The Kitchen Announces Fall 2017 Season
By: A.A. Cristi Aug. 15, 2017
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.
A number of iconic artists return to The Kitchen this season for the first time in decades. Celebrating their 25th anniversary, Stanley Love Performance Group, last at the venue with coven with an x in 1998, premieres Brings Swings, Sings Chimes Rings Wings, Flings Zingahlings-Spirit Party Things (September 21-23), a signature large-scale dance work that explores emotion, rhythm, message, and communion. The vastly influential punk band The Raincoats, whose 1982 concert at The Kitchen was later released as a recording entitled The Kitchen Tapes, will read from The Raincoats' The Raincoats, Jenn Pelly's new book for 33 1/3 Press, and tell the story of their debut album (November 2-3). Following a performance at The Kitchen's most recent Spring Benefit Gala, Jonathan Richman, with Tommy Larkins on drums and Xylouris White also on the bill, gives his first performances at The Kitchen since 1975 (November 18-22).
In addition to Richman, the season features eclectic music programming including Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg of experimental piano-percussion quartet Yarn/Wire in the first performances since 1966 of Maryanne Amacher's graphic score Adjacencies, which directs performers in sending their microphone signals to a changing array of speakers surrounding the audience(September 29-30). Employing a dense array of percussion instruments, the full quartet then premieres Feld, a new work by Berlin-based composer Enno Poppe, and also performs Tonband, Poppe's co-composition with Wolfgang Heiniger (October 6). Virtuosic polyrhythmic percussionist Greg Fox will perform music from his second solo album, The Gradual Progression (October 7). This season's installments of The Kitchen's acclaimed Synth Nights series include Laurel Halo playing selections from her recent album, Dust, with collaborator Eli Keszler (November 27-28); and Catherine Lamb performing Prisma Interius: III (December 5), which consists of music constructed around the Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer, joined by Bryan Eubanks, who developed the instrument with her.
The Kitchen welcomes back artist, composer, vocalist, and writer Sahra Motalebi, who was last at the venue with her Sounds from Untitled Skies in 2015. Her Directory of Portrayals(December 14-15) combines multichannel video sets, spoken text, and musical scores and is based on an ongoing online exchange with Motalebi's sister in Iran, to whom she bears a striking resemblance, and whom she has never met in person.
Additional season highlights include an evening celebrating the new season of Soft Skull Press (September 17), with readings by Eileen Myles, Lynne Tillman, Jillian Weise, Chelsea Martin, and Colin Winnette; and the return of the collective Metropolis Video for a screening of works by Talking Heads, Heartbreakers, Tuff Darts, and others from CBGB, first shown at The Kitchen's Soho location 40 years ago (October 3). With Dirty Looks, the bi-coastal platform for queer experimental film, video and performance, The Kitchen presents a screening program (October 30) with Kembra Pfahler, of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, that brings together short moving-image works featuring Pfahler by Richard Kern, Annie Sprinkle, Steve Doughty, Ned Ambler, Mike Kuchar, Charles Atlas, and Pfahler herself. Ugly Duckling Presse returns to The Kitchen to celebrate the release of Emergency INDEX 6, the sixth edition of their annual document of performance practice (November 29).
More information on The Kitchen's Fall 2017 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.
Please stay tuned for news about 2018 programs featuring Jim Findlay, Julius Eastman, Moor Mother, Charles Atlas, the Racial Imaginary Institute, and much more.
THE KITCHEN FALL 2017 PROGRAMMING
[VIDEO INSTALLATION]
Meriem Bennani
Siham & Hafida
Curated by Lumi Tan
September 13-October 21
Meriem Bennani's immersive video installation takes an intimate view into the lives of Moroccan chikha performers, who have historically provided entertainment for important celebrations and spread lyrics of resistance during French colonization. This new work focuses on Siham and Hafida, two figures in the scene whose intergenerational conflicts and oppositional approaches to tradition reflect greater shifts in Moroccan culture of the past 50 years. Extending Bennani's ecstatic depictions of assumed female roles in Morocco and the tensions created from these women negotiating a globalized society propelled by personal technology, the installation draws uncanny parallels between the new presence of chikha performance on social media and the oral traditions of Aita, the musical genre of the chikha and its accompanying dances. Bennani captures the performance of femininity celebrated by social and religious mores, as well as the less constrained moments in which this performance can recede.
