'SCENARIO' World Premiere, MASS, Maria Chavez Installation and More Set for The Kitchen's Spring 2015 Season

Since 1971, The Kitchen has provided artists of both emerging and established statures with a hot-house environment for the presentation and discussion of their work. The Kitchen seeks to foster a vibrant, living dialogue among artists from every field and area of culture. The institution's Spring 2015 season, April 11-June 27, exemplifies this commitment.

The Spring 2015 season continues The Kitchen's commitment to pioneering multi-disciplinary dance and performance works with the world premiere of Gillian Walsh's Scenario: Script to Perform (April 9-11), in which Walsh continues her formal exploration with scores; Dynasty Handbag's Good Morning Evening Feelings with Dynasty Handbag (April 24-25), a one-hour motivational experience designed to help audiences navigate through five basic human feelings that pop up throughout the day and try to kill you. Milka Djordjevich and Chris Peck's MASS (April 30-May 2) combines movement and song to create a slow dance on a pedestal for three women; Yve Laris Cohen's Fine (May 14-16) is a continuation of a body of work addressing the ontology of theatrical and exhibition spaces; in Open House (June 25-27) director/choreographer Steven Reker collaborates with Ryan Seaton (Callers), Matt Evans (Tigue), and Eliot Krimsky (Glass Ghost) to use sound, light, and movement to rework the poetically dense world of Richard Brautigan's 1968 novella In Watermelon Sugar; and the latest installment of Dance and Process (June 12-13) curated by Sarah Michelson and featuring new works by Strauss Borque-LaFrance, Benjamin Kimitch, Courtney Krantz and Elizabeth Ward.

The Kitchen's 2nd floor space will come alive with a number of exhibitions that explore the visceral power of sound; Emily Sundblad and Ken Okiishi will explore new romantic texts and musical adaptations in 4 days of open rehearsal among a suite of paintings (April 22-25); Maria Chavez will use sound escaping from the ground floor theater in a unique sound installation (April 28-May 2); and S/N, a exhibition exploring the power of sound examines the possible breaking points of communication as it extends in, through, and beyond the intelligible. S/N (May 22-June 13) is curated by Alex Fleming, Anya Komar, and Blair Murphy - Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.

Synth Nights, The Kitchen's series of live electronic music, continues with composer Helado Negro (May 6). Using rhythms, loops and hair-raising melodies, Lange creates a landscape of introspective feeling.

On May 29 & 30, Matana Roberts presents two new chapters of Coin Coin, the artist's ongoing series of musical and visual works.

On May 21, The Kitchen's Spring Gala will honor Kim Gordon and Dan Graham with special performances by Stephen Malkmus, The Feelies and The Raincoats, featuring honorary chairs Sofia Coppola, Aïda Ruilova and Raymond Pettibon, and Chloë Sevigny.

On May 26, The Kitchen is pleased to host Esopus 22: Medicine, an evening exploring the multiple intersections between medicine and creativity. More than 60 artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, designers, curators and medical professionals will come together to discuss their work on these themes.

Of the upcoming season, Executive Director and Chief Curator Tim Griffin said, "Every season, The Kitchen gives artists license to push the boundaries of their own work, making for a kind of joint adventure in art. This Spring's program shows how that effort has spanned decades, whether in returns by The Raincoats and Matana Roberts or debuts by Yve Laris Cohen and Emily Sundblad. And a few more surprises are still on the way."

More information on The Kitchen's Spring 2015 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.

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THE KITCHEN SPRING 2015 PROGRAMMING:

DANCE
Gillian Walsh
Scenario: Script to Perform
April 9-11 at 8pm; $15
Marking her first evening-length work at The Kitchen, Scenario: Script to Perform is a continuation of Walsh's work with scores. The score of Scenario-a constellation of derived language and numerical codes taken from Hasbro's Twister Dance Rave, military communication (Morse code), and pop culture (song lyrics) - creates a language/movement system that fights artifice and orients the dancer toward structure. Scenario approaches dance as a form of non-fiction. Featuring Maggie Cloud, Nicole Daunic, Mickey Mahar and Gillian Walsh with sound by Stefan Tcherepnin and lights by Zack Tinkelman, Scenario is choreographic thought without a dance.

