The Kitchen and Montez Press Radio Present Multidisciplinary, Multidimensional Programming Culminating 12-Month Residency for the Experimental Broadcasting and Performance Platform

Performances Include a Radio Operetta with Libretto and Direction by Esther Sibiude (June 14 & 16); a Muso-Poetical Play by Lamb (June 24); and the Debut of New Songs from Mat Kastella (July 27)

Radio Programs Include Two Series Examining Materials in, and Questions Around, Performance Archives: Off the Page and Sobremesa: Archiving Performance, Presented on radio.montezpress.com

The Kitchen and Montez Press Radio present a series of programs created within the experimental broadcasting and performance platform’s 12-month residency with The Kitchen, which began in Fall 2022. Montez Press Radio has thought beyond the walls of The Kitchen (itself temporarily sited at Westbeth Artists Housing) as well as their own home base of 46 Canal Street, collapsing the disparities between the face-toface nature of live performance and the diffuse nature of online distribution. The Kitchen x Montez Press Radio is organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator, with Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant.

Legacy Russell says, “Advancing in our newly-launched website and mission that rearticulates how The Kitchen’s experimental traditions can be pushed and extended in exciting directions, Montez Press Radio in residence brings together a unique opportunity to honor The Kitchen’s history of broadcast in relation to performance practice.”

The efforts of Montez Press Radio’s ongoing research, dialogue, and exchange come into focus through these performances and radio series. They kicked off on March 23 with Comte des Cierges, a short radio play by, with, and about doormen, staged in a lobby, written by playwright and former doorman Carlos Cotto, directed by Salome Oggenfuss, and produced in collaboration with The Working Theater (March 23, 2023). Programming now continues with The Song of Dirt Stammers Our Tongue, a radio operetta directed by its librettist Esther Sibiude, semi-staged and performed by a five-player ensemble live and in costume (June 14 and 16, 2023); Cape, a muso-poetical play by Lamb (Nala Duma) following characters in the early 1500s who discover a portal that allows them to travel great distances (June 24, 2023); and the debut of new songs off singer-songwriter, bedroom pop sensation, and prolific public performer __Mat Kastella__’s upcoming self-titled EP, live with backup dancers (July 27, 2023).

Montez Press Radio has been among the first programmed artists/collectives to explore the new potential offered by The Kitchen’s relaunched site, designed by __Pacific__—a new facet of support for The Kitchen’s long-standing relationships with artists, offering an abundance of experimental opportunities to forge new connections. Interviews and oral histories with artists, collaborators, and practitioners within The Kitchen’s community make up two ongoing radio series, available to stream on Montez Press Radio and The Kitchen’s new website. Off the Page launched on April 18, and is an interview series inviting 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. Sobremesa: Archiving Performance explores what it means to archive movement and time-based work. These series will be presented in June, July, and September 2023.

Programming Schedule & Details

Performances

Esther Sibiude: The Song of Dirt Stammers our Tongue

June 14 and 16, 2023 8:30pm The Kitchen at Westbeth (163B Bank Street, 4th Floor Loft, New York)

The Song of Dirt Stammers our Tongue is a radio operetta directed by its librettist Esther Sibiude, with music created and arranged in collaboration with an ensemble of five players: vocalist Lucia della Paolera, violist Justine Lugli, cellist Timothy Rusterholz, organist Thomas Hobson Williams playing the synthesizer, and Sibiude playing the harp. As in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, each of the instruments in this new work illustrates a character or theme from the poetic text – a blade of grass, a second, a ray of sunshine, a leaf. Musical threads weave together the journey of a man who belongs to the night sky, but who falls to Earth one evening while asleep. Unfamiliar with life on this planet, and generally disoriented, his meanderings lead him to New York, where he has to adjust to the city’s temporality. The piece will be semi-staged and performed live with musicians wearing costumes inspired by the natural world, with production design by Sibiude and Jett Strauss. The 40 minute medley of new compositions by the group set to original text by Sibiude merges improvisation with pop, folk, sacred and classical pieces.

Tickets $5-15 sliding scale. (On sale mid-May)

Lamb: Cape

June 24, 2023 8pm Abrons Art Center (466 Grand St, New York)

Cape is a muso-poetical play that follows five characters who live on an unnamed coastal landmass in the early 1500s. One day, a portal door materializes on the cape; the passageway allows one to instantly traverse thousands of miles of global distance. Braced against this new apprehension of the world, the five characters—the Lovers, the Cartographer, the Conductor, and the Voice—grapple with world-mapping, self-coordination, and relation in a suddenly global world. Lamb’s major stage debut— co-directed by Ava Elizabeth Novak—comprises several sequences of live music performance, dance, poetry, and theatre. The coastal locale depicted in the play is based on southern African ecologies that made contact with Portuguese colonizers at the turn of the 16th century. Through the ritual of performance, Lamb and Novak consider what kind of ontological reckonings indigenous lives on the cape undergo when their finistère (end of the earth) becomes a point of relay. Featuring an ensemble of Lamb (Dancer, Vocalist), Dymon Samara (Dancer), Kyneijee Wubah (Dancer), AMANI (Keys, Vocalist), 13th Law (Guitar, Bass), and Jessica Howard (Vocalist), as well as Lara Lewison (Video & Projection Designer), My Melendez (Set Designer and Florist), ed-en (Costume Designer), and Artwork by Tyler Cala.