[LITERATURE]
Soft Skull Press
September 17, 6:30pm
FREE
Stanley Love Performance Group
Brings Swings, Sings Chimes Rings Wings, Flings Zingahlings-Spirit Party Things
Organized by Sarah Michelson and Matthew Lyons
September 21-23, 8pm
$20 General / $15 Members
This year, the Stanley Love Performance Group celebrates 25 years since its founding by Love in 1992. Almost 20 years after their last major show at The Kitchen-coven with an x, in 1998-the SLPG returns with a signature work: a large-scale dance rich with dense, energetic movement. Drawing from various social and modern dance idioms, Love's choreography, which unfolds in perfect unison, achieves a truly orchestral effect. In Brings Swings, Sings Chimes Rings Wings, Flings Zingahlings-Spirit Party Things, SLPG take the audience on a journey of eclectic aesthetics, exploring emotion, rhythm, message, and communion.
[MUSIC]
Maryanne Amacher
Adjacencies
Organized by Blank Forms and co-presented with The Kitchen
September 29-30, 8pm
$20 General / $15 Members
Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) was a composer of large-scale, fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. While she is known primarily as an electronic composer, early on she wrote a handful of pieces for classical instruments using experimental forms of notation. AUDJOINS, a Suite For Audjoined Rooms was a collection of pieces from the early to mid-sixties for various spatially staged ensembles. Adjacencies, a graphic score for two percussionists and electronics, was written in 1965 and is the only known extant score of that series. Adjacencies directs performers in sending their microphone signals to a changing array of speakers surrounding the audience, combining otherwise distinct worlds of sound. Though the piece has not been performed since 1966, Blank Forms has collaborated with Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz to unpack and analyze the score for its posthumous realization. Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg of the experimental piano-percussion quartet Yarn/Wire will perform Adjacencies, with sound distribution by Daniel Neumann and Woody Sullender.
[SCREENING]
Metropolis Video: Rock from CBGB
Organized by Katy Dammers
October 3, 7pm
FREE
The Kitchen welcomes back this video collective for a screening of works by Talking Heads, Heartbreakers, Tuff Darts, and others from CBGB, first shown at The Kitchen's Soho location 40 years ago. Metropolis Video was formed in 1975 by a group of young filmmakers working in and around Manhattan Cable TV's Public Access Department. From August to December 1975 they spent their weekends at CBGB documenting many of the emerging bands, later dubbed punk and New Wave, that had made the Bowery club their home. Working with one of the earliest live-switched multi-camera systems and small sound mixers, the group adopted a verité shooting style that mirrored the intensity and exuberance of the musicians, and together they captured breakout early performances by Talking Heads, Heartbreakers (with Richard Hell and Johnny Thunders), Tuff Darts (with Robert Gordon), and several other groups. Highlights of these videos were shown in two sold-out screenings at The Kitchen in October 1977. The Kitchen is pleased to welcome Metropolis Video back for a screening that includes the world premiere of several songs from a recently discovered and digitally restored fall 1975 performance by Talking Heads at CBGB.
[MUSIC]
Yarn/Wire: Enno Poppe
Organized by Tim Griffin and Matthew Lyons
October 6, 8pm
$20 General / $15 Members
The New York-based ensemble premieres a new work by Berlin-based composer Enno Poppe. Massive percussion arrays-hand-crank sirens, wood drums, cymbals, complex suspended metal plates, mallet percussion, and found objects, all filtered through microtonal organs or paired with dense, perpetually moving piano complexity-comprise the sonic universe of Enno Poppe. His attention to detail along with consistently intense visceral energy energizes listeners and has vaulted Poppe's music to international acclaim. While still becoming known in the U.S., Enno Poppe has been championed here by New York's celebrated piano-percussion quartet Yarn/Wire. This concert pairs the new 2017 composition Feld, commissioned by the ensemble and EMPAC, with 2009's Tonband (written in collaboration with the electronics guru Wolfgang Heiniger) to make a unique and pleasurably head-spinning performance.
[MUSIC]
Greg Fox
The Gradual Progression
Organized by Lumi Tan
October 7, 8pm
$20 General / $15 Members
Celebrating the release of his second solo album, The Gradual Progression (RVNG), percussionist Greg Fox employs new methods of externalizing his polyrhythmic virtuosity into non-physical realms. The seven pieces of The Gradual Progressionactivate spiritual states through physical means, Fox's rigorous inner rhythms the mandalic vessel for unbound expression and arrangement.
