Jan 4, 2019

Tina Satter is an experimental playwright and director based in New York City. In 2008, she founded the Brooklyn-based ensemble Half Straddle; a group of performers and designers that make plays, performances, video, and music via her writing and direction. Since then, Half Straddle has premiered nine full-length shows, a number of shorter works and video projects that have been seen at festivals and theaters throughout the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Asia, and won multiple awards. The group has presented work at The Kitchen numerous times, including: The Kitchen L.A.B, 2013; Ancient Lives, 2015; Here I Go, pt. 2 of You, 2017. This month, Tina Satter and members of the Half Straddle team return to The Kitchen to premiere a new work titled Is This A Room: REALITY WINNER VERBATIM TRANSC... Read On

Dec 17, 2018

Among the most fulfilling aspects of working at The Kitchen is a sense of offering artists not only a platform for their work and ideas, but also, maybe more important, a home. In other words, there is a sense of belonging here, and of being part of a continuing history, made palpable every day. As one artist recently told me after their production ended, “It was like being part of a temporary family.” That fundamental authenticity has been a hallmark of The Kitchen since the 1970s, and propels artists to create productions that continually take new risks. And audiences see work here that they would not experience anywhere else. Just during the past year, such highlights have included Charles Atlas’s video installation The Past Is Here, The Futures are Coming and incredible theater p... Read On

Dec 10, 2018

Artist Jibade-Khalil Huffman has been working in, around, and between the worlds of video and literature for much of his adult life. As a child, however, all he wanted was to be a DJ. And the significance of this childhood fantasy becomes abundantly clear when one speaks with Huffman regarding his show, Tempo, on view at The Kitchen through this Saturday, December 15. With twenty years of perspective, he readily contemplates his early encounters with popular culture, acknowledging how much of that same pop culture persists today, albeit in a different frame. As he observes, “The show is about music; it’s about a particular black male experience and how music informs that.” A video titled Black Twitter in the Hour of Chaos provides the core of Tempo. The single-channel version is proje... Read On

Nov 20, 2018

Leila Bordreuil is a composer and cellist whose current work is based in noise music and improvisation. In 2012, Bordreuil received her BA in Electronic Music and Electronic Arts from Bard College, where she studied with Marina Rosenfeld and Richard Teitelbaum. Bordreuil has previously performed at The Kitchen with Eli Keszler. She now returns to present her own composition, Piece for Cello and Double Bass Ensemble II, the debut of this iteration in her most recent series. This piece will feature Leila’s largest ensemble yet, using six bassists to create dense texture and physical sensation. We had the opportunity to ask Leila a few questions regarding her influences and thought processes surrounding her upcoming performance. Leila Bordreuil will perform Piece for Cello and Double Ba... Read On

Aug 28, 2018

For decades at The Kitchen, artists have challenged habits and convention through art, reweaving and reorienting our culture–often while bringing together, with a nearly utopian impulse, under-recognized histories and the most urgent contemporary issues. This season is no exception, opening with a solo exhibition by Chitra Ganesh, who takes up turn-of-the-century social reformer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat's sci-fi novel Sultana's Dream (1905) to reimagine the roles of the individual and the collective during periods of societal turbulence. Following Ganesh in our gallery will be a video and sound installation by Jibade-Khalil Huffman engaging the legacy of black music as a tool of resistance and, as pointedly, considering how societal conditions often ask for a performance of identity e... Read On