Jay Scheib & More Set for The Kitchen's Winter 2014 Season
By: Tyler Peterson Dec. 12, 2013
The Kitchen has announced programming for its winter 2014 season, which begins January 8 with performances from both Jay Scheib and Heather Kravas.
Jay Scheib revives an early, unpublished Chekhov play in the raucous, sexy and ultimately tragic Platonov, or The Disinherited (January 8-24). Scheib's new work combines live film and theatrical performance; it will be live-edited and simultaneously broadcast each night to cinemas including BAM, AMC Times Square, and others across the country.
The Kitchen joins with PS122 to co-present a new work by choreographer Heather Kravas (January 8-13), as part of the 2014 COIL Festival. In a quartet, Kravas stages four dancers in four solos, of four parts each, to investigate the relationship of the individual to the collective through movements spanning folk dance, ballet, cheerleading and exacting minimalism.
Boru O'Brien O'Connell and Luke Stettner will mount simultaneous exhibitions from January 23-March 1, dividing the gallery space with a wall down the middle. For his first New York City solo exhibition-comprising photo, video and installation-O'Connell takes inspiration from the work of illustrator and designer John Vassos. Concurrently, artist Luke Stettner will offer a series of sculptures and works on paper that consider time and mortality through the lens of record keeping and documentation.
The Chicago-based, three-time Grammy-winning ensemble eighth blackbird has been called a group of "super-musicians" by the Los Angeles Times. On February 6 and 7, they'll perform a unique take on the commedia dell'arte by composer Amy Beth Kirsten, along with musical selections spanning over three centuries of styles.
Violinist and composer Sarah Neufeld, best known for her work with Arcade Fire, will perform a special one-night-only New York solo concert on February 14. The performance will feature material from Neufeld's 2013 debut album, Hero Brother, which captures her textural and kinetic style. The compositions blend electronic and avant-garde influences with folk and indie music.
Artist and writer Lucy Raven will present a performative lecture (February 19), in which she tracks the course of international manufacturing-in this case, the overseas production of 3D imagery for Hollywood.
On March 1, The Kitchen will host a tribute to longtime friend and supporter Lou Reed, who passed away in late October 2013. Reed's deeply influential noise album, Metal Machine Music, will play on loop in the theater for the duration of open hours.
Improvisational performance artist Aki Sasamoto will share the story of a mythic "fireman" who must fuel the furnace of life through her labor shoveling coal. From March 6-8, Sasamoto will occupy a constructed stage environment and original live soundscape for performances that search out hope in the face of darkness.
Performance/choreography duo Gerard & Kelly will take over both floors of The Kitchen for an exhibition (March 13- April 19) spanning performance, drawing, video, and sound. Known for engaging their audiences in intimate experiences, Gerard & Kelly will consider the human specifics of "time" in a gallery exhibition, including memory, attention and fatigue.
On March 21 & 22, cellist Okkyung Lee will blend traditional Korean melodies, improvisational jazz, and noise for a concert of strings and percussion inspired by Beckett's "First Love" and Yi Sang's surreal "The Wings."
The winter season concludes March 27-29, with Liz Magic Laser's Bystander, in which the performance and video artist flips the usual roles of newscaster and man-on-the street played out in the nightly news. Anchors offer their subjective testimony while the "public" presents factual reports, thereby exposing the mechanics and psychology at play in the news.
Throughout the season, The Kitchen will continue their L.A.B. series of panel discussions of salient themes in contemporary art and performance. Join us January 28, February 13, and March 17 as panelists engage with the many complexities of audience.
More information on The Kitchen's winter 2014 programming is below. Tickets are available online at www.thekitchen.org; by phone at 212.255.5793 x11; and in person at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street), Tuesdays - Saturdays, 2:00 - 6:00 P.M.