[SCREENING]
Dirty Looks: Kembra Pfahler
October 30, 8pm
$20 General / $15 Members
Through her ongoing project The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Kembra Pfahler has been performing since the late 1980s in museums, galleries, and clubs the world over. The Kitchen welcomes back Dirty Looks, the bi-coastal platform for queer experimental film, video and performance, with an unprecedented program of cinematic arcana and voluptuous horrors. From the beginnings of her practice through to recently produced material, Pfahler and her illustrious collaborators (who have included Richard Kern, Annie Sprinkle, Steve Doughty, Ned Ambler, Mike Kuchar, and Charles Atlas) will present a harrowing evening, sure to bring back the night.
[INSTALLATION]
Nikolas Gambaroff
Curated by Tim Griffin
November 1-December 16
Nikolas Gambaroff takes novelist and playwright Karl Kraus's satirical, WWI-era masterpiece The Last Days of Mankind as a point of departure for his newest installation. In its time, Kraus's play offered an unrelenting critique of a popular discourse fueling bigotry and blind nationalism. Written in 213 scenes, the work was considered impossible to perform- "intended for a theater on Mars," as Kraus put it. Yet its dystopian leanings seem resonant in our day of click-bait and fake news, where language is torn from its grounding in truth and reality, dismantled by the distributive algorithms of communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Here Gambaroff interrogates the dissolution of language and with it, meaning, and investigates how art, often imbued with multifaceted meaning, should place itself in a time when nothing seems to mean anything at all.
[MUSIC]
The Raincoats
November 2-3, 7pm
$20 General / $15 Members
In 1979, from the basement of a London squat, the Raincoats reinvented what punk could be. They had a violin player. They came from Portugal, Spain, and England. Their anarchy was poetic. Working with the iconic Rough Trade Records at its radical beginnings, they were the first group of punk women to actively call themselves feminists. The Raincoats traveled to The Kitchen in 1982, performing an evening of music that John Rockwell of The New York Times described as "a contradictory confusion of feminism/glamour/folk/sex/rock." This concert was recorded live and later released as The Kitchen Tapes. Now, The Raincoats return to The Kitchen to celebrate the release of the first book about their history, penned for 33 1/3 Press by author Jenn Pelly, entitled The Raincoats' The Raincoats. In the publication, Pelly builds on rare archival materials and extensive interviews with members of The Raincoats along with Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Hole, Scritti Politti, Gang of Four and others. At The Kitchen, Gina Birch and Ana da Silva will read passages and tell the story of their audacious debut album, which Kurt Cobain once called "wonderfully classic scripture."
[AUCTION]
The Kitchen Benefit Art Auction
November 14, 7-9pm
$150
An evening featuring more than 70 works, with all proceeds shared with participating artists and supporting The Kitchen's 2017-18 presenting season.
[MUSIC]
LIVE! ON STAGE: JONATHAN RICHMAN FEATURING TOMMY LARKINS ON DRUMS
With an opening performance by Xylouris White
Organized by Tim Griffin
November 18-22, Saturday-Sunday 7:30pm; Monday-Wednesday 8pm
$25 General / $20 Members
Jonathan Richman has been playing music, recording, and touring for most of his life. He and his drummer Tommy Larkins win fans wherever they play. In the early 1970s, Richman formed the noted band The Modern Lovers, who played at The Kitchen in 1975. After a celebrated performance at our most recent Spring Benefit Gala honoring John Cale and Lawrence Weiner, The Kitchen is pleased to welcome him back to our stage. Xylouris White, the Cretan music duo Georgios Xylouris and Jim White, open for Richman with selections combining the laouto, vocals, and drums.
[MUSIC]
Synth Nights: Laurel Halo
Organized by Tim Griffin
November 27-28, 8pm
$20 General / $15 Members
Laurel Halo returns to The Kitchen to play selections from her recent album Dust, revolving around loose and languid songs; warped, sun-filled, melted and at times, heavy-hearted and obscure. A collection of breezy, broken songs, based on woody instrumentation, sub bass, and restless, intricate electronics, Halo recorded this album with a number of collaborators, including Eli Keszler, who joins her for this performance.
