The Kitchen to Present 2023 DANCE AND PROCESS in June

The Kitchen, in collaboration with the American Academy of Art and Letters, will present Dance and Process, the series that brings dance artists into a group process interrogating methods of choreographic and dance practice, with artists challenging default structures in their own work and the field at large. Through this year's partnership with Arts and Letters, the choreographers had the rare opportunity to develop works inside their gallery spaces, repurposing them as studios for a four-month residency, and as a site for the final performances. Dance and Process this year features Martita Abril, Jonathan González, and Anh Vo, with presentations June 3-4 at 6pm (at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Audubon Terrace, entrance on Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets). Tickets are sliding scale $5-$15. The program is organized by Moriah Evans and Yve Laris Cohen with The Kitchen's Matthew Lyons (Curator) and Angelique Rosales Salgado (Curatorial Assistant).

Initiated in 1990 under the name Working in The Kitchen, Dance and Process is The Kitchen's longest running series, each year engaging artists with varied practices from which they launch examinations of dance and the methods through which it takes form. Martita Abril's work digs at the raw feelings and distortions generated by the intersecting physical and conceptual boundaries of race, culture, and laws. Jonathan González works towards the limits of discipline, and their practices emerge through the prisms of Black study, somatics, and the choreographic. Anh Vo creates dances and produces texts about pornography and queer relations, being and form, identity and abstraction, history and its colonial reality.

The Kitchen's Winter/Spring 2023 season, like much of the institution's programming under Executive Director and Chief Curator Legacy Russell, works with artists in a durational programming model that nurtures collaborative experimentation-very much in the spirit and groundbreaking tradition of Dance and Process. The Kitchen continues this season to untether performance from the finite realm of presentation (and often from finite space), with works evolving through process, accumulation, and recontextualization.

Martita Abril (Pichu) is a performer, choreographer, and teaching artist from the border city of Tijuana, México. She is active in the NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program and has been a volunteer interpreter aiding families seeking asylum at Dilley, Texas detention facility. Martita is interested in working with other artists and being in different processes, she has collaborated with Lux Boreal, Kim Brandt, Yanira Castro, Yoshiko Chuma, Milka Djordjevich, Daria Fain & Robert Kocik, Allyson Green, Mina Nishimura, Cori Olinghouse, okwui okpokwasili, David Thompson, and Will Rawls, among others. She performed in Simone Forti's Dance Constructions and the Handles exhibition by Haegue Yang at the Museum of Modern Art. Martita is the Coordinator of Movement Research at the Judson Memorial Church and teaches workshops in Bushwick for Spanish-speaking familias through the iLAND (Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance) program by Jennifer Monson.

Jonathan González's work unfolds as performance that has encompassed works for video and text, sonic investigations and platforms for collaborative study. González's writings have been published by EAR | WAVE | EVENT, Dance/NYC, Regiones:CENTRAL, Movement Research Performance Journal, Contemporaryand, The Creative Independent, Contact Quarterly, Cultured Magazine, deem journal, and Angela's Pulse. They have received support from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Art Matters Foundation, Jerome Hill Foundation as well as residencies with Loghaven Artist Residency, Center for Afro-futurist Studies, MANCC and Trinidad Performance Institute.

Anh Vo is a Vietnamese dancer and writer based in New York City. They received their degrees in Performance Studies from Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). Vo is currently a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow.

About the American Academy of Arts and Letters

The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of architects, artists, composers, and writers founded in 1898. Members present over seventy awards and prizes each year to support established and emerging practitioners in their disciplines. In addition, Arts and Letters purchases artwork for donation to museums across the country and hosts exhibitions, events, and performances in its historic landmark buildings in Washington Heights.

About The Kitchen

One of New York City's oldest nonprofit alternative art centers, The Kitchen is dedicated to offering artists opportunities to create and present new work within, and across, the disciplines of dance, film, literature, music, theater, video, and visual art. The institution fosters a community of artists and audiences, offering artists the opportunity to create-and for audiences to engage with-work that pushes the boundaries of artistic disciplines and strengthens meaningful dialogues between the arts and larger culture.

The Kitchen was founded as an artist collective in 1971 by Woody and Steina Vasulka, and was formalized as a 501c3 in 1973. It has, from its infancy, been a space where experimental artists share progressive ideas with like-minded colleagues. It was among the very first American institutions to embrace the emerging fields of video and performance, while presenting visionary new work in established disciplines such as dance, music, literature, and film. This unique combination generated an environment immediately conducive to groundbreaking and cross-disciplinary exploration, helping to launch the careers of many artists who have defined the global avant-garde.

Among the artists who have presented significant work at The Kitchen are Muhal Richard Abrams, Laurie Anderson, ANOHNI, Robert Ashley, Charles Atlas, Kevin Beasley, Beastie Boys, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Julius Eastman, Philip Glass, Leslie Hewitt, Darius James, Joan Jonas, Bill T. Jones, Devin Kenny, Simone Leigh, Ralph Lemon, George Lewis, Robert Longo, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sarah Michelson, Tere O'Connor, Okwui Okpokwasili, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, Sondra Perry, Vernon Reid, Arthur Russell, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Spiegel, Talking Heads, Greg Tate, Cecil Taylor, Urban Bush Women, Danh Vō, Lawrence Weiner, Anicka Yi, and many more