Emily Bate
Emily Bate is a performer, composer and song leader. She works in music & performance circles and runs Trust Your Moves, a 65-member queer community chorus designed around liberation and co-creation. Emily is currently working on Wig Wag, a hybrid music-theater piece, where the audience sings, reads text, and enjoys the pleasures of spectatorship, with a quartet of singer-performers leading the way.
Emily has worked with artists like Erin Markey, Chet Pancake, MJ Kaufman, The Bearded Ladies Cabaret, and Mal Cherifi.
Emily’s work has been supported by an Independence Foundation Fellowship, two Leeway Art & Change Awards, the MAP Fund, Art is Essential, the SBMA grant, and a 2021 Pew Fellowship.
Awarded Grants
2022
Window of Opportunity Grant (WOO)
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Overview
Emily Bate (ACG '19) has been invited to share a work-in-progress showing of her new performance piece, Wig Wag, in the upcoming Trade School Festival in Philadelphia. Wig Wag is an interactive theater piece that explores community singing. Led by a quartet of queer and trans singer-performers, the audience is led through a collective ritual of singing and reading text together. The piece explores the tension and pleasure of the being in social relationships with each other, allowing audiences to viscerally feel their collective interdependence.
The Trade School Festival, taking place June 15-26, 2022, is a festival and exchange platform that celebrates the work of Philadelphia performing artists and creates connections with artist peers across the country. The Window of Opportunity Grant will support Emily in paying her Wig Wag collaborators a living wage as they develop a vital “proof of concept” for potential partners, funders, and supporters.
2019
Art and Change Grant (ACG)
Related grantees
Overview
Emily will create a concert that will explore the history of LGBTQ choruses, as both anchors of queer and trans community and sites of social change. Trust Your Moves, Emily’s 65-member queer community chorus will perform a concert exploring this history by combining music drawn from the archives of other LGBTQ choruses with two original pieces--one she composes, and one written by Daniel de Jesús (they/he).
