About this Event
Witch’s Kitchen Banquet
October 22, 2022
7–10 PM
At 2220 Arts+Archives
This fall, Active Cultures is thrilled to present Witch’s Kitchen Banquet and Cabaret: an eclectic set of performances and collaborations conceived and directed by artist Shana Lutker that celebrates the grotesque, the surreal, and the underground. The series marks the culmination of Witch's Kitchen, hosted by Lutker, a multifaceted, three-year project, which expands on the generative intersection of performance and presence through the legacy of our spirit guide, Valeska Gert (1892–1978).
Witch’s Kitchen Banquet will be a witchy artist feast accompanied by an intimate performance of newly commissioned interpretations of Valeska Gert’s dances by Jessica Hemingway, Bashir Naim, Kensaku Shinohara, and Emily Mast with Reza Arzanian.
Ticket price includes dinner and wine. Cash bar will feature a special Witch’s Kitchen cocktail.
Doors open at 6:30
Cocktail Hour and Performances at 7:00
Dinner served at 8:00.
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Witch’s Kitchen Cabaret
November 12 & 13, 2022
Purchase tickets through
Witch’s Kitchen Cabaret presents two kaleidoscopic evenings of music, dance, and performance exploring the boundaries of performance and audience, the strange and extravagant, both on and off the stage. The Cabaret is co-directed by Shana Lutker and Mexico and France-based artist Adriana Lara / Red Social. Hosted by the fabulous Page M. Person, both evenings will also feature performers Hemingway, Naim, Shinohara, Mast, and Arzanian, along with the costumes of Johanna Went, and a full lineup to be announced in the coming weeks.
Join us for one or all three evenings at 2220 Arts+Archives and celebrate three years of Witch’s Kitchen!
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Witch's Kitchen borrows its name from Hexenküche, a post-World War II restaurant and cabaret run by Valeska Gert in Berlin. Her underground restaurants and bars in Berlin, New York, Provincetown, Zurich, and the Isle of Sylt, before, during, and after WWII, provided safe havens to exiles and artists of all sorts. She was an innovative dancer and acclaimed performer across Europe in the early 1920s. "By dancing like a holy terror," she wanted "to cross every border and violate every boundary in art." Her dances were described by one critic as the "pathos of protest." As a Jew, she was declared a degenerate artist and fled Berlin in the early 1930s and returned in the 1950s. A film actor over a span of nearly sixty years, Gert worked with directors ranging from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht to Federico Fellini and Werner Herzog. In addition to her legacy in film and dance, she was claimed as the mother of punk by Nina Hagen and Berlin’s Die Tödliche Doris.
Read more about Witch’s Kitchen
Read more about Active Cultures
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Images: Courtesy of the artist.
Shana Lutker is a Los Angeles-based artist. Shaped by the archives of psychoanalysis and surrealism, her interdisciplinary work in sculpture, performance, writing, and installation foregrounds an unstable relationship between subjects, memory, and history. Recent exhibitions include Current LA:FOOD, the LA public art triennial; Virginia Woolf: an exhibition inspired by her writings at Tate St. Ives; and An Analphabet at Vielmetter Los Angeles. She was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2014 and Performa in 2013, and she has had solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Perez Art Museum Miami.
Shana Lutker’s previous plays and performance works include a surrealist dinner theater at TAIX presented by LAXART; a commission for Performa 13; a play staged at the Perez Art Museum Miami, the Hirshhorn, and Hauser and Wirth; and Hear It Here, an interactive multimedia piece with two actors and an accordionist staged in Zurich, Mexico City, Miami, and Santa Barbara.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, United States
USD 54.47