George Coates was born on March 19,1952 and is an American theater director most notable for his work with George Coates Performance Works, which he founded in 1977 in San Francisco, CA.
13 Facts About George Coates
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George Coates 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.
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George Coates was born in Philadelphia in 1952 and spent his childhood in New Jersey and later Rhode Island.
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George Coates's father was an Irish Catholic rotogravure operator at the Providence Journal.
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In 1969, at the age of 17, George Coates hitched a ride to California and eventually settled in Berkeley.
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George Coates auditioned for and was cast in numerous productions at the University of California, Berkeley theater department as an unregistered student.
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In 1976, George Coates began creating original works with performers including movement artists, opera and gospel singers presented non-traditional formats in a theatrical context.
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George 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.
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In 1999, George 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.
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The play was mounted on alternate nights with a production of Arthur Miller's The Archbishop's Ceiling, for which George Coates had received funding from National Endowment for the Arts, to make a production examining censorship.
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From 2004 to 2011, George Coates ran an online video blog, Better Bad News, a scripted video series with a cast of performers.
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George Coates has hosted Twit Wit Radio, a weekly political satire program with a cast of actors, on Pacifica Radio, KPFA 94.1 FM, since 2011.
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George Coates cited the participatory scientific displays of Frank Oppenheimer as a major influence.