12-Month Residency

PERFORMANCES

Salome Oggenfuss, Carlos Cotto in collaboration with The Working Theater: Comte des Cierges featuring a cast of Jim Fletcher, Anthony Delfi, Emily Davis, Sophie Becker, Gordon Landenberger, Lluca Huatuco, Timothy Allan, John Ayala, Nile Harris, Pamela Mondezie.

March 23, 2023, 7:30 pm. Free with RSVP. Seward Park Cooperative, at 387 Grand Street, New York, NY 10002

Esther Sibiude: The Song of Dirt Stammers our Tongue performed by live a five-player ensemble.

June 14 and 16, 2023, 8:30 pm. Tickets $5-15 sliding scale. The Kitchen at Westbeth, 163B Bank Street, 4th Floor Loft, New York, NY 10014

Lamb: Cape a muso-poetical play following five characters in the early-1500s who discover a portal that allows them to travel great distances.

June 24, 2023, 8 pm. Tickets $18.50. Abrons Art Center, 466 Grand St, New York, NY 10002

Mat Kastella Live at the Port Authority Bus Terminal

July 27, 2023, 7 pm. Free and open to the public. Performing Arts Stage at Port Authority Bus Terminal (8th Avenue between 40 & 41st Streets, near the Jackie Gleason statue)

RADIO SERIES

Off the Page

A series of collectively executed interviews broadcast on Montez Press Radio and co-presented with The Kitchen that invites guests to engage experimental legacies and histories of 'avant-garde' production, work, labor, thought and collaboration across decades within and beyond The Kitchen’s community. Conducted by Alex Waterman, Archivist, The Kitchen, Stacy Skolnik and Thomas Laprade of Montez Press Radio and select members of The Kitchen’s Curatorial team, the series proposes an act of translation beyond the “archival” document to engage in dialogues with artists, audiences, and researchers who have produced and supported experimental work. These conversations expand and care for the life of primary source(s), keeping them active and vital actors in the continuum shared between The Kitchen’s ongoing productions and its archive.

Sobremesa: Archiving Performance, Performing Archives

A three-part radio series broadcast on Montez Press Radio and co-presented by The Kitchen across June, July, and September 2023 moderated by Alex Waterman, Archivist, The Kitchen and Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant.

What is a performance archive? What are its limits if any of a movement-based, time-based archive? What do we at The Kitchen think of as a performance archive? What are the series guests’ definitions of a performance archive, and the infrastructures and value systems within?

The focus of this series explores the theme of Archiving Performance in dialogue with The Kitchen’s community, expanding the mission and intergenerational vision of our archive, stewarded in the care of artists and cultural preservation, especially in the context of time-based media, and in alternative sectors of arts beyond academic or museum-based archives. How do we capture, discuss, debate the nuances of ephemeral experience, and what can the archive help us formulate?

BIOS

Montez Press Radio is an experimental broadcasting and performance platform founded in 2018, with the goal of fostering greater experimentation and conversation between artists, writers, and thinkers through the medium of radio. This platform invites different corners of the art world to interact with each other in person and on air—a place where media finally meets flesh. Montez Press Radio is drawn to art that exists in the unexpected, the authenticity of sharing without a script, the sounds of ideas in the making, conversation that forgets there’s an audience. All of its in-studio broadcasts are free and open to the public. Montez Press Radio’s archive is an ongoing auditory document of Montez Press Radio’s existence. It is not designed to reflect the ingenuity of postproduction, but rather serves as a catalogue of rough cuts which contain all the small glitches, false starts, and awkward silences that are intrinsic to our process of live recording and running an event space. Montez Press Radio is as much a radio broadcast as it is a reflection of particular moments in time.

Carlos Cotto is a playwright, screenwriter, and actor raised in Washington Heights, New York, but based in Washington, DC. Growing up in a bilingual household, his love of stories sprung from watching Spanish telenovelas and American primetime TV shows. During his fifteen-plus years as a doorman in a New York City co-op building, Carlos was formally introduced to theater by joining a 32BJ Union theater program. The program helped cultivate his love for magical realism and helped infuse it into his work. Carlos has been featured off-Broadway in the "Best of Theater Works" showcase produced by the Working Theater. Carlos was the proud recipient of the Mark Plesent Commission with a staged reading premiering in the fall of 2022.

Soul music, contemporary dance, and ecofuturism comprise LAMB (Nala Duma)'s artistic vision: where the visceral meets the cerebral; where the natural enacts the synthetic. The musician, composer, choreographer, and director explores Blackness as the break that might rupture our attachments to Worlds, territories, and Man. Steeped in the aesthetic, conceptual, and political tradition of modern Black thinkers before them, Lamb's thesis is this: in a world wrought through violence, to salvage some beauty from it is to seek truth within it.

Mat Kastella is a singer-songwriter, performer, and arguably the hottest thing New York City has seen since MTV’s TRL got cancelled. Drawing inspiration from the OG boybands and pop stars from days long past and mixing it with the freshest sounds of the century—he’s an artist you’re not going to want to miss.

Salome Oggenfuss is a filmmaker and casting director working across disciplines. She was born in Switzerland and is based in New York. She seeks to create spaces and situations that bring together amateur and professional artists and strives to reroute desires towards the enrichment of everyday life.

Esther Sibiude is a radio artist and harpist. She seeks to create space for contemplation and deceleration. The combination of music and storytelling is an attempt to collectively digest the gush of information disseminated by the news through endless digital feeds.

Working Theater exists to create theater specifically for, about, and with working people, the community that makes up the majority of the overall metropolitan workforce. To that end, Working Theater makes their productions relevant, accessible, and affordable to all, regardless of geography or socioeconomic status, because they believe that theater should be a part of everyone’s everyday culture.