RSVPs will open on September 11.

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. Special guests joining her include 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.

SEATING POLICY | Programs are free and open to all, but registration is requested. Check-in line forms 45 minutes before the advertised start time. Registered guests are given priority check-in 15 to 30 minutes before start time. Five minutes before the advertised start time, all seats are released, regardless of registration, to our patrons in the stand-by line. If you arrive after the program starts, you will be seated at the discretion of our front-of-house staff.

STANDBY LINE | If registration is sold out or has ended, do not fret! We welcome you to come to the Library regardless of registration status and wait in our standby line, which forms 45 minutes before the advertised start time. Five minutes before the program starts, all remaining seats are released. While this is not guaranteed, we will do our best to get you into any of our programs.

ASSISTIVE LISTENING AND ASL | ASL interpretation and real-time (CART) captioning available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing accessibility@nypl.org.

BRUNO WALTER POLICY | Please note that any unoccupied seat will be released five minutes before the show begins and holding seats for anyone beyond that is prohibited. There is no food or drink allowed inside the venue.

AUDIO/VIDEO RECORDING | Programs may be photographed and recorded by and at the discretion of the Library for the Performing Arts and will post signs indicating as such. If you would prefer your image not be captured, please let us know and we can seat you accordingly. Attending any program indicates your consent to being filmed/photographed and your consent to the use of your recorded image for any and all purposes of the New York Public Library.

PRESS | Please send all press inquiries to Alex Teplitzky at alexteplitzky@nypl.org. Please note that all recording, including professional video recordings, are prohibited without expressed consent from the Library.

Photo: Emily Coates and Derek Lucci in Tell Me Where It Comes From by Emily Coates. Photo: Chris Randall