Emma Coyle

Emma Coyle is a writer, artist, and performer based in New York. She co-founded Invited Dress Productions, a Brooklyn-based theater collective whose work includes The Triumph of Folly, Secret Forest, Midsummer Midwinter, and Commedia Dell'Arte E-Puppetry. Her writing has appeared in Olive Branch Review and Musée Magazine, and her artist's book Manifesto for a Lover was exhibited at Fanzineist Vienna 2025.

Project Title: Take me to the River: Immersive Acts in Theater, Ecology, and River Pageantry

Project Description: What does it mean to perform with a river rather than in front of it? Contemporary river pageantry, exemplified by the River Clyde Pageant, reaches back through centuries of outdoor pageantry traditions, but its modern iteration raises questions about the unique water-based location of these performances. What does the river do? What happens to the line between audience and performer when we consider the performances of more-than-human kin? What kind of attention becomes possible when the pageant's performance and the ecosystem around it are not considered separate spheres? This talk moves through the conditions of the pageant's own production to ask what kind of immersion is being produced when the theatrical and the ecological are happening simultaneously.