[LITERATURE]
Ugly Duckling Presse
Emergency INDEX Volume 6
November 29, 8pm
Free
Ugly Duckling Presse created Emergency INDEX in 2012 as an annual print publication to document performances of every kind, from any genre, and for any purpose, providing a "state of the field" view of performance as represented by actual works made in the preceding year. Over the last five years, the project has assembled an illuminating index of the language and concerns of more than 500 performance makers from more than 30 countries. Martha Wilson has praised INDEX as "a bible of performance art activity," and Robert Ashley called it "a profoundly important publication" because it gives "the sense of a magical secret shared among many artists." This launch event for Volume 6 features adaptations, elaborations, and improvisations based on performance works from near and far documented in the newest issue.
[MUSIC]Synth Nights: Catherine Lamb
Prisma Interius: III
Organized by Tim Griffin
December 5, 8pm
$20 General / $15 Members
Catherine Lamb presents Prisma Interius: III, the most recent series of pieces constructed around the Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer, an instrument, developed with Bryan Eubanks, that spectrally filters a live sound input of the outer atmosphere to the listening space within which the performance piece is situated. In this iteration, Lamb, on vocals and viola, is joined by Eubanks on synthesizer to present a piece constructed around 45 unfolding chords of slowly expanding durations and proportions.
[PERFORMANCE]
Sahra Motalebi
Directory of Portrayals
Organized by Lumi Tan
December 14-15, 8pm
$20 General / $15 Members
Directory of Portrayals (from Rendering What Remains) is a performance from an open-form opera that includes staged events, exhibitions, and text. The work draws its structure from a libretto, written by Motalebi, based on an ongoing, online exchange between the artist and her sister, who lives in Iran. Though they bear a striking resemblance, they have never met in person. Here, Motalebi moves between multichannel video sets, spoken text, and musical scores, registering the complicated dynamics of identity, intimacy, and translation that underpin this dialogue. Taking the production of the opera itself as a subject as well, the work reflects more broadly on interiority, performance, and their artifacts-on and offline, on and off stage.
Funding and Crediting
Stanley Love Performance Group received a Late-Stage Stipend grant from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation.
Annual program support provided by The Amphion Foundation, Inc., The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Cowles Charitable Trust, Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Howard Gilman Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, Marta Heflin Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, The Jerome Robbins Foundation, and The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and The New York State Legislature, and National Endowment for the Arts.
The Kitchen thanks the following foundations and businesses for their support: 11R; 47 Canal; 303 Gallery; Ace Hotel New York; Alvarez & Marsal Holdings, LLC; The Amphion Foundation, Inc.; Marianne Boesky Gallery; Gavin Brown's enterprise; Calvin Klein, Inc.; Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust; Christie's; James Cohan Gallery; Contemporary Art Partners; Paula Cooper Gallery; The Aaron Copland Fund for Music; The Cowles Charitable Trust; Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Inc.; Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York; Debevoise & Plimpton LLP; The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; The Durst Organization; Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation; FACE Contemporary Theater Fund; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver, and Jacobson LLP; Galeria Franco Noero; Galerie Gisela Capitain; Galerie Perrotin; Galerie Eva Presenhuber; Howard Gilman Foundation; Goethe-Institut New York; Goldman Sachs; Marian Goodman Gallery; Greene Naftali; Hand, Baldachin and Amburgey LLP; The Harkness Foundation for Dance; Hauser & Wirth; Marta Heflin Foundation; Hannah Hoffman Gallery; HSBC Private Bank, a division of HSBC Bank USA, N.A.; IAC; Jerome Foundation; Mayer and Morris Kaplan Family Foundation; Lagunitas Brewing Company; Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation; Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation; David Lewis Gallery; Lisson Gallery; The Margaret and Daniel Loeb-Third Point Foundation; Luhring Augustine Gallery; LUMA Foundation; The MAP Fund; Grace R. and Allen D. Marcus Foundation; Matthew Marks Gallery; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Mertz Gilmore Foundation; Metro Pictures; J.P. Morgan; J.P. Morgan Chase Foundation; Morgan Stanley; New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project; New England Foundation for the Arts' National Theater Project; New Music USA; New York Community Trust; Orentreich Family Foundation; The Overbrook Foundation; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison, LLP; Petzel, New York; Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council; The Jerome Robbins Foundation; The James E. Robison Foundation; The Rolex Initiative; Andrea Rosen Gallery; May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation; The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; Jennifer and Jonathan Allan Soros Foundation; Reena Spaulings Fine Art; Team Gallery; Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund; Tumblr; UBS Financial Services; VIA Art Fund; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Warby Parker; and David Zwirner, New York/London.
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