The Kitchen Presents SASQUATCH RITUALS

The Kitchen presents Sasquatch Rituals, a cycle of performance ritual installations initiated by Sibyl Kempson and her 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co., tracking and responding to her consuming experiences as an investigator for the Bigfoot Field Research Organization (April 24-28). In Art in America, Ralph Lemon writes, "Kempson's theatrical writing, her plays, if you want to call them that, are anarchic scripted actions, destabilizing the framework of even experimental theater," and this piece continues this work through the ordered chaos of ritual, and the evocation of the wilderness within urban settings. Sasquatch Rituals likewise excavates the wilderness, and wildness, inside of us. Particularly, with its ensemble of women, it unleashes a collaborative feminine subconscious. The participants' rituals, engaging nature in the middle of the Chelsea performance space, call to the hirsute giant whose eerie apparition and shoe size have, through centuries, obsessively pervaded the American psyche.

Through the deep dive of her Sasquatch research, Kempson found she was not interested so much in seeking proof of the beast, but rather in the potentials of a shared experience-or perhaps a mass hallucination-that transcends boundaries of time, place, and communication. The Bigfoot myth predated European contact in stories from various Native American tribes ("Sasquatch" itself comes from the Halkomelem word "sásq'ets"); sightings were likewise documented by colonizers. To this day, as Kempson emphasizes, Sasquatch sightings continue to be logged by individuals of all backgrounds and professions, including the likes of professors, doctors, nurses-the very people the industrialized world looks toward for definitions of hard, scientific realities.

Kempson refers to Sasquatch Rituals and another work, The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S. as "co-created-two different manifestations of the same project." The latter unbinds Mary Shelley from her Georgian English life and brings her into recent-American-history-and-dystopian-future-traversing contexts, juxtaposing Frankenstein's Monster with eye-witness accounts of Sasquatch encounters from the Internet in its feminizing understanding of wildness. Sasquatch Rituals, with its many shared themes,similarly considers patterns of language Americans use on the Internet-attempts at explaining what may be totally inexplicable. Hilton Als, calling Kempson a "vital talent...making an indelible mark on the downtown theatre scene" in the New Yorker, notes that her work is "attuned to the mad leaps in logic that make everyday communication a spectacle, if you listen."

The exploration of the uncanny human interconnectivity the Sasquatch has stirred is reflected in the staging of Sasquatch Rituals, with audiences able to move around among performers, with no clear active/passive clarifications being made. The piece itself has transformed from space to space; when it debuted at Mount Tremper Arts Center in 2017, the performers built and played around a fire; viewers could accompany them up the mountain to "call out to any presences that might be up there lurking unseen." At Abrons Arts Center, a section of the piece used the building's back garden. The Kitchen, in its location in an industrial corner of Chelsea, with no outdoor space, allows the piece to pointedly explore the idea of finding wilderness in the constructions of the human world, and within and beyond the constructs of the human mind.

A muddy creative energy and openness was key to the creation of the piece. Though Kempson is the "writer-director," writing and observations also come from other performers in 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co. the company's process and work embraces a feminism that celebrates connectedness and process, and goes hand-in-hand with the piece's manifestation of a feminine subconscious, an idea that everyone has the potential to access feminine modes of thought, and in so doing make the world a far more just and overall more fun place.

In many ways, the piece ended up becoming about what the process itself revealed. Kempson says, "One of the ways Feminism has fallen short is we're so pissed off, we end up wanting to even the score, which is part of it-but also part of Feminism that was missing in the Second Wave was embracing both feminine and masculine, and inclusiveness with regard to differences. [Now it's] let's give it another try, let's have another wave that's more fun and muddier and more of a celebration and a balance, so that we're not just pissed about how it's all wrong-we're talking and singing and laughing about how it can be infinitely better. The piece is about something unexpected. When you get a group of women together and put them in a closed environment, where they're isolated from the rest of the world, it can become very difficult, especially if they're women with strong personalities. Something happens, though, when you learn to overcome that and continue to work together towards a common goal, instead of competing against one another. And that's what feminine power is. How do we not allow ourselves to be fragmented by the difficulties of being human? That has been the big discovery - bigger than Bigfoot."

