On View: September 18-September 20
The Kitchen at Westbeth (163B Bank Street, 4th Floor Loft)
Time:
4:00 to 9:00PM
The Kitchen’s longest running program Dance and Process stages an interrogation of methods of choreographic and dance practice, whereby artists challenge default structures in their own work and the field at large. Beginning in July, a cohort made up of artists Ayano Elson, Niala, and Stacy Lynn Smith will engage in a weekly process of sharing material in development and receiving structured feedback facilitated by mayfield brooks and Niall Jones, culminating in public performances of new works in September.
Please note: The full program runs from 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM and features three performances, with short intermissions between each. Audience members are welcome to arrive at any time throughout the program, and come and go during these breaks. The Box Office will remain open until 8:30 PM.
Ayano Elson, in collaboration with Cayleen Del Rosario, Amelia Heintzelman, Owen Prum, Matt Evans, Madison Greenstone
Stacy Lynn Smith
Niala
Dance and Process: Ayano Elson, Niala, Stacy Lynn Smith is organized by mayfield brooks and Niall Jones, with Matthew Lyons, Curator, and Angelique Rosales Salgado, Assistant Curator.
BIOS
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022-3 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA with the World Arts and Cultures/Dance program, and a 2025 Creative Time Research and Development Fellow. They live by the sea.
Niall Jones is an artist, performer and teacher based in New York City. Niall constructs immersive, liminal sites that attend to sensual, collective registers of fiction, dis/order, dis/placement and in/completeness. And he dances through a constellation of curiosities, obsessions and practices destabilized by performance, sound, text, photography and video.
Ayano Elson is an Okinawan–American dancer and choreographer based in New York City. This summer, she will join The Kitchen’s Dance and Process artist-in-residence program and continue work on a new premiere for the Chocolate Factory in spring 2026. Her performances have recently premiered at Danspace Project, PAGEANT, Center for Performance Research (CPR), ISSUE Project Room, and Roulette, among others. She has held artist residencies at the Chocolate Factory (2025), CPR (2022), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and ArtCake (2021), was a Movement Research Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellow (2018), and a Gibney Dance Work Up artist (2015). She is currently dancing for Kim Brandt, Jesi Cook, Gwendolyn Knapp, and Melinda Ring, and has performed in works by Milka Djordjevich, Ella Dawn W-S, Simone Forti, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy + Niall Jones, and Alexa West at museums, galleries, and theaters in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.
Niala is a black trans multidisciplinary artist based in Bangkok and New York City, whose work spans across the mediums of movement and sound. Her work aims to explore what it means to be black, queer, and trans in an ever-evolving social landscape. As a member of NYC’s kiki scene, Niala draws inspiration from her deep connection to the ballroom scene, paying homage to black fem queen culture as a means for building pathways to expansive and imaginative futures. Niala has performed at venues including The Shed (2022, 2024) and The Kitchen (2023). Her most recent work, DAWTA was featured in The Judson’s Black Aesthetics Residency (2024), where she performed a duet with her mother.
Stacy Lynn Smith is a neurodivergent, Black mixed-race interdisciplinary dance artist and improviser, choreographer, director, filmmaker and Green Circle Keeper at Hidden Water. Smith creates, devises, improvises and performs across disciplines and genres with an array of talented artists including: DeForrest Brown Jr., Anna Homler, Karen Bernard, Thaddeus O’Neil, Rakia Seaborn, Vangeline Theater, Saints of an Unnamed Country, Salome Asega, GENG, Donna Costello, Bradley Bailey, Michele Beck, Jasmine Hearn, mayfield brooks, Josephine Decker, Kathy Westwater, Jill Sigman, Emily Johnson, Joan Jonas, Peter Born and Okwui Okpokwasili. Smith was a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, 2024 Djerassi AIR, their work PORTALS was featured in the 2024 season of Black Aesthetics (curated by Malcolmx Betts and Arien Wilkerson at Judson Church), is a 2025 MacDowell Fellow and 2025 Dance and Process (DAP) AIR at The Kitchen. As Psychic Wormhole (with Alex Romania), work includes Face Eaters (The Chocolate Factory Theater) and fame hOle (Grace Exhibition Space, La Mama). Psychic Wormhole is working towards completing their debut film, RECKONING, a visceral experimental memoir grappling with Smith's experiences as a survivor of CSA and Complex-PTSD, which received the inaugural Artists Supporting Artists Program (ASAP) grant from Sweat Variant (Okwui Okpokwasili + Peter Born) and was shortlisted for ‘25 Creative Capital in Film / Video. To support the film in this final phase: youwillconsumeus.com/reckoning.
Funding Support and Credits
The Kitchen’s programs are made possible in part with support from The Kitchen’s Board of Directors, The Kitchen Global Council, Leadership Fund, and the Director’s Council, as well as through generous support from The Amphion Foundation, Inc., Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Cowles Charitable Trust, Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Ford Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, Marta Heflin Foundation, The New York Community Trust, Jerome Robbins Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, and in part by public funds from the Manhattan Borough President, the National Endowment for the Arts, 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 the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
The Kitchen acknowledges the generous support provided by the Collaborative Arts Network New York (CANNY). As a coalition of small to mid-sized multidisciplinary arts organizations, CANNY is committed to strengthening the infrastructure of arts nonprofits throughout New York.
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