The Kitchen Announces Fall 2018 Season
By: Julie Musbach Aug. 15, 2018
The Kitchen, founded in 1971, has continued to serve as an important catalyst for a broad community of groundbreaking artists working across disciplines. In today's landscape, where contemporary artists and arts institutions are collaborating in new ways and generating new contexts for the continuing evolution of multi-disciplinary art, The Kitchen, as a nimble, smaller-scale organization, plays an especially vital role. It provides emerging and established artists a hot-house environment for the presentation and discussion of their work, supporting and seeking to foster a vibrant, living dialogue among artists from every field and area of culture. From multimedia exhibitions that unfold as symbolically abundant narratives, to performances that mine and traverse musical and dance histories, to musicians whose ecstatic virtuosity soars above genre, the Fall 2018 (September-December) season vitally showcases The Kitchen's propensity for artists who understand-and can thereby elude, upturn, and obliterate-the boundaries of expectation.
Two exhibitions this season expand the potentials of narrative art and look towards utopia in their contemplation of escape from confining mores. In Her garden, a mirror(September 13-October 20), visual artist Chitra Ganesh works with a varied palette of art historical and literary sources to extend the futurist vision of Bengali Muslim author and social reformer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's 1905 story, "Sultana's Dream." With a series of linocut prints and three large-scale installations in sculpture and video, Ganesh densely populates a utopian dream that coalesces the feminist fantasy the writer articulated over a century ago with the contents of contemporary imaginaries. Artist and author Jibade-Khalil Huffman's Tempo likewise creates an exhibition-as-narrative, in an hour-long video installation broadcast onto numerous screens and surfaces, interrogating our relationship to and expectations for black music and the performance of identity (November 1-December 15).
Performance at The Kitchen continues to be as multifarious as ever, with artists harnessing the vast possibilities of the mutable, multidisciplinary space. The U.S. theatrical debut of visual and theater artist Liliana Porter's THEM, co-directed with visual artist Ana Tiscornia and presented with El Museo del Barrio, continues Porter's career of perception-bending work (October 25-26). Tourmaline-activist, writer, filmmaker, and, per Janet Mock in Allure, "the preeminent and foremost scholar on Marsha P. Johnson"-and filmmaker Sasha Wortzel present their celebrated short, Happy Birthday, Marsha!, as a live, immersive screening with performances, and a live score from Geo Wyeth (September 21-22). The film sees acclaimed Tangerine star Mya Taylor playing trans activist Marsha "Pay it No Mind" Johnson on her 24th birthday, hours before her often under-acknowledged role in the Stonewall Riots would change history.
Choreographer Trajal Harrell returns to the Kitchen-where in 2014 he presented the entirety of his acclaimed Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church series-with the NY premiere of Caen Amour, co-presented with the Crossing the Line Festival 2018, produced by the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF). "Funny, affecting...ironic in tone, and visually like no other choreography you've seen" (The Guardian), Caen Amour is a crossroads of a contemporary hoochie-koochie show, fashion runway, and dance laboratory; stage, catwalk, and dressing room; a museum piece and revisionist history (September 18-19). Choreographer Moriah Evans, who previously presented her piece Variable Dimensions at The Kitchen, returns with her newest performance, Configure (December 5-8).
In its musical programming, The Kitchen continues to embrace artists whose live performances tend to transcend our ideas of what a "concert" might be. The Kitchen and Crossing the Line Festival also co-present the FIAF-produced world premiere of artist/choreographer nora chipaumire's completed three-part #PUNK 100% POP*NIGGA, exploring three musical ideologies-punk, pop, and Congolese rumba-in marathon performances (October 11-13).Comedic performer Morgan Bassichis, who accesses elements of queer protest through a "stage persona [that] moves through the world in a naïf's daze," and whose storytelling is often sung "a voice so honeyed and seductive that audible sighs are sometimes heard coming from the audience" (Artforum), shows off how sung duets can teach interpersonal skills (November 1-2).
