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George Coates George Coates was born in Philadelphia on March 19, 1952. During the 1971-72 season he was an actor in the School od Dramatic Arts of the University of California, Berkeley where he worked with the visiting director from France, Antoine Boursellier, who encouraged him to move to New York City. In New York he studied at the Mercer Art Center with Gene Frankel, performed in off-off Broadway plays and signed his first professional contract with the National Shakespeare Company as a character actor in 1973. With the Shakespeare Company Mr.

Coates toured the U.S. for nine months. In 1974 Coates settled in the San Francisco area, working with experimental theater collectives. He made his directorial debut at the Third Actualist Convention; a marathon gathering of emerging poets, performers and film makers. In 1976 he received a grant from the California Arts Council for Drop Outs, a perfomance developed from tape recorded inerviews with eight high school dropouts. This was followed by a series of perfomances created through extensive collaborative investigations and interactions with virtuoso soloists including mime Leonard Pitt and operatic tenor Johii Duykers which resulting in two solo shows, 2019 Blake and Duykers the First. These performances were presented at international theater festivals in Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium and France. In 1981 he formed George Coates Performance Works, an ensemble

of artists from diverse mediums, and began a series of music theater spectacles beginning with The How Trilogy (1981-1984: The Way of How, are/are, and Seehear) and continuing with Rare Area (1984-1986). Actual Sho, which receives its world premiere at the Theater Der Welt Festival in Stuttgart, West Germany June 25, 1987, was commissioned by American Inroads, which produces the US premiere July 28 in San Francisco. Coates' work has been presented by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Washington Performing Arts Society in Washington, D.C., the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, the Doolittle Theater in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco as well as the New York Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival produced in Munich, London, Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Granada, J3russels and Copenhagen. His works have been documented in the N.Y. Ti-

mes, Le Monde, The Drama Review, the New Yorker, Artweek, Newsweek, Opera News and Stagecraft Magazine. □

Actual Sho Director's Statement: Actual Sho is new music theater spectacle, formed by a synthesis of familiar performance techniques with emerging ideas and technologies. I have brought together performers, technicians, engineers, designers, composers, architects and craftspeople from developing industries and cultural institutions in the San Francisco area. From October 1986 through June 1987 we meet daily