This piece contains field observations by Laurena Allan, Eleanor Hutchins, and Sarah Willis, with additional textual contributions from Lindsay Hockaday, Maurina Lioce, Linda Mancini, Laura Stinger, hundreds of witnesses who shall remain anonymous, and research personalities who will become increasingly in/famous. With choreography by Signora Mancini, songs and music by Julie LaMendola and Alexis and Lindsay Powell, sound design by Keenan Hurley, dramaturgy by Clarinda MacLow, stage management by Molly Zimmelman with help from Leonie Bell, and production support by Sarah Cameron Hughes. Featuring additional performance by Jessica Weinstein.

Performances take place April 24-28 at 8pm at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street). Tickets are available online at thekitchen.org; by phone at 212.255.5793 x11; and in person at The Kitchen, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 2:00-6:00 P.M.

Sibyl Kempson/ 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co. : Sasquatch Rituals is made possible with development support from Henry Street Settlement/Abrons Art Center, Mount Tremper Arts, and Jerome Foundation; annual grants from Howard Gilman Foundation, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, and Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co. was founded in April 2015 by playwright Sibyl Kempson, and was launched from the Martin E. Segal Center at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC. Their first production, Kempson's Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag, premiered in the Underground Theater at Abrons Arts Center later that same month. The play is published by 53rd State Press.

Later the same year, another new piece Public People's Enemy, devised by Kempson and Robert M. Johanson, was performed at the Ibsen Awards and Conference in Ibsen's hometown of Skien, Norway. 7 Daughters also began presenting periodic "Academic Re-Education Events" with the Gershwin Performance Series at Dixon Place, called "Make No Mistake: These Youth Cultures of Today Are Here to Restructure Your Mind." They feature readings of student writing from Kempson's experimental performance writing class at Sarah Lawrence College.

On the Spring Equinox of March 20, 2016, the 7 Daughters of Eve presented the first of 12 Shouts to the Ten Forgotten Heavens at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC. It is a 3-year cycle of rituals taking place on Solstices and Equinoxes that seeks to integrate human and non-human presences in the geographic and psycho-topological location of the new Whitney building in the Meatpacking District itself. Collaborators include: Dallas performance maker and scholar of ritual, indigenous performance and shamanism, Thomas Riccio, visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra, sound and media artists Tei Blow and Sahra Motalebi, choreographers Jodi Melnick, Elke Luyten & Kira Alker, puppet artist Amanda Villalobos, and others. The initial Shouts of the cycle were developed in residence at the Watermill Center in February 2016.

2018 & 2019 sees the birth of new twin projects. Sasquatch Rituals has been developed at Abrons Arts Center in NYC and as part of the Watershed Laboratory at Mount Tremper Arts in Ulster County, NY, and premieres at The Kitchen in April 2018, laying the groundwork for its companion The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S., developed at New Dramatists and in residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, with music by celebrated Austin composer Graham Reynolds. Maery S. is winner of the 2016 Frederick Loewe Award for Musical Theater. Both projects are supported by a two-year grant from the Jerome Foundation, and by many individual contributors.

Also on deck is Kyckling and Screaming, Kempson's translation/adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck, directed by Sarah Benson, with music by Cynthia Hopkins and Molly Drake, and choreography by David Neumann. Currently in development with generous support from New York Theatre Workshop and the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.

The Kitchen is one of New York City's most forward-looking nonprofit spaces, showing innovative work by emerging and established artists across disciplines. Our programs range from dance, music, performance, and theater to video, film, and art, in addition to literary events, artists' talks, and lecture series. Since its inception in 1971, The Kitchen has been a powerful force in shaping the cultural landscape of this country, and has helped launch the careers of many artists who have gone on to worldwide prominence.

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