With Nothing Is Still, electronic musician Leon Vynehall has turned his most recent album-"a stunning concept record about his grandparents that incorporates ambient and modern classical music" (Pitchfork)-into an immersive performance (September 27-29). Percussionist Eli Keszler's "artful, perplexing, and endlessly fascinating" work uses "rigorously conceived scores to harness the inchoate energy of improvisation and its capacity for surprise" (The New York Times). He presents a multimedia performance of his upcoming album Stadium, a percussive mimicry of the movements and rapid transformations of Manhattan (October 2). Tyshawn Sorey, "a preternaturally talented multi-instrumentalist who has built a career in the territory between standard definitions"-thought of in some circles "as a jazz drummer" and in others "as an avant-garde composer" (The New York Times)-comes to The Kitchen for three evenings of performance (October 21-23). Cellist and composer Leila Bordreuil, driven by a fierce interest in pure sound and inherent texture, challenging conventional cello practice through extreme extended techniques and amplification methods, continues a series of compositions for amplified cello and double-bass with Piece for Cello and Double Bass Ensemble II (November 20-21).
More information on The Kitchen's Fall 2018 programming is below. Tickets are available online at 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 2018 FULL PROGRAMMING
[EXHIBITION]
Chitra Ganesh
Her garden, a mirror
September 13-October 20
In this solo exhibition, Chitra Ganesh continues her exploration of gender and power in a futurist imaginary, taking as a point of departure the utopian, feminist, sci-fi novella from 1905 called Sultana's Dream by Bengali author and social reformer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. These new works in printmaking, sculpture, and video engage art historical and literary sources to further reimagine the roles of the individual and the collective during periods of societal turbulence. Curated by Matthew Lyons.
[DANCE]
Trajal Harrell
Caen Amour
September 18-19, 7pm and 9pm
Tickets: $25 General / $20 Members
Trajal Harrell's latest work reimagines the hoochie koochie, an erotic dance first popularized by the Syrian dancer Little Egypt whose 1893 performance at the Chicago World's Fair spawned a number of imitators trying on an "oriental" style of dance in traveling shows and fairs throughout the US. From the hoochie koochie's exoticizing, sexually objectifying foundations, Harrell writes that he mines for "forms of creative resistance between the cracks of history." So emerges a crossroads of a contemporary hoochie-koochie show, fashion runway, and dance laboratory; stage, catwalk, and dressing room; a museum piece for the historical imagination. Co-presented with the Crossing the Line Festival, produced by the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF).
[FILM]
Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel
Happy Birthday, Marsha!
September 21-22, 8pm
Tickets: $20 General / $15 Members
Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel present a live immersive screening of their film Happy Birthday, Marsha! which imagines iconic activist and performer, Marsha "Pay It No Mind" Johnson in the hours before the 1969 Stonewall Riots. The evening will include performances by intergenerational collaborators on the project including Geo Wyeth, who will score the film live.
[MUSIC]
Leon Vynehall
Nothing is Still
September 27-29, 8pm
Tickets: $20 General / $15 Members
London-based musician and producer Leon Vynehall presents the U.S. debut of the immersive live show for his album Nothing is Still (Ninja Tune), a lyrical ode to his grandparent's immigration to New York City from the United Kingdom in the 1960s. The performance includes musicians from London's leftfield and jazz scenes including Sam Beste on piano/synth, Rob Mullarkey on bass, Will Ritson on drums and Vynehall himself on synth, guitar, drum machine and lap steel.
[CONVERSATION]
The Kitchen L.A.B.
October 1, 6:30pm
Free
For its continuing conversation series, The Kitchen invites artists and writers to consider the term representation, taking particularly into account its resonances with postwar critical structures, contextualizations of identity, and impulses toward non-representative social structures on both ends of the political spectrum.
[MUSIC]
Eli Keszler
Stadium
October 2, 8pm
Tickets: $20 General / $15 Members
Celebrating his latest record on Shelter Press entitled Stadium, Eli Keszler presents a new solo music alongside video installations by artist Alan Segal. The live percussion performance draws from the album's collected city-space recordings, fragmenting these sounds through acute instrumental means. As a visual and auditory experience, Keszler creates resonant, melodic, and percussive textures that move massive expanses into the tactile dimension.
