Past Event: Charles Aubin

Kicked a Building Lately? Charles Aubin in conversation with Emily Coates 

How can performance transform our experience of the built environment? How can we reconsider spaces and their histories through live art? This far-reaching conversation between curator and museum director Charles Aubin and dancer-choreographer and director of dance Emily Coates explores how artworks can conjure new familiarities and memories in familiar spaces. Aubin draws on his decade as curator at Performa, New York’s leading performance biennial, and his collaborations with artists such as Madeline Hollander and Jimmy Robert. Coates brings to bear her three decades as a maker and performer with artists such as Yvonne Rainer and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Together, the two share stories of work that stirs up urban environments and social histories to create encounters that reverberate beyond their original context, and look ahead.

 

Location

32 Edgewood Ave, Room 204

About the Speakers

Charles Aubin is co-director of Centre Pompidou Jersey City. Previously as Senior Curator & Head of Publications at Performa (2013-2023), he has organized performances and programs featuring a wide range of artists, architects, choreographers, and filmmakers, including Nairy Baghramian, Jérôme Bel, Julien Creuzet, Tarik Kiswanson, Franz Erhard Walther, Mabel O. Wilson, and Haegue Yang. In 2019, Charles coedited Bodybuilding: Architecture and Performance, the first publication to survey the use of live performance by architects. He is the editor of On the Town, A Performa Compendium: 2016–2021, a reference guide for the commissioning, producing, and presentation of contemporary performance. Between 2015 and 2018, he also served as curator for the inaugural program of Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, where he co-organized the last major exhibition of Lutz Bacher and founded the annual dance festival Échelle Humaine. His writing has appeared in Artforum, art press, Critique d’art, frieze, Kaleidoscope, and Mousse.

Emily Coates is a dancer, choreographer, and writer who has performed internationally with New York City Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project, Twyla Tharp and Yvonne Rainer. Her choreographic work has been commissioned and presented by the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Works & Process at the Guggenheim, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Danspace Project (NYT Critic’s Pick 2017, NYT Fall Dance to Watch 2018), Performa (NYT Best Dance 2019, with Yvonne Rainer), among others. In 2023 she was a featured artist in the exhibition Hard Return at the Neuberger Museum. A 2016 Fellow of the Center for Ballet and the Arts and a 2019 Dance Research Fellow, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, she is Professor in the Practice of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and Director of Dance Studies at Yale University, where she created the dance curriculum and the Yale Dance Lab. She co-authored Physics and Dance with physicist Sarah Demers (2019), and co-edited Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 with Yvonne Rainer (2023). emilycoates.art

Co-sponsored by the Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies Program at Yale, and the Yale School of Art's Painting and Printmaking program, this event is free and open to the public.