George Coates is an American theatre director most notable for his work with George Coates Performance Works, which he founded in 1977 in San Francisco, CA. The company produced over 20 multi-media live performances over a span of 25 years, winning a multitude of awards for its international performances, earning critical acclaim in Asia, Europe and South America and gaining North American attention at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. In the 1990s, he was the first to merge live performers within stage environments created by computer generated graphics in real time live theatre. Coates became known as a pioneer of experimental live theatre using stereographic projections and 3-D glasses populated by live actors and musicians.
Early life
George Coates was born in Philadelphia in 1952 and spent his childhood in New Jersey and later Rhode Island. His father was an Irish Catholicrotogravure operator at the Providence Journal. In 1969, at the age of 17, Coates hitched a ride to California and eventually settled in Berkeley. Coates auditioned for and was cast in numerous productions at the University of California, Berkeley theater department as an unregistered student. He then traveled to New York where he signed a year contract with the National Shakespeare Company, touring the country in character roles in "As You Like It," "Julius Caesar" and George Bernard Shaw's "St. Joan." When the contract ended, Coates returned to Berkeley, where he joined the Berkeley Stage Company and later the experimental theater group the Blake Street Hawkeyes, where he became fascinated by improvisation and the ensemble.
Early work
In 1976, Coates began creating original works with performers including movement artists, opera and gospel singers presented non-traditional formats in a theatrical context. His first major piece, 2019 Blake, was the story of a performer who can't keep a linear train of thought, performed by mime Leonard Pitt with a few props. His next one-man show, Duykers The First, featured operatic tenorJohn Duykers. The Way of How, performed at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in 1983, included the same performers, operatic tenor Rinde Eckhert, and a real time analog sound processing system invented by composer Paul Dresher that created the sound of an ensemble playing when a performer laid down multiple tracks on a tape loop.
Notable work
Coates' Rare Area was seen by 35,000 people in a sold-out, three-month run at San Francisco's Theater Artaud and in a one-month series at the Museum of Modern Arts' Herbst Theater. Commissioned in 1986 by William Cook and "American Inroads" for their San Francisco New Performance Festival, Actual Sho was created through eight months of improvisation, utilized an original design of a tilting, rolling stage. Actual Sho premiered in Stuttgart, West Germany on June 25, 1987 before its inclusion in the 1987 New Performance Festival. It was performed in Yugoslavia, Poland, the Kennedy Center's San Francisco Festival in Washington, DC, the Pepsico Summerfare Festival in Purchase, NY, the BITEF Festival in Belgrade and Herbst Theater in San Francisco. Coates collaborated with Steve Jobs in 1988 to create a multimedia production for the unveiling of Jobs' NeXT Computer System and was featured for this production in the 2015 film, Steve Jobs, directed by Danny Boyle and written by Aaron Sorkin. Coates' Right Mind opened the American Conservatory Theater's 1989-1990 season. It was brought to a close October 17, 1989 when the Loma Prieta earthquake caused extensive damage to the landmark Geary Theater, with the set for Right Mind on stage. A year to the day after the earthquake, Coates’ show Architecture of Catastrophic Change opened in his new theater, a renovated neo-gothic cathedral at 110 McAllister St. in San Francisco. In 1999, Coates became the first to acquire the rights to Valerie Solanas' long-lost work Up Your Ass, which had been lost by Andy Warhol and discovered at the Andy Warhol Museum thirty years later. The production, which was retitled Up Your A$$ by Coates and made its world premiere in 2000 at his San Francisco theater, was regarded one of the raunchiest and most controversial shows around, with an all-female cast, many of which were dressed in drag. The play was mounted on alternate nights with a production of Arthur Miller'sThe Archbishop's Ceiling, for which Coates had received funding from National Endowment for the Arts, to make a production examining censorship. Coates' production of the Miller play incorporated gender bending by including five of the performers from Up Your A$$, some in drag, some not. Up Your A$$ later premiered in New York at PS 122.
Recent Activity
From 2004-2011, Coates ran an online video blog, Better Bad News, a scripted video series with a cast of performers. He has hosted Twit Wit Radio, a weekly political satire program with a cast of actors, on Pacifica Radio, KPFA 94.1 FM, since 2011.
Influences
George Coates cited the participatory scientific displays of Frank Oppenheimer as a major influence. The brother of Robert J. Oppenheimer, Frank founded the Exploratorium, San Francisco's hands-on, interactive people's science museum.