[MUSIC/PERFORMANCE]
nora chipaumire
#PUNK 100% POP*NIGGA|
October 11-13, 7pm
Tickets: $25 General / $20 Members
The Kitchen is pleased to present the world premiere of this three-part work conceived of as a live performance album inspired by chipaumire's formative years in Zimbabwe during the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. Each section explores distinct sonic ideologies-punk, pop, and Congolese rumba-confronted and celebrated through the artists Patti Smith, Grace Jones, and Rit Nzele. chipaumire moves through these three, distinct sonic and visual landscapes as part of her continued investigation of portraiture and self-portraiture, biography, subjecthood, liberation, and independence. Co-presented with the Crossing the Line Festival, produced by the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF).
[MUSIC]
Tyshawn Sorey
October 21, 6pm
October 22-23, 8pm
Tickets: $20 General / $15 Members
The acclaimed instrumentalist and composer presents three evenings of performances offering the fullest overview of his various working methods to date-including intergenerational collaborations and ritual works, as well as pieces featuring his percussion cage, conduction, and a newly-formed ensemble that integrates spoken word, turntablism, and spontaneous composition. See thekitchen.org for specific programs. Organized by Tim Griffin.
[THEATER]
Liliana Porter
THEM
October 25, 6pm and October 26, 7pm and 9pm
Tickets: $25 General / $20 Members
THEM, co-directed by artists Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia, will make its theatrical debut in the United States at The Kitchen. Through a series of vignettes and with a great deal of humor, the performance questions the conventions through which we perceive things, and offers an invitation to recreate narratives beyond your expectations. Presented by El Museo del Barrio, the SCAD Museum of Art, and The Kitchen.
[EXHIBITION/INSTALLATION]
Jibade-Khalil Huffman
Tempo
November 1-December 15
In a new video and sound installation, a narrative unfolds across surfaces and screens, revealing and obscuring objects in the gallery space over the course of an hour. By dramatizing our relationship to culture, Huffman examines our affinities for black music, and our expectations for its potential as a tool of resistance. Within this mutable narrative, the characters-waylaid by a contemporary condition that demands a performance of identity, even while those identities are undermined by systems of oppression-seek to enact a kind of utopia. Curated by Lumi Tan.
[MUSIC/PERFORMANCE]
Morgan Bassichis
Damned If You Duet,
November 1-2, 8pm
Tickets: $20 General / $15 Members
What better way to learn basic interpersonal skills somewhat later in life than to duet? Kick off your November sugar cleanse with Damned If You Duet, an evening of songs-for-two from Bassichis and special guests artist Malik Gaines, child star Helen Messineo-Pandjiris, cellist Ethan Philbrick, and choreographer Mariana Valencia. Organized by Tim Griffin.
[AUCTION]
The Kitchen Benefit Art Auction
November 13, 7-9pm
An evening featuring more than 70 works of art with all proceeds shared with participating artists and supporting The Kitchen's 2018-19 presenting season.
[MUSIC]
Leila Bordreuil
November 20-21, 8pm
Tickets: $15 General / $12 Members
The Kitchen presents Leila Bordreuil's Piece for Cello and Double Bass Ensemble II, the newest in her series of compositions for amplified cello and double-basses begun in 2015. This work will feature the largest and loudest ensemble yet, involving six bassists. With roots in musique concrete, contemporary noise, and a hint of spectral music, Piece possesses a dark melancholy, pivoting at times toward scathing physical sensations through long, corrosive atonalities and dense textures. Organized by Tim Griffin.
[DANCE]
Moriah Evans
Configure
December 5-8
Tickets: $25 General / $20 Members
We search in desperation and exaltation for radical, hopeful sites that we cannot see-to let them go, again and again. With Ka Baird, Madeline Best, Strauss Bourque-Lafrance, Lizzie Feidelson, Nicole Marie Mannarino, Lydia Okrent, and João dos Santos Martins. Organized by Matthew Lyons.
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