THE KITCHEN WINTER 2014 PROGRAMMING
THEATER/PERFORMANCE
Jay Scheib
Platonov, or The Disinherited
January 8-24
$25
Director, designer, author, and 2011-12 Guggenheim Fellow Jay Scheib will premiere his innovative new "live cinema performance," Platonov, or The Disinherited. The work consists of two integral halves:a live performance at The Kitchen adapted from Chekhov's unfinished first play; and The Disinherited, a real-time film of the show that will be broadcast each night to movie theaters including BAM, Times Square, and others. Formally, Platonov, or the Disinherited builds upon stagecast initiatives like Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD, but enlists performers to operate cameras from on stage, visible to the audience and woven into the action. The performance is threaded with every theme that would later unfold in Chekhov's masterworks, following a circle of friends and lovers through fights, betrayals and double-crosses to their hilarious, destructive conclusion. This physically daring and emotionally charged performance is a journey with a sense of humor first and foremost that races into the dark hearts of ecstasy, loyalty, selflessness, money, and pride.
DANCE
Heather Kravas
a quartet
January 8-13
$20
Comprised of a kaleidoscopic ballet, a mutating folk dance, a Constructivist-inspired manifesto and a titillating cheer, Heather Kravas' a quartet examines the underlying politics of societal fidelity. Four contemporary dancers (Oren Barnoy, Cecilia E, Jennifer Kjos and Liz Santoro) execute four dances comprised of four parts each, asking: where is the end of us and the beginning of them? By turns arduous and minimal, this work blends tradition, desire, communism, preteens, servitude, mushroom clouds and the pastoral as the various dances cross converge. Based in Seattle, NYC and Montesquieu-Volvestre (France), Kravas has been presented by PS122, The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, Movement Research and Danspace Project, among others. As a performer, she works with DD Dorviller's human future dance corps and was recently a re-performer in MoMA's retrospective, Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present.
Commissioned by PS122 as part of the COIL 2014 Festival. Co-presented by PS122 and The Kitchen.
VISUAL ART
Boru O'Brien O'Connell
Draft, Capture, - -
January 23-March 1
FREE
The first New York solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist Boru O'Brien O'Connell's takes an encounter with the iconic work of industrial designer and illustrator John Vassos as a starting point for a new body of work including video, photography and sculpture. Desks, cameras, microphones and tile floors take roles as mnemonic and perceptual devices in various states of assembly and exposure. In a multi-channel video, a child fruitlessly assembles wood blocks while an animated man climbs and descends staircases in a state of constant fear. Across his work, O'Connell mirrors tropes such as the "filmic wipe" to conflate the subject and medium into a vertiginous space of heightened creative emblems. In addition to his own artwork, O'Connell contributed a three-channel video work and writing for Miguel Gutierrez's 2012-13 performance And lose the name of action. His work has been published by Blind Spot, Bidoun, Vice, DIS, and Triple Canopy, and written about in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Frieze. Curated by Lumi Tan.
VISUAL ART
Luke Stettner
this single monument
January 23-March 1
FREE
Last thing I knew there were five indications of a pause
first was the one that came before all the others
after that came the one I remember the least but was the most sudden and unexpected
following that came the refrain
the second to last was the most turbulent and listless and mournful and violent and prolonged and ordinary
the one that followed all the others was how it ended.
An exhibition of new work by artist Luke Stettner. He has exhibited at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (North Adams), Exit Art (New York), Stene Projects (Stockholm), Kate Werble Gallery (New York), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Tuscon, AZ), among others. Stettner has received reviews in publications such as Artforum, ArtReview, Mousse, Aperture, and The Boston Globe. Curated by Lumi Tan.
MUSIC
eighth blackbird
Heart and Breath
February 6-7, 8:00 p.m.
$25
The six musicians of multi-Grammy-winning ensemble eighth blackbird play, speak, sing, whisper, growl, and mime, breathing theatrical life into the commedia dell'arte characters of composer Amy Beth Kirsten's Colombine's Paradise Theatre, a musical tale of love and death, dream and delusion. Preceding Kirsten's work is a musical program spanning three centuries yet unified in its passionate attention to themes of heart and breath.
MUSIC
Sarah Neufeld
February 14, 8:00 p.m.
$15
Violinist and composer Sarah Neufeld, best known as member of Arcade Fire, will perform selections from her debut solo album Hero Brother. Neufeld counts Bela Bartok, Steve Reich, Iva Bittova and Arthur Russell among the formative influences for her solo work, in tandem with an ear for the textures and sensibilities of contemporary electro-acoustic, avant-folk and indie rock music. Hero Brother indeed channels all of the above, flowing through shifting atmospheres and oscillating between restrained, stately ambience, emotive études, and raw kinetic energy. Neufeld is also a founding member of the acclaimed contemporary instrumental ensemble Bell Orchestre and has performed and recorded with many other groups, including The Luyas, Esmerine and Little Scream. Neufeld has recently premiered her solo music at BAM (Brooklyn), the WSO New Music Festival (Winnipeg) and Wavelength Festival (Toronto).
