The Kitchen Presents Lauren Bakst's AFTER SUMMER, OR NOT IN THE KITCHEN (THE BED, THE BATHROOM, THE DANCE FLOOR AND OTHER SPACES)

The Kitchen presents Lauren Bakst: after summer, or not in the kitchen (the bed, the bathroom, the dance floor and other spaces), performances developed across a residency through The Kitchen at Queenslab. Lessons from encounters; a love story between desire and abjection; movement that emerges from contact: after summer is a map of and for an everyday erotics. Curated by Matthew Lyons.

Bakst's most recent project, More Problems with Form, featured a filmed reenactment of a scene from Chantal Akerman's Les Rendez-Vous d'Anna (1978), depicting an intimate exchange between the protagonist and her estranged mother. In rehearsing, performing, and filming a new version of the scene with her own mother, Bakst describes, "we were able to have an encounter that would not have been possible with the scripts we already have for relating to each other." While this provided that performance's conclusion, her latest work, after summer... takes this scene and its reenactment as its point of departure. What alternative genealogies of the erotic does this gesture propose? Moving from the extreme intimacy of mother and bed into refractions of other social spaces and exchanges, including that of the performance itself, Bakst charts and traverses the landscape of her desires.

The kitchen, as a historically domestic space of female labor that has been taken up by feminist art practices, is-as the title playfully underscores (likewise hinting at the piece's absence from The Kitchen itself)-avoided. after summer rather points us to other spaces of relation-the bed, the bathroom, and the dance floor. What forms of unknowing and undoing are proposed by the affective worlds these spaces generate and the temporary formations of intimacy they make possible?

Public performances take place at Queenslab (1611 Cody Avenue, Ridgewood, New York) December 11-14 at 8pm. Tickets: $20 General/$15 Members. Tickets will go on sale today, November 4 at 12pm.

Lauren Bakst is an artist and writer living in New York. Her performance, video, and publication works have been commissioned by The Kitchen (2019), The Chocolate Factory Theater (2019), BAM/Wendy's Subway (2018), Dance and Process at The Kitchen (2018), Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery (2018), SculptureCenter (2017), Danspace Project (2016) and Pioneer Works (2015). Lauren is a Contributing Editor to the Movement Research Performance Journal where she worked as Managing Editor from 2015-18. She has held residencies and fellowships at The Drawing Center, The New Museum, and danceweb at ImpulsTanz, among others. Her writing has been published in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and BOMB Magazine. Lauren teaches in Philadelphia at University of the Arts School of Dance, where she most recently curated The School for Temporary Liveness, a pedagogical art project that reimagined performance through the poetic frame of a school.

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