Tickets $15. (On sale mid-May)

Mat Kastella

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

After conquering New York City subway stations, touring the US last summer, and working on new material in Asia at the start of 2023, Mat Kastella is back in NYC taking to the stage with a sneak peak of songs off of his debut self-titled EP in his very first Live Concert Special.

Free with RSVP (Reservations open mid-May)

Radio Programs

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 centers folks’ voices in dialogue—be it artists, audiences, and researchers who have supported experimental work and continue the lives of primary source(s) to keep them present and active in the archive.

Richard Lowenberg and Alex Waterman, “Info/Eco: The Nature of Information” Date: Live on April 18, 2023, 7 pm from 46 Canal St., archived on radio.montezpress.com and on thekitchen.org.

Two-part conversation with the cast & production team for Robert Ashley’s television opera, Perfect Lives, commissioned by The Kitchen in 1983. Hosted by Alex Waterman, Archivist, The Kitchen and director of Vidas Perfectas (2014):

John Sanborn, Dean Winkler, Carlota Schoolman, Mary Griffin, Mimi Johnson, “Perfect LIves: 40th Anniversary” Date: Live on June 8, 2023 1 pm from 46 Canal St.

Peter Gordon, Mimi Johnson, Carlota Schoolman, David van Tieghem, Jill Kroesen (Phoning in), “Perfect LIves: 40th Anniversary” Date: Live on June 9, 2023 11 am from 46 Canal St.

Future segment updates forthcoming.

Sobremesa: Archiving Performance

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, The Kitchen with invited guests to open up conversation about the theme of Archiving Performance. 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? How do we capture, discuss, debate the nuances of ephemeral experience that are so essential to the form of performance, in the context of the archive?

Segment updates forthcoming.

About Montez Press Radio

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 post production, but rather serves as a catalog 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.

About the Artists

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 Pleasant Commission with a staged reading premiering in the fall of 2022.

Soul music, contemporary dance, and eco futurism 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 canceled. Drawing inspiration from the OG boybands and pop stars from days long past and mixing it with the freshest sounds of the century.

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.

About The Kitchen

One of New York City’s oldest nonprofit alternative art centers, The Kitchen is dedicated to offering artists opportunities to create and present new work within, and across, the disciplines of dance, film, literature, music, theater, video, and visual art. The institution fosters a community of artists and audiences, offering artists the opportunity to create—and for audiences to engage with—work that pushes the boundaries of artistic disciplines and strengthens meaningful dialogues between the arts and larger culture.

The Kitchen was founded as an artist collective in 1971 by Woody and Steina Vasulka, and was formalized as a 501c3 in 1973. It has, from its infancy, been a space where experimental artists share progressive ideas with like-minded colleagues. It was among the very first American institutions to embrace the emerging fields of video and performance, while presenting visionary new work in established disciplines such as dance, music, literature, and film. This unique combination generated an environment immediately conducive to groundbreaking and cross-disciplinary exploration, helping to launch the careers of many artists who have defined the global avant-garde.

Among the artists who have presented significant work at The Kitchen are Muhal Richard Abrams, Laurie Anderson, ANOHNI, Robert Ashley, Charles Atlas, Kevin Beasley, Beastie Boys, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Julius Eastman, Philip Glass, Leslie Hewitt, Darius James, Joan Jonas, Bill T. Jones, Devin Kenny, Simone Leigh, Ralph Lemon, George Lewis, Rob- ert Longo, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sarah Michelson, Tere O’Connor, Okwui Okpokwasili, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, Sondra Perry, Vernon Reid, Arthur Russell, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Spiegel, Talking Heads, Greg Tate, Cecil Taylor, Urban Bush Women, Danh Vō, Lawrence Weiner, Anicka Yi, and many more.

Website: thekitchen.org Instagram: instagram.com/TheKitchen_NYC Facebook: facebook.com/TheKitchenNYC Press Contact: Blake Zidell at Blake Zidell & Associates: blake@blakezidell.com or 917.572.2493.

Press Contact: Blake Zidell at Blake Zidell & Associates: blake@blakezidell.com or 917.572.2493.