Mar 14, 2016

Curatorial Fellow Alessandra Gomez and Andrew Ondrejcak discuss ELIJAH GREEN at The Kitchen. Alessandra Gomez: Can you briefly describe ELIJAH GREEN in your own words? Andrew Ondrejcak: ELIJAH GREEN is a landscape play. The protagonist is an invisible spirit that shape-shifts through various people during the performance, living through a variety of human experiences. AG: Your work reflects moments of communal time, interwoven by human foibles and strangeness. For instance, there was a very sensual and intense moment between Stuart Singer and his laptop, accompanied by a monumental build-up of techno dance music. Although the scene was dominated by Stuart’s intense panting and the weighted beat of the dance music, my attention shifted to Meg Harper. She was facing away... Read On

Feb 26, 2016

On the US premiere of their latest work, For Claude Shannon , Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard spoke with Curator Matthew Lyons. Having worked together for the last five years, Santoro and Godard continue their investigations taken up in the previous work, Relative Collider , on the relays between movement and text, the neurophysics of attention and presence, and the transfer of information or communication in performance. Matthew Lyons: How did you begin developing this new work, coming off of the previous work, Relative Collider? Pierre Godard: The first impetus for the new piece was to reverse the process that took place in Relative Collider, using movement structures to compose a text and then injecting variability in the text material, yet with a very similar desire to find new... Read On

Feb 1, 2016

The Kitchen is fortunate to have had a long history with the composer, trombonist, and scholar George Lewis; he first performed here in 1979, and then took on the role of Music Curator from 1980-1982. During this time, he programmed such seminal artists as Julius Eastman, Douglas Ewart, Julius Hemphill, Joan LaBarbara, Jackson Mac Low, Eliane Radigue, and many more. As part of our “From The Kitchen Archives” CD series on Orange Mountain Music, Lewis curated The Kitchen Improvises: 1976-83; on February 9th, Lewis will perform at The Kitchen alongside those who appear on the CD, including Thomas Buckner, Earl Howard, Oliver Lake, Michael Lytle, in addition to improvisers of a different generation. In conversation with Kitchen curator Lumi Tan, Lewis shares his recent projects and reflects... Read On

Jan 25, 2016

Quicksand furthers Robert Ashley’s distinct and innovative investigation of the American language in a musical setting. Using his signature blend of speech and song, it tells the story of a composer who has been coerced by a Government Agency (the “Company”) to serve as a low-level “courier” (or spy). Traveling with his wife to an unnamed South Asian country run by a military dictatorship, he becomes involved with plans to overthrow the government through his close friendship with two tour guides. With the assistance of four American mercenaries, the composer participates in the capture and imprisonment of the country’s leaders, and the destruction of the torture operation by which the dictatorship has maintained its power. The novel Quicksand was published by Burning Books in 2011, an... Read On

Jan 4, 2016

Big Dance Theater has had a profound impact on the New York performing arts scene since its establishment in 1991, challenging the boundaries of the form and pioneering a new level of hybridity. Co-Artistic Directors Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar have used the medium of dance to explore the relations between the various art forms, referring to histories of performance, film, literature, and music. Rather than accepting the limitations implicit in the categories of dance and theater, the company has instead chosen to embrace both, feeling out a style that is simultaneously highly-choreographed drama and theatricalized dance. To watch a Big Dance performance is to enter a dream-like world in which seemingly disparate languages, sounds, costumes, sets, and motions are interwoven in an intr... Read On