It’s Steaming in The Kitchen |
|
StubDog.com :: Event Information And Articles :: It’s Steaming in The Kitchen
Chelsea, the neighborhood bounded by West 30th and 14th Streets, and Seventh Avenue and the Hudson River, has several hallmarks: elite art galleries in the West 20s; velvet rope dance clubs; a gay community; and eateries lining Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Standout, unique attractions within the scene are not limited to an easily digestible entertainment, though. There’s The Kitchen.
Home to some of the nation's finest experimental work, The Kitchen Center for Video, Music, Dance, Performance, Film and Literature, to give the place fondly known as "The Kitchen" its full name, is a performance laboratory where works by independent artists and companies are commissioned, supported, developed and executed. The original site was in the former kitchen of the old Broadway Central Hotel. Today the center occupies a striking three-story complex in Chelsea (a former 19th-century icehouse) containing one of the largest black box theaters in the country, as well as a second-floor café theater. Offerings are often offbeat and the crowd is generally eager to experience new and risk-taking modes of performance. Certainly not a venue for the placid absorption of the tried-and-true, The Kitchen pushes the envelope of possibility in contemporary performance.
Founded as an artists' collective in 1971 by video artists Woody and Steina
Vasulka, The Kitchen began as a space where media artists, composers,
and performers could share their ideas with one another. It embraced a
sprit of experimentation and was an environment uniquely conducive to
cross-disciplinary explorations that helped launch the careers of many
artists who have defined the American avant-garde, including Vito Acconci
(Brooklyn-based architect, landscape architect, and installation artist),
David Byrne (Scottish-American musician and artist perhaps best known
as a founding member and principal songwriter of the new wave band Talking
Heads), Constance de Jong (American artist writer and playwright. She
is probably best known as the writer on the libretto of Philip Glass's
opera Satyagraha), Kiki Smith (artist and feminist), Steve Reich (American
composer, a pioneer of minimalist music. His innovations include using
tape loops to create phasing patterns and the use of simple, audible processes
to explore musical concepts. He has been described by The Guardian as
one of "a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have
altered the direction of musical history"), and board members Laurie
Anderson (Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first
performance-art piece in the late 1960s and became widely known outside
the art world in 1981 when her single O Superman reached number two on
the UK pop charts. She has also invented several devices that she has
used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created
a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead
of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s,
she developed a talking stick, a six-foot-long baton-like MIDI controller
that can access and replicate different sounds.) Philip Glass
(Considered one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century
and widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the
public. Described as minimalist he distances himself from this label,
describing himself instead as a composer of "music with repetitive structures."
He writes music for and performs with his own Philip Glass Ensemble. Three
of his film scores have been nominated for Academy Awards) and Meredith
Monk (American composer, performer, director, vocalist, film-maker,
and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary
works which dwell in the spaces between music, theatre, and dance. She
“works in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the
body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema."
Today, The Kitchen is an internationally acclaimed arts institution still widely known for its commitment to experimental work as it continues to provide instrumental support for the early and mid-career development of the current generation of artists. The Kitchen is a non-profit, interdisciplinary organization that provides innovative artists working in the media, literary, and performing arts with exhibition and performance opportunities to create and present new work. Using its own extensive history as a resource, the organization identifies, supports, and presents emerging and under-recognized artists who are making significant contributions to their respective fields as well as serves as a safe space for more established artists to take unusual creative risks.
