going to be recycled and quoted and then wrought into a new poetic form.

Even though your choreographic process is very different from Balanchine’s, do you feel you carry anything about either how he worked or the NYCB legacy into your own dance projects?

The material is sourced from archives, but “archives” are also quite expansively imagined as both the things—papers, photographs and moving images—and the dancers’ bodies. And that’s mine. That is also the bodies of the older dancers who still remain, like Allegra Kent, who has been a research source. So, yes, my own body is very much present as its own kind of found object in the piece.

And Derek, my fellow performer, is a very physically gifted actor. I’ve been transmitting to him aspects of the Balanchine style to see what sticks, what holds. It’s the idea of transmission, which is happening all the time at the School of American Ballet. I thought, what if I, as an experiment, while working on this with a mover who’s so completely outside of the dance world, see what gets through? It’s been a really fun part of the process. We start every day with a Balanchine barre.

I love that. So, what would you call The Scattering? A dance-theater piece? 

I do think it’s appropriate to call it a dance-theater piece, but it’s a goal of mine to create my own definition of choreography as a form that can hold verbal language as well as movement. It is a choreographic work.

And I will say one more thing about that. What I’m making is nothing that Balanchine would have made, but I think you need an influx of new ways of working and new methods to get at something about a legacy that can’t be said through the ballets themselves in the home where those ballets are preserved. And that’s what I hope I’m accomplishing here, saying something that can’t otherwise be said through the available forms in which he worked.