The Kitchen Presents The School for Temporary Liveness Vol. 4: Experiments in Performance, Practice, and Pedagogy

THE KITCHEN PRESENTS THE SCHOOL FOR TEMPORARY LIVENESS VOL. 4, JULY 10–12, 2025

Experiments in Performance, Practice, and Pedagogy with Bilna'es, nora chipaumire, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Juliana Huxtable, Darrell Jones, Julie Tolentino, Wendy’s Subway, Andrea Zavala Folache & Adriano Wilfert Jensen

View the full program and schedule on temporaryliveness.org.

On July 10-12, 2025 (Thursday, 4:30-10:30p, Friday, 1-11pm, and Saturday, 2-9pm), The Kitchen presents School for Temporary Liveness (STL) Volume 4, consisting of a unique series of performances,sonic convenings, workshops, and conversations with over fifteen artists, alongside a multi-day reading room, participatory installation, and screening program.

The School for Temporary Liveness reimagines performance through the poetic frame of a school. STL asks: What if we approach performances as invitations to enter into study? Inversely, if we imagine the whole operation of a school as a performance, how does that change the ways we teach and learn, or what we think of as knowledge?

When approached as a form that bears the excesses, instabilities, and ruptures of social life, performance—like school—can be an excuse for taking part in dissonant communion. Amid crumbling and defunct infrastructures for assembly, STL Vol. 4 proposes a para-site for renewal, refuge, and possibility.

The Kitchen presents The School for Temporary Liveness Vol. 4, July 10–12, 2025 at The Kitchen at Westbeth (163B Bank Street, 4th Floor Loft). This program is a part of the third annual West Side Fest, a three day celebration of arts and culture on Manhattan’s West Side. Following three prior presentations in Philadelphia in 2019, 2020, and 2023, STL Vol. 4, presented in New York City for the first time and dually broadcasted live on Montez Press Radio, creates a site for emergent and collective study, mobilizing formats for practice, action, and reflection over three days. Program schedule free and open to the public with encouraged RSVP, and performances ticketed $10-30 sliding scale. The School for Temporary Liveness Vol. 4 is organized by guest curators Lauren Bakst and Niall Jones, with Matthew Lyons and Angelique Rosales Salgado, The Kitchen. Production by David Riley, Production & Exhibitions Manager, and Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor, The Kitchen.

We are coming back to school, even though we never left.

The School for Temporary Liveness (STL) invites you to join our beautifully improper and unwieldy assembly. Following three prior iterations, Vol. 4 continues STL’s proposal to reimagine performance through the poetic frame of a school. From Thursday July 10–Saturday July 12, STL Vol. 4 will inhabit The Kitchen at Westbeth, with live broadcasts on Montez Press Radio. Between air, earth, and rivers, spilling into and out of the LOFT and the BASEMENT, this impermanent campus hosts a series of situations for collective study and experiments in performance, practice, and pedagogy.

Scenes & Schemes > Let’s make a school.

A curriculum for collective and incomplete study…

In performance: nora chipaumire • Juliana Huxtable • Julie Tolentino keywords: affinity, atmosphere, commemoration, commons, energy, erotics, flesh-body, freedom, friendship, giving-receiving, loss, materiality, mortality, (non)knowledge, observation, research, revolution, service, speculation, survival, unstable archives

In practice: Bilna’es • Denise Ferreira da Silva • Darrell Jones keywords: air, becoming, black feminist poethics, crisis, dancing, disorder, difference without separability, gravity, hijacking, improvisation, negation, participant, periphery, permutation, praxis, refuge, refusal, rhythm, un-languageable

In process: Wendy’s Subway • Andrea Zavala Folache & Adriano Wilfert Jensen keywords: attention, collectivity, complicity, conviviality, elsewhere, dispersal, interdependence, movement, methodology, play, rehearsal, scoring, time, tempo, transmission, translation

