Dec 10, 2015

Sophia Cleary and Samara Davis, creators of Penis, spoke with Curatorial Fellow Alessandra Gomez in anticipation of their upcoming performance as part of Synth Nights featuring Champagne Jerry, Tami Tamaki, and Penis. Alessandra: Can you provide a brief summary describing the creation of Penis? Penis: The day after I got some bad news, Sophia came over and spent the day with me. We watched the Punk Singer and decided we wanted to start a band. The idea was kind of a joke—we didn’t know how to play any instruments and weren’t sure if we’d ever actually follow-through with it. Our friend, Neal Medlyn, suggested we call the band “Fecal Penis.” It somehow didn’t feel right, but at the suggestion of our best friend Joseph Teeling, we dropped the “Fecal” and became “Penis.” We operated a... Read On

Dec 2, 2015

Choreographer Tere O’Connor spoke with Assistant Curator and Archive Manager Katy Dammers about his new piece The Goodbye Studies premiering at The Kitchen this week. O’Connor reflects on the complexity of his newest piece and its construction through deep relationships with his collaborators.  Katy Dammers: I was struck by some moments in your work where the dancers collectively offer what I interpreted as moments of grief or fear. In what seems to be a growing presence of terrorism, news coverage frequently depicts reactions as collective gestures—whereas in your work I saw twelve different experiences. How have you been working on that in this piece? Tere O’Connor: I feel like I’m talking about the current situation on earth, with a focus on groups of people in absolute ... Read On

Oct 29, 2015

Choreographer and artist Ralph Lemon will be premiering Scaffold Room at The Kitchen on October 30th, 2015. Please visit our event page for the live performance schedule. Ralph Lemon’s intellectually rigorous practice as it is understood and celebrated today may be said to have arisen from his break with habitual structures of dance making—and, more specifically, from the disbandment of his successful modern dance company in 1995. In his subsequent practice, a desire to examine his own history alongside his charged, personal engagement with the social and political quickly materialized. Accompanying this desire is an emphasis on interdisciplinarity, especially given his expansive background as a choreographer, dancer, writer, and visual artist. Described by Lemon as a “flexibl... Read On

Oct 19, 2015

Singer-songwriter Glasser uses her music to explore the symbiotic potential of organic and digitally-developed sounds, producing compositions that have been characterized as both icy and ethereal. Glasser’s most recent project Charge addresses the tension between social access and physical distance latent in new technology and social media. Charge turns the human body itself into a source for material, finding and distorting the rhythms of the artist’s own breath in a performance that functions as an “intimate yet exotic embrace.” In advance of the opening of Charge at The Kitchen on October 23, Glasser reflects on the expression of this investigation of the synthetic and the real in her recent work and in her collaboration with artist Jonathan Turner. Nicole Kaack: In a 2013 LA ... Read On

Aug 18, 2015

Choreographer koosil-ja and her collaborator Geoff Matters spoke with Assistant Curator and Archive Manager Katy Dammers about their new piece I am capitalism premiering at The Kitchen this fall. They consider the origins of this work and its place within koosil-ja’s long history at The Kitchen. Katy Dammers: What brought you to consider capitalism in this piece? Koosil-ja: Over the past ten years, looking for my identity was the driving force behind my work, and I wasn’t really going anywhere with it. Then I read Gilles Deleuze and felt an opening. He thinks being is a process and identity is a crappy concept, because it puts our existence inferior to the idea that exists before us. He opened me up to a new plateau. While I was searching for the meaning and name of my existence, my... Read On