MUSIC
MATA: 17th annual Festival of New Music
April 14-18 at 8pm; $20
The MATA Festival celebrates its seventeenth year as the leading international festival for emerging composer talent by showcasing the wild variety of today's compositional climate with a sweeping range of original compositions from around the globe. Among the Festival's featured works are ten American premieres and eight world premieres-including three MATA commissions-representing voices from Croatia to Iran, Bolivia to China. "A bellwether of shifting tides" (Village Voice), the Festival's non-dogmatic stylistic range is dizzying, offering a percussion sculpture, a punk-inspired scream-song, works involving lamps and light bulbs, a dancer connected to a pulley-driven prepared piano, and more in performances by Sweden's Curious Chamber Players, in their US debut, along with the Talea Ensemble, Momenta Quartet, Bearthoven, and others.

EXHIBITION
Emily Sundblad with Ken Okiishi
April 22-25
In The Kitchen upstairs space, Emily Sundblad, with Ken Okiishi and other special guests, present open rehearsals and performances-incorporating new romantic texts and musical adaptations-over the course of four consecutive days. The finished work will premiere later this spring in The Kitchen theater.

MUSIC
Stephen Prina
April 22 at 8pm; $15
"Amid a Music History and Literature course, the professor introduced us to Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24, 1934, by Anton Webern, explaining that it is the least referential musical composition in the Western canon. Soon into the recording-in the first movement out of three of an approximately seven and one-half minute long work-the piano voices a chord, commonly described as a raised ninth, at which point my meltdown began. Contrary to it being non-referential, it signaled to me the "Jimi Hendrix Chord," the one he used as the bedrock for Purple Haze and other of his signature songs from the 1960s. This crisis became the point of departure for Concerto for Modern, Movie, and Pop Music for Ten Instruments and Voice, 2008, over some thirty years after this pedagogical incident."

Also performed here will be Prina's flute sextet The Way He Always Wanted It XI, which premiered in 2013 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Christopher McIntyre provides musical direction, conducting an ensemble that includes members of TILT Brass, Either/Or, NE(x)tworks, Talea, and Imani Winds.

PERFORMANCE
Dynasty Handbag
Good Morning Evening Feelings with Dynasty Handbag
April 24-25
Good Morning Evening Feelings with Dynasty Handbag is a live, conceptual, one-hour hybrid morning/late-night/children's show for adults, hosted by everyone's favorite no one, Dynasty Handbag. This inspirational hour is designed to help you navigate through the five basic human feelings that pop up throughout your day and try to kill you. The show will feature an emotionally stunted musical performance, an unpleasant, non-results based exercise routine, a grief squelching cooking segment, and experimental commercial breaks for imaginary feminist products. Curated by David Everitt Howe for NYPAC.

EXHIBITION
Maria Chavez
Sound Bleed @ The Kitchen
April 28-May 2, Free
Building on her ongoing focus on chance, accident, and coincidence, sound artist Maria Chavez's new site-specific installation was developed around the particular phenomenon of sound escaping from The Kitchen's ground floor performance space, leaking up into the 2nd floor exhibition space. Usually considered undesirable and often hard to control, this audio trait (called sound transfer or 'sound bleed') will be recorded on site over the course of the preceding weeks and then remixed into an installation of sound and light that repurposes these vagabond, unruly sound occurrences.

Chavez will be in residence on April 28 & 29 between 12-6pm remixing audio live in the space. The completed installation will be on view April 30-May 2, from 12-7:30pm.

DANCE
Milka Djordjevich + Chris Peck
MASS
April 30-May 2 at 8pm; $15
MASS is a dance, singing and dancing, a song and dance in a black box, a slow dance on a pedestal for three women, with music. It's also the mass, force, and friction against, around, and inside that box. It's a trio of voices tuning, their bodies objectified and recomposed through gradual processes in motion and sound. Like a prayer, it proceeds without manipulation, loving the flaw. Choreography by Milka Djordjevich, music by Chris Peck, performed by Jessica Cook, Kyli Kleven and Djordjevich, lighting by Madeline Best, scenic design by Sara C. Walsh, and with performance advisor Rebecca Brooks.

MUSIC
Synth Nights: Helado Negro
May 6 at 8pm; $15
A South Florida native, born to Ecuadorian immigrants and based in Brooklyn, Roberto Carlos Lange's upbringing provides essential elements to his songwriting, including his consistently bilingual - English and Spanish - lyrics. While citing the influence of electro and Miami-bass he heard on the radio in his youth, his diverse work as Helado Negro points to shades of Krautrock bathed in his mesmerizing rhythms, loops and hair-raising melodies. Known for his craftsmanship, Lange has cultured his identity, ideology and musical dexterity with constant artistic and introspective development, pouring his heart and full sincerity into his music.