In performance, we gather in proximity to the works and lifeworlds of nora chipaumire, Juliana Huxtable,and Julie Tolentino. Each artist offers performances that differently inhabit and refract liveness as a proposition, need, and horizon. Their works sharpen, tear, and cut into the multiplicities and densities that charge the present, the excessive and playful art of the edit, the instability and difference that emerges in the archival encounter. chipaumire’s acontinua - an obituary, a manual for a life lived chasing LIFE is a revolutionary meditation that iterates across two nights, channeling the maximal into the distilled and back again. Juliana Huxtable extends her lush interspecies, intra-animating poetics into a shifting environment of language, light, and sound for GFP (GREEN FLUORESCENT PROTEIN). Building on their archiving-performance project The Sky Remains the Same, Julie Tolentino gives group form to Lovett/Codagnone’s 1999/2005 duet CLOSER, attuning us to the urgent task of keeping the impossible record.

In practice, we read, listen, dance, talk, wonder, and dream with Bilna’es, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Darrell Jones. Expanded listening and study sessions with the adisciplinary platform Bilna’es dwell in the resounding anticolonial multitude of life-lived in the negative. Poethical readings of the Tarot led by Denise Ferreira da Silva challenge the inherited philosophical and epistemological traditions that constitute the political-architecture of the present, welcoming our capacities for “existence as implicancy.” The physical-poetic-philosophical is alive in Darrell Jones’ practice sessions that invite participants toward extremes and edges, finding non-redemptive ways of moving the body through intensity.

In process, we promiscuously accumulate, collide and (dis)arrange matters and materials in the Wendy’s Subway’s Reading Room, inseparable assembly, and in the zona de juego, a manifestation of Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen’s project Domestic Anarchism. inseparable assembly constellates a collection of texts that prompt connections and webs of thought. Through a screening program with the After Hours Film School, inseparable assembly attends to the many valences of rehearsal. Domestic Anarchism: zona de juego makes a place for ambient conviviality and cohabitation. Emerging from a series of intimate collaborations that blur living and making, the zona de juego and its companion session bailes with Malcolm-x Betts shapeshift between dancing, mark-making, ingesting, and reflecting.

STL Vol. 4 swarms improvisationally against attempts at institutional, disciplinary, and repressive enclosure. We’ve already been swarming. Our movement is the dissonant counter-sway, a hesitant social dance within a para-site containing and scattering our immeasurable para-fictions. We gather cause we want to and we have to. STL is open to all — we are all students.

Come fantasize, disrupt, and unwork the school, the scene, the scheme…

—Lauren Bakst & Niall Jones

The School for Temporary Liveness Vol. 4 Schedule

THURSDAY, JULY 10

LOFT

4:30 pm, in practice

Metaphysics of the Elements: The Studio on Reading (Air)
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Free with RSVP

6:00 pm, in practice

Listening Session: Only sounds that tremble through us
Bilna’es
Free with RSVP

9:00 pm, in process

After Hours Film School: Screening
Wendy’s Subway
Free with RSVP

BASEMENT

8:00 pm, in performance

acontinua - an obituary, a manual for a life lived chasing LIFE
nora chipaumire
Tickets: $10-$30 Sliding Scale

FRIDAY, JULY 11

LOFT

1:00–2:30 pm, in practice

I get lost…
Darrell Jones
Free with RSVP

2:45–4:45 pm, in practice

Workshop: To all those we are indebted to
Bilna’es
Free with RSVP

5:00–7:00 pm, in process

Domestic Anarchism: bailes
Andrea Zavala Folache & Adriano Wilfert Jensen with Malcolm-x Betts
Free with RSVP

Reading and Writing in Tempo
Wendy’s Subway
Free with RSVP

LOFT & BASEMENT

7:00–11:00 pm, in performance

THE SKY REMAINS THE SAME: Archiving Lovett/Codagnone’s CLOSER 1999, 2005 in 2025 (Group)
Julie Tolentino
Tickets: $10-$30 Sliding Scale

