The Kitchen Sets 2014 Spring Season: SYNTH NIGHTS, MATA Festival & More

The Kitchen has announce programming for its Spring 2014 season, which begins April 4-5 with the latest edition of Synth Nights, The Kitchen's series of live electronic music. This installment, curated by composer Nico Muhly, features a trio of musicians-Joe Snape, Jethro Cooke, and Jordan Munson-who all bring acoustic textures and an emotional core to their electronic compositions.

The season's music programs continue in mid-April at the MATA Festival, celebrating 16 years of presenting composers under 40. This year's event, April 14-21, brings together 34 composers from 17 countries, whose works will be performed by Uusinta Ensemble, ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), Neue Vocalsolisten and others. MATA's events for 2014 also include an installation and performance on the neighboring High Line. On May 16, singular vocal talent Bishi will visit from London for the New York premiere of her solo concert Albion Voice, sung in English, Bengali, Bulgarian and Biblical Greek. Then, Opera Cabal will present American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) June 12-13, performing the North American premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas' haunting ATTHIS.

The Kitchen continues to support bold new work by today's leading choreographers. May 3-5, as part of DANSE: A French-American Festival of Performance and Ideas, The Kitchen will present Cecelia Bengolea and François Chaignaud's altered natives' Say Yes to Another Excess - TWERK, which mines the dance culture of the club scene, with help from London grime DJ label Butterz. The following week, May 8-17, Melinda Ring will present a new body of work comprising two durational performance installations, and a raw, stripped-down evening-length dance. Jen Rosenbilt will explore shifting, improvisatory relationships in A Natural Dance, May 29-31. And The Kitchen's Dance and Process series returns June 6­-7, with new works by Kim Brandt, Alan Calpe, Rebecca Patek and Gillian Walsh, all curated by artist Sarah Michelson.

In the gallery, The Kitchen's season of exhibitions begins with Gerard & Kelly's Timelining, a performative examination of queer time and history, on view through April 19. Curatorial Fellows from The Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program will then curate Common Space, May 23-June 14, investigating the different approaches to public space and shared resources in today's culture. And the season will conclude with The Rehearsal, a group exhibition June 25-August 1, in which Courtesy the Artists, Discoteca Flaming Star and Georgia Sagri revisit an unreleased Jules Dassin movie about the military junta in Greece, filmed 40 years earlier in the building that is now The Kitchen.

This spring, The Kitchen will also celebrate a seminal figure in their history: artist Robert Longo. On May 22, The Kitchen's Spring Benefit Gala will honor Longo's legacy of performances, exhibitions, and curatorial contributions to The Kitchen (including first exhibitions of Dara Birnbaum, Jack Goldstein, and Cindy Sherman's Film Stills). Sherman and John Turturro will co-host the event, with honorary chairs Keanu Reeves, Michael Stipe, and Janelle Reiring & Helene Winer.

More information on The Kitchen's Spring 2014 programming is below. Tickets are available online at www.thekitchen.org; by phone at 212.255.5793 x11; and in person at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street), Tuesdays-Saturdays, 2:00-6:00 P.M.

THE KITCHEN SPRING 2014 PROGRAMMING

VISUAL ART
Gerard & Kelly
Timelining
Through April 19
Through a series of sculptures, site-specific interventions, and a performance enacted for the duration of the exhibition whenever a viewer is present, Gerard & Kelly underscore The Kitchen as a site to work through questions of queer time and intersubjectivity. Curated by Tim Griffin.

MUSIC
Synth Nights, curated by Nico Muhly
April 4-5, 8pm
$15
Acclaimed composer Nico Muhly brings together three composers across three generations-Jethro Cooke, Jordan Munson, and Joe Snape-whose music relies on three dimensions, concerned as it is with capturing a moment in both space and time.

MUSIC
MATA Festival
16th annual Festival of New Music
April 16-19 & 21, 8pm; April 20, 1pm
$20
Called "the city's leading showcase for vital new music by emerging composers" by The New Yorker, MATA presents its biggest annual festival to date, featuring an A-list of instrumentalists performing works by an international group of 34 composers under age 40. Finland's Ensemble Uusinta has their US debut, while Germany's Neue Vocalsolisten is paired with International Contemporary Ensemble for Oscar Bianchi's evening-length Matra and an a capella program. Also appearing are Talea, Ekmeles, Mivos Quartet, and Mantra Percussion, among many others. Full details at thekitchen.org.

