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Choreographing Community
- University of Wisconsin Press
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When I lived in the SoHo area of New York City, working as a dance and performance art critic in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was a frequent visitor to The Kitchen Center for Video, Music, and Dance. Recently , while in New York to dig through The Kitchen’s archives in preparation for this article, I saw their production of Ann Carlson’s Night Light. This site-specific performance was a social archeology of a neighborhood in the form of an artful walking tour through the streets of the Chelsea area between Greenwich Village and midtown, where The Kitchen has been located since 1985, punctuated by a series of frozen tableaux recreating historic photographs of Chelsea incidents. Afterwards , we all reconvened at The Kitchen, to drink beer and chat with the tour guides and performers in the downstairs performance space. One of the many projects commissioned by Elise Bernhardt, the current executive director of The Kitchen Center for Video, Music, Dance, Performance, Film, and Literature (as it is now called), Night Light was a performance about community pride and preservation that 281 k Choreographing Community Dancing in The Kitchen : Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts 25, no. 1 (2002): 143–61 created intimate, interactive relationships between the tour-guide performers and spectators. It set me thinking about the history of The Kitchen as an institution in relation to changing ideas of community in the arts. When Bernhardt was invited to run The Kitchen in 1998, she told Deborah Jowitt in a Village Voice interview that her vision for this wellestablished “alternative space” had to do with balancing neighborhood engagement and support for experimentation by artists—not always an easy task for an institution committed to avant-garde arts. The neighborhood , she pointed out, was extremely diverse in terms of class, culture , and commerce, embracing “Chelsea Piers [a new sports center], the women’s prison, thirty-eight art galleries, the [Episcopal] seminary, the housing projects [for low-income families], four public schools, Chelsea Market [an upscale food market], and the Roxy [nightclub]. . . . If you could figure out a way to embrace all those worlds—not all at once necessarily, but in strategic partnerships—you’d create sort of a model of how a cultural center should function.”1 She told Jennifer Dunning of the New York Times, “There are rich and poor people here, a strong gay community, middle-class people with kids, sports, arts, fruits and vegetables. It’s about as diverse as you can get. The first thing I did was to send staff out to let people know they worked at The Kitchen, and invite them to something. The Kitchen is a base, not a space. A cultural center.”2 Bernhardt’s vision of The Kitchen as a local cultural center with programming targeted to various audience strata (including families with kids) and with an emphasis on outreach and education to draw in diverse Chelsea neighborhood residents not only differentiates its presenting program from two other dance spaces in Chelsea—the Joyce Theater and Dance Theater Workshop—but also dovetails neatly with state, federal, and private funding criteria since the mid-1990s; her appointment was a strategic move by The Kitchen’s board of directors, and it was good for dance as well, for Bernhardt had for fifteen years run the organization Dancing in the Streets, which she founded to present modern and postmodern dance for free in public spaces like parks, streets, swimming pools, and train stations. As well, Bernhardt’s view of art’s agenda as community-building verging on social services and her insistence on bringing people together with art over meals, on one hand, returns full-circle to an ethos of communalism and commensalism embraced by the founders of The Kitchen 282 (who were rooted in a utopian, collectivist 1960s alternative culture3), but on the other hand conceptualizes that community in a very different key, one that suits our own era of multiculturalism, of targeting the needs and rights of special interest groups, of esteem-building, and of anti-elitism in the arts. The community the early Kitchen fostered was a community of avant-garde artist-participants, whereas Bernhardt’s Kitchen seeks to make art accessible to a flourishing neighborhood community . This article explores how, since the founding of The Kitchen and especially since it became an institution in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the organization’s notion of community has changed several times and how its relationship...