BASEMENT

8:00 pm, in performance

GFP (GREEN FLUORESCENT PROTEIN)
Juliana Huxtable
Tickets: $10-$30 Sliding Scale

SATURDAY, JULY 12

LOFT

2:00–4:00 pm, in practice

Metaphysics of the Elements: The Studio on Reading (Air)
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Free with RSVP

4:30–6:00 pm, in practice

I get lost…
Darrell Jones
Free with RSVP

BASEMENT

3:00 pm, in conversation

Do Not Become Enamored of Power
Lia Gangitano and Julie Tolentino
Free with RSVP

6:00 pm, in performance

GFP (GREEN FLUORESCENT PROTEIN)
Juliana Huxtable
Tickets: $10-$30 Sliding Scale

8:00 pm, in performance

a post-mortem speculative interrogation of acontinua – an obituary, a manual for a life lived chasing LIFE nora chipaumire Tickets: $10-$30 Sliding Scale

Ongoing

inseparable assembly
Wendy’s Subway Reading Room

Wendy’s Subway presents inseparable assembly, a reading room that invites shared study, reflection, and gathering. Envisioning the reading room as a space of social choreography, inseparable assembly iterates across a selection of titles centering performative, improvisational, and pedagogical practices; a reader of citations and fragments assembled through self-guided movement; and an offering of prompts for writing and annotation. Inseparable assembly marks time on Thursday night, through an After Hours film screening program; and a Friday afternoon session of writing and reading in tempo.

Domestic Anarchism: zona de juego
Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen

A place for drift and contact, Domestic Anarchism: zona de juego is open before, during and after Domestic Anarchism: bailes. An invitation for children and adults to cohabit in the material and immaterial architectures of a performance. Large scale window paintings as reversed coloring books, aluminium clits as toys and tools, a hyphae house drawn with flowers on the floor, (mother) tongues carved in soap, erotic booklets and passing scores.

The materials and practices in Domestic Anarchism: zona de juego have been made in a series of collaborations with HaYoung, Alissa Šnaider, Paolo Gile, Emma Daniel, Lisa Schåman, Luca Soudant, Kexin Hao and Lauren Bakst.

Montez Press Radio

In partnership with Montez Press Radio, an experimental broadcasting and performance platform, The School for Temporary Liveness Vol. 4 at The Kitchen streams live on July 10–12. Montez Press Radio is as much a radio broadcast as it is a reflection of particular moments in time. The broadcast will go live from the start to the end of each program day, as an ongoing auditory document of STL Vol. 4.

Read an ongoing email exchange between Vol. 4 co-curators Lauren and Niall.

Niall:
How do you study liveness ? And what does school have to do with it ?

Lauren:
Love these questions. To answer them, I woke up and opened some books and turned to a few pages I've turned to many times before. I'm with Rebecca Schneider: At any second or third look the live shatters into complications. To study liveness is to give oneself over to that shattering.

If at first glance, liveness seems to suggest a fetishistic attachment to presence, we keep learning that liveness is always, per Fred Moten, more + less than here and now. To study liveness is to give oneself over to that insistent shattering of presence, of the present ... to commune with and within the unholy ghostliness of liveness.

Shattering, shards, I'm thinking of Julie Tolentino and the cut. Harry Burke describes their 108-hour performance-exhibition "Repeater": Every hour, a camera documents the room, and Tolentino cuts the same spot on her inner thigh to smear a slide with a throb of blood. Liveness is that open wound and the immanent response of the flesh. Cutting, healing, scarring, repeating.

We study liveness by attending to this endless iterativity. We study liveness by rehearsing the difficult embrace of what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls difference without separability. It takes practice to keep refusing the "I". As Ethan Philbrick reminded us so beautifully: Why worry about preaching to the choir? We need choir practice.

