The audience is invited by musician Charles Burnham to move outdoors and into Kaatsbaan’s nearby barn. He leads us like a Pied Piper on violin. As we take our seats in the rustic barn, Emily Coates is dancing in circles outside on the grass in black yoga pants, a t-shirt, and sneakers. We see her neatly framed through the open barn doors. Meanwhile, actor Derek Lucci appears on the barn balcony, expounding on geometry. Coates continues her circling dance indoors as she speaks into a handheld microphone about her research on “cosmic dance.” She muses on the relationship between dance and the stars as well as cosmic dances across time and geography while tracing spiral patterns with her feet. She and Lucci talk over one another in a complex overlay of information. Occasionally one of them pauses, allowing for the words of the other to sink in. 

Bernham is now visible outside the barn doors, pacing while shaking rattles, ringing temple bells, and playing a wooden flute. With her one free arm, Coates repeats specific gestures that correlate with key words in her narration. Coates deduces, “Cosmic dance must form interrelationships—always using the materials and forms of the moment to mimic the patterns of the stars.” She seems to be doing just that.

Coates continues her fluid spiraling patterns—with a finger or an arm or her pelvis or her entire body—and brings in yet another element to the cosmic concoction: an extemporaneous discussion with scholar and philosopher Brent Hayes Edwards. The thought-provoking questions, moments of humor, and conversational give-and-take color the implications of her simple grapevine steps. Edwards questions how one could create a cosmic dance as just a solo: it should have a cast of thousands. Coates repeats a new pattern of kneeling to the floor followed by reaching to the sky. Edwards speculates that if she danced out the barn door all the way to Acapulco and back in two months, that would be a cosmic dance.

They discuss transitions—specifically parataxis, sentences without any coordinating connectors so that the mind must make the connecting leap. (I am wondering how this will play out choreographically.) With that, their conversation ends and Coates hands Edwards her microphone so she can freely dance out the door. Burnham, still outside, wends his way around her with flute and bells while she continues bowing and reaching, applauding toward the heavens, and dancing back-and-forth grapevines with fingers snapping in exultation. They continue the cosmic celebration . . . right out of sight.