AGAINST LINEAR TIME
by Douglas Messerli
John Kelly Time
No Line / the performance I saw with Pablo Capra was at REDCAT (Roy and
Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) on April 25, 2019
It is difficult to know how to describe John
Kelly’s one-man performance, Time No Line,
which I saw last night at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles. That difficulty has
partly to do with the fact that Kelly’s work is so many different things: a
kind of muted autobiographical commentary (this particular work is based on his
journals begun in 1976 and continuing into the present), a history of his
involvement with dance (he performed briefly with The American Ballet Theater),
art (for a while he studied with Larry Rivers), and music (he sings a couple of
songs in drag and talks of his passion for opera), a kind of silent film
presentation, and, perhaps most importantly, a testimony to the many friends he
has lost of AIDS over the years.
If
there’s a sort of self-obsession about this work simply because the performer puts
himself front and center as such a multi-talented actor, there is also a kind
of humility in simply putting so many loves, endurances, and embarrassments together.
As
reviewer Dan Callahan wrote in The
Village Voice, “Kelly’s Time No Line
is less about himself and more about the people he has lost.” The people of whom he speaks, some of them with whom I shared distant friendships, became ghosts
that haunt his memory, and even when he is sharing his own artistic
experiences, Kelly himself becomes a kind of ghost, explaining—or perhaps, at
moments, self-justifying—his highly checkered past from dancing with ballet
companies, performing in famed art venues such as La MaMa (where this
performance appeared in 2018), The Whitney Museum of Art, the Walker Art
Center, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Tate Modern and, as well in far less grand
East Village venues such as Limbo Lounge, Pyramid Club, Club 57, and the gay
bar The Anvil (where long before his 1980 performances there, I met my first
lover, the year before returning to the university to encounter my husband of
now almost 50 years.)
It’s
a kind of heady mix to perform a song in one of his drag singer’s persona and
in the next minute talk about Bush-appointee to the chair of the National
Endowment for the Arts, John Frohnmayer who notoriously nixed NEA grants
awarded by that year’s panel to Tim Miller, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Karen
Finley. At one point Kelly chalks a kind of version of
Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Vitruvian Man on
the stage floor.
At moments Kelly reads from his journal before performing unscripted events involving props and interacting with his own images from his past projected on a back screen. It’s quite clear, as Kelly has described himself elsewhere, he is a “range queen,” a bit like performer Joey Arias (whom Kelly mentions in passing), a person who can, instant by instant, transform himself, a kind of artist-warrior who battles notions of gender and a notion of a coherent being.
To
comprehend his performances you have almost to imagine a genius-child dressing
up and acting out nearly every figure he loves before his bedroom mirror.
Only, the fun thing in this case is that we get to be there, to share his
wonderment of human life, even if so many of them people and events are now phantoms.
Time, in Kelly’s world is not linear, but endlessly circular and even overlaid
with both present and past.
The
rather young—I think I may have been the eldest member of the audience—and
sophisticated REDCAT attendees clearly assimilated and enjoyed Kelly’s
chameleon-like work, even if they might not always know the figures of whom he
speaks and enacts. This man/woman/ child gets to have it all along with the much
deserved applause.
Los Angeles, April 26, 2019
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera,
and Performance (April 2019).
john was my downstairs neighbor for a few years in the 80's. He's a marvelous sweet man. still blocked on facebook douglas.
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