Career
Encounters with John Cage, Andy Warhol, influenced Kabza"s early music and writing. A 1966 festival organized by Gene Tyranny, 12 Hours of the New Music included music by Kabza along with pieces by John Cage, Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley. In the late 60"s and early 70"s he performed and traveled with U Utah Phillips, George Pedersen, George Koppel (aka Van Rozay), Kate McGarrigle and guitarist John Bian.
In 1973 he founded Annex Press, a non-profit publisher of experimental literature and art work.
Along with This magazine and Burning Deck Press Annex Press was one of a handful of small literary presses publishing work of the Language group Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman and Rosmarie Waldrop, among others In the mid seventies Kabza lived in Paris and discovered the work of French writers Alain Veinstein, Anne Marie Albiach and Claude Royet-Journaud.
He later translated works of Veinstein with Maria Claudia Saiz, Larry Shields and Rosmarie Waldrop (The Archaeology of the Mother) by A. Veinstein, Spectacular Diseases, 1986. In Paris, Kabza met the dancer-performance artist Mark Tompkins who later appeared in his film Spiral Notebook, 2009.
In 1980 he founded the Translation Work Center in New New York
With grants from Poets & Writers, he directed the Annex Press Poetry series in Ithaca, New York In 1982 he co-founded the Memphis Cinema with visual artist Lisa Marie Majewsky. Kabza"s machine, text and dance work AMINO SHIM premiered at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum performance festival in Ithaca, New York, in 1984. He created over 20 short video works including Spiral Notebook, a blend of narrative and non-narrative that fragments encounters with the cities of Detroit and Paris, France, and spans the years 2000–2009.
His work based on Franz Kafka"s Before the Law, 2000, is split screen.