DANCE
Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud
altered natives' Say Yes to Another Excess - Twerk
May 3-5, 8pm
$20
Ceclia Bengolea and François Chaignaud skim the line between popular and concert dance, drawing on their immersion in club culture from London to New York. With dancers Alex Mugler, Ana Pi, and Elisa Yvelin-as well as London grime scene DJs Elijah and Skilliam of the label Butterz-they move from Martha Graham's technique to house, challenging the expressive, communal, poetic, and discursive powers of dance.

DANCE
Melinda Ring
Forgetful Snow
May 8-17, 7pm
$15
A triptych composed of two durational performances and an evening-length dance, Forgetful Snow investigates the transcendent possibilities of body and mind. By day, performers in the installations The Landscape and (Memory of) Snow Machine labor at searching for landscapes and retrieving lost moments of time. These simple tasks involving the body, video, and language are quietly focused and profoundly mysterious. In the evening, performed naked and without accompaniment, the dance is stripped of layered-on meaning and emotion. Presented instead is pure choreography and performance-formally complex, physically raw and intimate. Ring's main collaborators for this project are performers Talya Epstein, Maggie Jones, and Molly Lieber.

MUSIC
Bishi
Albion Voice
May 16, 9pm
$15
In the New York premiere of this acclaimed one-woman show, London-based artist Bishi performs music from her latest album against a spectacular backdrop of animated video. Singing in English, Bengali, Bulgarian, and Biblical Greek, she traces her search for personal and national identity in a changing world.

GALA
The Kitchen Spring Benefit Gala honoring Robert Longo
May 22
Cipriani Wall Street
The Kitchen celebrates one of its key figures, Robert Longo, who both exhibited and performed at the space while curating debut shows by legendary artists such as Cindy Sherman and Jack Goldstein. Sherman and John Turturro co-host, joining honorary chairs Keanu Reeves, Michael Stipe, and Janelle Reiring & Helene Winer. Visit thekitchen.org for complete information.

VISUAL ART
Common Space
May 23-June 14
As arenas formally designated as "public" are increasingly privatized, this exhibition seeks to locate-across a diverse spectrum of social, political, and economic spheres­-where the category of the common might yet exist today. Taking up relations among people in different kinds of space, featured works engage struggles over unequally distributed territory at the same time as invoking spaces that are effectively shared. Curated by Maria Teresa Annarumma, Molly Everett, Joo Yun Lee, and Kristine Jærn Pilgaard, Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.

DANCE
Jen Rosenblit
A Natural Dance
May 29-31, 8pm
$15
A Natural Dance is concerned with structuring bodies falling out of relation, aesthetically and spiritually, in order to locate ways of being together. This work locates logic outside of a normative lens, looking to an improvisatory system for disrupting behavior while ushering in the glory of absurdity, timing, meaning, sequence, divinity, and the political.

DANCE
Dance and Process: Kim Brandt, Alan Calpe, Rebecca Patek, and Gillian Walsh
June 6-7, 8pm
$15
This event features new works and is the culmination of a 10-week group process of sharing work and feedback. Curated by Sarah Michelson.

MUSIC
Opera Cabal presents ACME
ATTHIS, by composer Georg Friedrich Haas
June 12-13, 8pm
$15
Opera Cabal and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble perform the North American premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas's haunting monodrama ATTHIS, conducted by Peyman Farzinpour, former director of new music at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and stage directed by Emmy Award-winning director, Habib Azar. Soprano Ariadne Grief intones verses of isolation and longing by Sappho, with Opera Cabal Artistic Director, Majel Connery, embodying her amorous double. Haas shares the stage with Guggenheim Fellow, Marcos Balter, in three never-before staged works by Balter featuring violist Nadia Sirota.

VISUAL ART
The Rehearsal
Courtesy the Artists, Discoteca Flaming Star and Georgia Sagri
June 25-August 1
Forty years ago, Jules Dassin made a film about popular uprisings against the military junta that had ruled Greece since 1967. Then in exile with his wife, Greek actress Melina Mercouri, Dassin shot this film in the building that is now The Kitchen. Just as the film was completed, the junta was overthrown and the film, tilted The Rehearsal, was never commercially released. For this exhibition, artists Courtesy the Artists, Discoteca Flaming Star, and Georgia Sagri engage the themes, resonances, and Brechtian structures of Dassin's work against the recent narratives of collective action for autonomy on the global stage. Curated by Matthew Lyons in collaboration with the artists.