Oral History: Steve Gross
By Matthew Lyons, Curator
As The Kitchen approaches its 50th anniversary in 2021, we have been conducting a series of oral histories with artists and other practitioners who have both shown at The Kitchen and served on staff in various capacities. One area that has been central to our research thus far is the history of The Kitchen’s dance program in the 1980s and 1990s, and for the second of the oral histories focused on this timeframe and discipline, Curator Matthew Lyons spoke to Steve Gross, The Kitchen’s Dance Curator from 1990–1992, about his tenure.
What follows is an edited selection of highlights from Steve Gross’s oral history detailing his trajectory from arriving in New York as a dancer and emerging choreographer to early opportunities as an arts administrator and curator. In addition to commissioning productions at The Kitchen by artists such as Lance Gries, koosil-ja, Tere O’Connor, Steven Petronio, Susan Rethorst, David Roussève, RoseAnne Spradlin, and Donna Uchizono, Gross created in 1990 the significant program initially called Working in The Kitchen (now called Dance and Process) which continues to this day and is The Kitchen’s longest running program in its history.
Early Years in New York
I moved to New York in 1984 right after finishing college in Philadelphia, wanting to be a dancer/choreographer and to explore the community here, which in the end happened pretty quickly. I got on Fresh Tracks, the curated showcase of Dance Theater Workshop at the time, which was fairly competitive. Different opportunities developed from there, but I was also just taking a lot of dance classes and trying to improve. Eventually, I got connected to Pineapple Dance Center, which was down on Broadway and Houston. I became friendly with a woman who was running programming there. Her name was Wendy Lasica.
Wendy wanted to start a theater within Pineapple Dance Center, converting their largest studio into a performance space on the weekends. Wendy named this nonprofit housed within Pineapple “The Field.” Eileen Kelly, another performer/artist, and I suggested doing a workshop for choreographers modeled in part on Bessie Schonberg’s choreographer workshop at DTW and a summer workshop offered by Bill Evans—both of which I’d taken. We wanted a place to show works in progress and to get feedback: this program became known as Fieldwork. After about a year and a half, Pineapple decided they were going to close their dance studio in New York (the company was based in London), and Wendy decided that she wanted to move back to Australia, where she was from originally. Wendy asked me if I wanted to try to do something with The Field, which had just lost its space, didn’t really have a mission, and didn’t have any funding yet as a young nonprofit. I said, “Yes, I would like to try to do that.” I was 24, I think, at the time. So then, I just started! We had Fieldwork, and then over time built the organization and different programs, all sort of focused on emerging artists or independent artists. It was mostly dance and theater at the start, although we worked with all kinds of different performing arts disciplines eventually.
So that’s how I got involved in the start of The Field and came to lead it in 1987. And while I was building The Field as an organization, I was continuing to make my own work, with gigs at PS122 primarily, but also Dance Theater Workshop and other places around the city, and a few other places outside of New York. As I gained some traction as a performing artist, I applied to The Kitchen to do a show. Cynthia Hedstrom was the curator there at the time. I sent in a videotape and a cover letter, and soon enough the videotape was returned to me with a polite rejection. And so I thought, “Okay, well, whatever.” But then maybe two months later, she contacted me and said she wanted me to come in for an interview to be the dance curator at The Kitchen.
Coming to The Kitchen
So I went to The Kitchen and interviewed with Cynthia, and then I met with Bobbi Tsumagari, who was the Executive Director at the time. I had a good meeting with Bobbi and then I didn’t hear anything for at least a month and a half. Nothing at all. So I thought, “Okay, I guess that was that.” And I don’t know what I was thinking about this job opening, because I was still running The Field and had my own performance art career that I was trying to continue to grow. But on the other hand, The Kitchen is just such a phenomenal space and an amazing opportunity for artists, with an amazing history. Wow, the resource was phenomenal—that space!
So anyway, after about a month and a half, Bobbi called me, asked me to come back, and hired me. The process of being hired gave me a sense of how unwieldy the place was. They had a curator for each discipline, and, as you know, it’s always a scramble for funding. And you had artists coming in and trying to do crazy stuff in there. It just had this chaotic kind of thing going on. You know, maybe it was controlled chaos.
Curating in The Kitchen
I didn’t feel like I brought a very strong curatorial perspective to The Kitchen. As a matter of fact, I came from an organization that didn’t curate all: The Field’s mission was literally not to curate—it was a first come, first served kind of operation. If more artists wanted to do a program, we expanded the program. So it’s kind of an interesting choice that Bobbi made with me, because I had a much more broad-based, grassroots background. With The Field, I thought it was important to have a place where any artist could try to develop their vision and not be “picked and chosen” to death early in their process. In other words, you needed to have a lot of artistic ideas and methods being pursued to create a healthy, robust arts ecosystem, I thought.
But The Kitchen was something that was really the opposite of that in a way. At The Kitchen, I had ten weeks a year to program. That’s what the dance season was at the time: ten weeks, ten artists. The template was pretty standard in the sense that each artist had the theater for a week.