DANCE
Yve Laris Cohen
Fine
May 14-16 at 8pm; $15
Fine is a continuation of a body of work addressing the ontology of theatrical and exhibition spaces. Laris Cohen asks architecture's lowest common denominators to both outperform and fall short of their usual duties. Curated by Matthew Lyons.

GALA
The Kitchen Spring Benefit Gala honoring Kim Gordon and Dan Graham
May 21 at Cipriani Wall Street
The Kitchen celebrates the work of two legendary artists who not only appeared here during the 1970s and '80s, but also forged, across disciplines, legacies whose imprint remains strong here today. The evening features special performances by Stephen Malkmus, The Feelies and The Raincoats. Gordon and Graham will curate subsequent evenings at The Kitchen in June.

EXHIBITION
"S/N"
May 22-June 13
"S/N explores the complex dynamics of sound, in particular its tendency to exceed, disrupt, or evade attempts at its capture. "S/N," an abbreviation for signal-to-noise ratio, refers to the balance between a desired communication and the unwanted background noises emanating from the materials and environments it traverses. The writers, musicians, and artists included in the exhibition take up the material complexities of sound, understanding the aural as a site of potential resistance. Moving through language and into noise, S/N examines the possible breaking points of communication as it extends in, through, and beyond the intelligible. Curated by Alex Fleming, Anya Komar, and Blair Murphy, Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.

DISCUSSION
Esopus 22: Medicine
May 26 at 7pm; Free
Exploring the multiple intersections between medicine and creativity, Esopus 22: Medicine will feature contributions from more than 60 artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, designers, curators, and medical professionals. For this evening, contributors to the issue including Nina Katchadourian, Will Sheff (Okkervil River), and others share their work on these themes.

MUSIC
Matana Roberts
May 29-30 at 8pm $15
Matana Roberts has been working for the past eight years on an ongoing series of musical and visual works she terms Coin Coin, exploring themes of history, memory and ancestry. This innovative work has forged new conceptual approaches to narrative, history, and political expression within improvisatory structures. At The Kitchen she presents a new consideration of her recent solo release in the series, River Run Thee, where she will be exploring her ongoing interest in sound/moving image mixology, ephemeral collage, improvisation and durational experimentation for the sake of experimentation first and foremost; each evening features a special past collaborator in the work. These two evenings will offer two very rare reworked glimpses of the newest chapter as it relates to the past two chapters of the work (Coin Coin Chapter 1: Gens des Coleur Libre, and Coin Coin Chapter 2: Mississippi Moonchile) and the current direction of Roberts' compositional process. This two-night residency will also be in celebration of the five-year anniversary of the release of the groundbreaking series. Each evening will end with a discussion led also by a special guest and arts comrade that has been intrinsic to the development of the series.

DANCE
Dance and Process: Strauss Borque-LaFrance, Benjamin Kimitch, Courtney Krantz, and Elizabeth Ward
Curated by Sarah Michelson
June 12-13
This event features new works and is the culmination of a 10-week group process of sharing work and feedback.

PERFORMANCE
Open House
Steven Reker, Ryan Seaton, Matt Evans, Eliot Krimsky
June 25-27 at 8pm; $15
Using Richard Brautigan's novella In Watermelon Sugar as a guide and the lens through which material is developed, director / choreographer Steven Reker collaborates with Ryan Seaton (Callers), Matt Evans (Tigue), and Eliot Krimsky (Glass Ghost) to form the band Open House to premier an evening of songs, compositions, and performance work. Through sound, light, and movement, the band conjures and reworks the poetically dense world that Brautigan created in his 1968 book and creates a space for a "collective imagination" to emerge during the performance. The characters in the story are personified through each of the band members and also inform the music and tone of the piece.

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The Kitchen is one of New York City's most forward-looking nonprofit spaces, showing innovative work by emerging and established artists across disciplines. Our programs range from dance, music, performance, and theater to video, film, and art, in addition to literary events, artists' talks, and lecture series. Since its inception in 1971, The Kitchen has been a powerful force in shaping the cultural landscape of this country, and has helped launch the careers of many artists who have gone on to worldwide prominence.

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