When I write we, I am already thinking like a school, and maybe not like school as institution (rage against the university) but more like a school of fish. And I remember a photo AJ Wilmore sent me from Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Undrowned. Gumbs is writing about striped dolphins, for which the primary unit of life is school... What if school was the scale at which we could care for each other and move together. We study liveness through our indefatigable swarm; it catches us, pulls us in, spits us out, let me throw it back to you:

How would you describe the school we are making? And what does liveness have to do with it?

Niall:
I wonder if we’re even making a school ; or always , always caught in the terminological limits and our desires ( poetic and logistic ) to labor within the usefulness and uselessness of school as a location , a continuum , a frame . We’re making something that on a number of levels tends to our complexly specific and individual ( but not singular ) on-going histories with growing up and working in and with school and its many symptoms . Pre-School . Elementary School . Sunday School . Middle School . Vacation Bible School . Dance School . High School . High School Dropout , but not quite . College and more college and even more college . In a continual process of living through and forming responses to school’s tendencies to categorize , confine , discipline , & outlaw ways of being ; considering its tendencies and missions to provide real access to material and immaterial resources that do offer an otherwise, a something else , a gorgeous detour .. . as much as it expropriates its constituent’s labors & dreams of potential futures / potential worlds that deepen unpayable and unavoidable debts. Maybe the school we are working on now , the fourth iteration , a deconstruction or an aberration, is aligned with Kunci Study Forum & Collective’s School of Improper Education, but perhaps also in a kind of irregular accord with Pope L.’s Hole Theory as we make and tend to the living gaps * breaks * ruptures * holes that demand something like a school to incite re/assembly and to “ to confront the nothingness, to touch its fullness … over and over again with one’s body” ( Barad, Troubling Time/s ) .

“Can you feel it?”

So - when I say
Holes are conduits or a 'means to'
Or a space or an intersection -
I mean holes are occasions
Opportunities which can take
Many forms, materials, and durations
(imagine a hole that is only duration).

The form, material and durational
Aspect of a hole can affect
Its nature (imagine a hole
That is only aspect or affect).
When I imagine a hole
That is only this or only that
I am not after purity -
But hilarity.
Holes are not the point.
Holes are empty theory..
– Pope.L

We are building a new school.
The school is an experiment on the
sustainability of (both material and immaterial)
economies of organization.
We want to test the idea of school
as a garden of ideas, a laboratory
of affects, and a space where new ideas
clash and coalesce. We are not yet sure
about what can be learned in
this school. But we are absolutely sure
about not starting from the premises that
specify what needs to be learned and not learned. We want to study together, while interrogating the
meaning of
togetherness.
– Kunci Study Forum & Collective
Hmmmm , what does liveness have to do with any of this ? This is certainly why we’re doing this , a commitment in asking and reasking this question together and with others , and to locate the ask in our doings . I’m not entirely sure of what it is or where it is or how to explain it but maybe a question to ask regarding liveness , similar to Kodjo Eshun musings on dance music’s rhythmic psychedelics in Abducted by Audio, might be “ can you feel it ? ” And then , what kind of work are we doing and what kind of formulation of place and collective is emerging as we move from , with and toward senses of feeling .
So maybe liveness is about intensities, how we study a variety of im/material intensities and how those intensities create thresholds ( Eshun ) ,
unwatchable places we make
when we watch with one another ( Moten and Harney ) ,
that we meet at to devise ways of entering , being with & passing thru .
& Toni Morrison , too !

I’m sure you’ve seen or heard the clip numerous times but I have to include it because liveness is also an ongoing series of longings to endure , to persist , to survive and to die , beautifully under life’s impossible circumstances . Toni says , “ Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in parts . But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that, that makes it elegant. .. survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between . ” https://www.tiktok.com/@thekrisbliss/video/7293226786748402986 __

Lauren !
What feels strikingly different or new
about the planning and making
of Volume 4
compared to
Volumes 1, 2 & 3?__