At The Field, we were pretty scrappy and tried to make the most of whatever resource we could find. For example, because a lot of studios and spaces around town weren’t used as much during the summer, we created a summer space grant program. We would solicit as many studios and theaters in the city that we could by asking, “Would you adopt an artist for the summer and give them four hours a week in your space to rehearse for free?” And it was a pretty good program for the summers—we would get thirty or forty spaces to participate each year, including The Kitchen, which donated space each summer before I was on staff.
At The Kitchen, I had the same idea: How can we make the most of the two spaces—the theater and the rehearsal studio on the second floor? So I do think that I brought part of my grassroots background to Working in The Kitchen when I initiated that program in 1990. Artists got time and space throughout the three or four months that they were meeting for Working in The Kitchen, not just the week of the show. I was trying to maximize the use of that amazing space, which wasn’t used all the time, depending on what was going on or how much tech a show needed.
Aside from trying to give people an opportunity, a leg up from self-producing, something where at least they’d have access to a great space and some funds, Working in The Kitchen was really about artists giving one another feedback on their work as it was developing. By the time I came to The Kitchen, I’d learned that artists typically created work alone, sequestered; the first time the work was seen by anyone (other than a select person or two) would be opening night. I believed it was important for artists to look at their peers’ work and provide feedback about it, about what’s coming across, so the artists would have an idea if their artistic intentions were landing before they put the work in front of the public. So I wanted to take that idea (Fieldwork) but add to it the resources that The Kitchen had. And in general, the artists that I ended up selecting for Working in The Kitchen were artists who weren’t making their first or second show. They were further along, but they weren’t able to land their own show at The Kitchen. So this was kind of like a development program and potentially a bit of a feeder program into having one’s own season presentation, which I think did happen for Meg Stuart and some other folks further along.
Anyway, these issues of resources and how they were being apportioned and who was making those decisions were all present at the time. I think Cynthia’s perspective before me was supporting fine dance art, what she perceived to be great work. And mine wasn’t quite that. That was one of the things that was weird about The Kitchen choosing me to curate—because like I told you before, I’m just much more grassroots oriented and community oriented. So I wanted to try to get as many people in there. But at the same time, The Kitchen had a very high profile curatorial perspective, and I was trying to learn what that was and trying to meet that on some level, too.
So some of the shows I did were big and grand, and some of them were much smaller. We did one production with Lance Gries called (STAIN) The Eleventh Hour, where he was improvising in the space for twelve hours and the audience only came in for the last hour. And his idea was not only about what would he generate in this twelve-hour improvisation, but the question was would the audience be able to tell—on some level, somehow—what had occurred in the space before they actually witnessed what was happening? Kind of conceptual, but it was great to support different things like this. Of course, I wanted to show great work and artists who fit within The Kitchen’s aesthetic, but I also focused on trying to bring in strong but different voices/people who had never been in this space before. And if nothing else, being able to put a produced gig at The Kitchen on their resumes might help them in other ways with other things. I knew a lot of performing artists from being a part of the New York City arts community for about six years by then. There definitely was some discomfort and disorientation on my part because I was straddling two different worlds. I would get leaned on, sometimes very lightly and sometimes more heavily, to have access to the space. I ended up not programming the vast majority of the artists who approached me because I didn’t feel like their work really met The Kitchen’s curatorial perspective, which was something along the lines of avant-garde and pushing boundaries and redefining the form, if possible. So it wasn’t just, “Oh, well, you’ve never been in the space, I’ll give it to you.” That wasn’t the whole equation. I was walking a line between accessibility while still trying to respect and keep the vision of what this institution was about.
There was a lot of risk involved. The idea wasn’t that you were going to just pick work that was complete already and just show it here. I mean, we did that sometimes with international artists like Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, and Marie Chouinard, and maybe there were a couple others. But otherwise, I was taking risks, and that made me very anxious and I had a lot of judgments (mostly my own) about “failure,” you know—would projects fail, would artists fail? But obviously the important thing I came to believe over time is that you’re giving people a chance and that is part of their growth, whatever happens.
After Steve Gross left The Kitchen, he remained a part of the performing arts community for another fifteen years or so before becoming a psychologist. Gross began an independent practice in 2004, working with artists among other folks from various walks of life. He also works for the New York State prison system, providing feedback and direction to mental health staff managing inmate-patients in crisis across the State. Gross is planning to return to art any day now, with a focus on writing. A piece of his about providing therapy to an inmate-patient entitled “Prison Psychotherapy” was published in the The New York Times.
Images: 1) Press release announcing the appointment of Steve Gross as The Kitchen’s Dance Curator, 1989, detail. To see the full press release, click here. 2) Donna Uchizono, San Andreas, 1990. Performance view, The Kitchen. Photo by Tom Brazil. 3) Postcard for Working in The Kitchen at The Kitchen, November–December 1990, front. To see the full postcard, click here. 4) Program for Meg Stuart, Disfigure Study at The Kitchen, 1991, detail. To see the full program, click here.