Still from Invisible Universe by Emily Coates

Invisible Universe is a feature-length experimental documentary and dance film by Emily Coates that chronicles spontaneous collaborations between leading dance artists and scientists encountering each other for the first time within the Wright Laboratory. Part performance, part cinematic essay, the film frames the intimate, sometimes awkward, process of dialoguing across differences, staging choreographic investigation inside a physics laboratory that has been tasked with studying unseen phenomena. The film features choreographers Annie-B Parson, Ni'Ja Whitson, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Reiner, scientists Richard Prum, David Moore, and Reina Maruyama, and research and development technician Frank Lopez. Directed by Emily Coates. Director of Photography and Editor: John Lucas. Sound Design: Evdoxia Ragkou. US, Run time: 67 minutes.

The screening of Invisible Universe will be followed by a conversation with Emily Coates, Reina Maruyama, and Annie-B Parson moderated by Brent Hayes Edwards.

Sundays on Broadway
6:00 p.m. - doors open at 5:45 p.m.
WeisAcres, 537 Broadway #3
New York, NY 10012

All donations go to the performers.
$5-20 suggested.

Artists' Bios:

Emily Coates (dancer, choreographer, writer) has performed internationally with New York City Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, Twyla Tharp, and Yvonne Rainer. A recipient of the Mae L. Wein Award, her career highlights include three duets with Baryshnikov, in works by Erick Hawkins, Mark Morris, and Karole Armitage. Her choreography has been commissioned and presented by Danspace Project (NYT Critic’s Pick 2017, NYT Fall Dance to Watch 2018), Performa (NYT Best Dance 2019, with Rainer), Baryshnikov Arts Center, Works & Process at the Guggenheim, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Quick Center for the Arts, Hopkins Center for the Arts, among others. In 2023, she was a featured artist in the exhibition Hard Return at the Neuberger Museum. A fellow at Center for Ballet and the Arts and New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, she is Professor in the Practice and the founding Director of Dance Studies at Yale University. 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

Brent Hayes Edwards writes and teaches on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz. His most recent book is Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, the co-written autobiography of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill (Knopf, 2023), which was awarded a 2024 American Book Award and a 2024 Jazz Journalists Association Book of the Year Award for Biography or Autobiography. Edwards is also the author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 ASCAP Foundation Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism as well as the 2019 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association and Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies.

Reina Maruyama is an experimental particle/atomic/nuclear physicist and a Professor of Physics at Yale University. She is exploring new physics in nuclear and particle astrophysics, particularly dark matter and neutrinos. She and her group are carrying out experiments in “direct detection of dark matter” with terrestrial-based detectors for both axions and WIMPs and searches for neutrinoless double beta decay. She has authored over 300 publications and has presented her work in numerous conferences and workshops. Maruyama is the recipient of several awards, including the Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, Yale Public Voices Fellowship, and Woman Physicist of the Month from CSWP. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She is often quoted in popular science press such as APS News, Nature News, Science News, and Symmetry Magazine for her work on dark matter and neutrinoless double beta decay.

Annie-B Parson is the artistic director of OBIE and Bessie award winning Big Dance Theater. She has co-created works for BAM, The Old Vic/London, Sadler’s Wells/London, The Walker, Theatre National/Paris, Japan Society and The Kitchen. Parson has made choreography for rock shows, marching bands, movies, museums, objects, television, augmented reality, opera, ballet, theater, symphony orchestras, string quartets, and a chorus of 1,000 amateur singers. She has made dance for Lorde, David Byrne, David Bowie, St. Vincent, Kim Deal, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Esperanza Spalding, Suzan Lori Parks, Wendy Whelan, Anne Carson, Laurie Anderson, Salt n Pepa, Jonathan Demme, Spike Lee and the Martha Graham Dance Co. Her work with David Byrne includes American Utopia. Her most recent book is entitled: The Choreography of Everyday Life.