VISUAL ART/LECTURE
Lucy Raven
On Location, an illustrated lecture
Wednesday, February 19, 7:00 p.m.
$10
With On Location, artist and writer Lucy Raven traces Hollywood's export of raw materials-in this case, images-to countries in Southeast Asia to be processed, reformed, and recombined. Beginning with the recent conversion of the 2009 disaster-apocalypse film 2012 from 2D to 3D, Raven investigates the developing technologies and infrastructures through which landscapes, locations and stereoscopic 3D spaces are constructed. Raven is a contributing editor to BOMB magazine, and her writing has appeared in Artforum and October. She has curated projects for the Goethe Institute (New York), Ballroom Marfa (Texas); and was the co-creator of Bump City, a series of online documentaries for the Oakland Museum of California (2012). Her artwork has also been exhibited at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), and the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, and PS1 (New York).
MUSIC
Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music
Saturday, March 1, 11:00 a.m. -6:00 p.m.
In tribute to Lou Reed, Metal Machine Music will play continuously in The Kitchen's theater. Reed's critically panned and deeply influential 1975 album has been revisited in recent years as one of the artist's most significant contributions to contemporary music. Metal Machine Music is one hour of a guitar and the feedback from two amplifiers, with no set rhythm, key or vocals. Legendary music critic Lester Bangs described it as "the greatest record ever made in the history of the human eardrum."
PERFORMANCE
Aki Sasamoto
Sunny the fireman
March 6-8, 8:00 p.m.
$15
New York-based, Japanese-born Sasamoto works across mediums to explore everyday gestures, found objects, and improvisations. In this new storytelling endeavor, Aki Sasamoto searches for optimism in the murky memory of hardship and drama, and strives to make sense of personal episodes through gestures and sculptural objects. Fireman is the dark smart soul who has to keep shoveling coal into a furnace in order to continue life, trying to be the Idiot, but motivating herself to one day become enlightened. Occupying a landscape constructed by Sam Ekwurtzel, Sasamoto will encounter an impossibly tall Jessica Weinstein, augmented by lighting design from Madeline Best and the live accompaniment of John Bollinger.
VISUAL ART/PERFORMANCE
Gerard & Kelly
Timelining
March 13-April 19
FREE
Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly are artists and choreographers whose uniquely collaborative practice uses performance, choreography, writing, and a range of other media to re-articulate the spaces in which they work and construct situations of intimacy and engaged participation. Gerard & Kelly's solo exhibition features a new project, Timelining, installed in both the upstairs and downstairs spaces of The Kitchen. Conceived as an ongoing system of performances, the work plays temporalities of stage and exhibition space against the experience of time in everyday life. Privileging faulty memory, fatigue, and belatedness, the exhibition, which also includes drawings, sound, and video, reflects on a society increasingly in sync. Curated by Tim Griffin.
MUSIC
Okkyung Lee
March 21-22, 8:00 p.m.
$15
Inspired by Samuel Beckett's "First Love" and Korean surrealist writer Yi Sang's "The Wings," composer and cellist Okkyung Lee presents a suite of newly written compositions for strings and percussion. Fragile gestures and sounds suspended in time and space, in combination with visceral, gritty noise attempt to invoke the dark themes of these short stories. A native of Korea, Lee incorporates jazz, Korean traditional music, improvisation and noise to create a distinctive sound. She has performed alongside such musicians as Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, Vijay Iyer, and Thurston Moore.
PERFORMANCE
Liz Magic Laser
Bystander
March 27-29, 8:00 p.m.
$15
LECTURE
The Kitchen L.A.B.
January 28, February 13, March 17, 7:00 p.m.
FREE
Artists and critics in all fields, and from throughout The Kitchen's season, present work and compare notes in this continuing series considering the contextual meaning of different terms in art. Please join us and participate as artists engage the term audience. Among participants this year have been Eileen Quinlan, Jacob Kassay, Olivier Mosset, C. Spencer Yeh, Adrienne Truscott, and many others.
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