NYC PREMIERE!
Gavin Butt & Ben Walters, This Is Not A Dream
2012, documentary and live performance on video
Curated by Bradford Nordeen

The Kitchen
7PM

The video revolution of the 1970s offered unprecedented access to the moving image for artists and performers. New worlds began to unfold: you could talk back to the mainstream by hijacking its images and upending its values; you could reach out, through the camera, to fellow freaks; and you could create dreamscapes to explore other ways of being. Drawing on exclusive interviews shot in London, New York and Berlin, This Is Not a Dream charts a path across four decades of avant‐garde experiment and radical escapism, following the influences of Andy Warhol, John Waters and Jack Smith to the perverted frontiers of YouTube and Chatroulette, taking in subverted talk shows and soap operas, streetwalker fashions and glittery magic penises along the way.

This Is Not A Dream was created as part of a UK academic research project, Performance Matters, by four people with no experience of documentary-making. Its directors, Gavin Butt and Ben Walters, are a professor and a journalist respectively; its editor, Tom Frederic, is an actor; and the experimental cabaret artist Dickie Beau created bespoke video-interactive performances in specific response to the documentary material being assembled. (Dickie is unable to perform in person but the screening incorporates video recording of his work.) Gavin is Reader in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of books on performance, criticism, queerness and art. Ben is cabaret editor of Time Out London and creator of BURN, the platform for moving images by cabaret artists. Tom trained at LAMDA and has numerous screen and stage credits, including the lead in Wrong Turn 3. Dickie is funded by Arts Council England and has performed in New York, Paris, Edinburgh and Dublin. Performance matters is a collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Roehampton and the Live Art Development Agency, with support from the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council.

The Kitchen is one of New York City's most forward-looking nonprofit spaces, showing innovative work by emerging and established artists across disciplines. 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.