Alan M. Kriegsman, The Performance Artist Finding His Voice: John Kelly and His Multi-Media Works, The Washington Post, 1990

     John Kelly, in his early thirties, feels a little uneasy about being on top of the performance art heap.

"I don't know," he says, "it's an era of Wunderkinder. Everyone wants you to be brilliant at 19. You've got to astonish them, then they'll spit you out and go on to the next one. It's in the marrow of the culture somehow, right now."

     Kelly makes his Washington-area debut tonight at Dance Place, in the first of two performances of his "Born With the Moon in Cancer." under the auspices of the Washing-ton Performing Arts Society.

     Last year he won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in the preceding three years he was the recipient of two Bessies (New York Dance and Performance Awards), an American Choreographer Award and, in 1987, an Obie for his best-known opus thus far, "Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte," based on the life and art of the Viennese neo-expressionist painter Egon Schiele.

     In his performance pieces— some are solos, some group works—he sings in the countertenor range, choreographs, dances, designs sets and deploys film. He's portrayed such characters as the Mona Lisa, Narcissus, Leonardo da Vinci and Maria Callas. Some of his works are quasi-autobiographical, including "Born With the Moon in Cancer."

     You'd scarcely guess at any of this seeing or speaking with him off-stage. He looks like your average, dean-cut Joe College. He was born in Jersey City, and grew up with what he describes as a "pretty normal family."

     "Since I was the first son in a family of five kids," Kelly observes, "my mom and dad hoped I'd be involved 'in sports—I had a baseball suit at 3—and go to military school—all the things I didn't want. It all worked out eventually, though. My folks now come to my performances and are proud of me."

     There was a vein of art in the genes somewhere. His father was gifted in the visual arts, though he never took it far; his mother was interested in music, and his grandmother was a painter.

     "I always assumed as a kid that I'd end up as a visual artist As a child I was always putting on music, jumping around, making costumes. I was very excited by glimpses of ballet dancing I saw on TV. Ulanova doing "The Dying Swan' on The Ed Sullivan Show' was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen—the music, the fantasy of it, the idea of a perfect world!"

     In high school musicals, he discovered the urge to dance. Through a girlfriend, he began to take lessons from a former Radio City Music Hall Rockette who taught ballet, jazz, tap and acrobatics in Bayonne. To please his parents he enrolled at Jersey City State College, but at the same time he auditioned for the American Ballet Theatre School in New York.

      "I really wanted to be in ballet. I wanted to be the prince, and dance *Les Sylphides' and all that stuff. But I was fighting a major inferiority complex. I hated my feet, my turn-out-all this time he was still commuting to dance classes in Manhattan from Jersey City. Then he dropped out of college and moved to New York, continuing his ballet studies at the Harkness studios.

     "At this point I started to assess my limitations and take stock of reality.  I realized I had been living with blinders on, not knowing at all what it was going to take to make a career. So one day I just left the classes, and took a job waiting tables in a Greenwich Village restaurant"—the old Sutter's on Eighth Street.

He tried a new tack, taking classes in graphic design and then fashion illustration at the Parsons School of Design for a couple of years; among his teachers was Larry Rivers. But this led him down still another avenue.

     "I was doing a lot of self-portraits, using a mirror. I'd play music and get into really intense poses. It became a form of theater—I was really performing, with myself as the audience."

     It was at this juncture, in the late '70s, that he started doing performance pieces in East Village clubs. "I loved it I'd found a way to vent all my rage and rebelliousness, to get it out of my system." As his following grew, he began to make longer pieces and to perform in what he calls "more legit" venues such as P.S. 122, St. Marks Danspace and the Dance Theater Workshop. "Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte" sealed his reputation; by now Kelly has performed it in such places as Montreal, Hamburg, Toronto and Reggio Emilia abroad, as well as at the Spoleto U.S.A. Festival in Charleston, S.C.; in Aspen, Colo.; and at Yale University. Two years ago he took it to Vienna itself, where it won a huge ovation at the Secession Museum.

     Kelly found Schiele's art a vivid spur for performance. "His paintings seemed to lend themselves to choreography. I just had to look at the canvases to get ideas for dances," he says.

     It was during his club dates in the East Village that he started singing. At first, he ventured no further than lip-synching to Callas recordings, but then he began to use his own voice. "I found a way of making it work," he says. "Now I'm studying voice with Peter Elkus, who is Frederica Von Stade's coach. I'm getting less insecure about having technique. Now at least I know what it is."

     Kelly calls "Bom With the Moon in Cancer"—the piece he'll perform at Dance Place—"a staged concert." In the course of it he sings arias and songs by composers ranging from Verdi, Pergolesi, Bizet and Saint-Saens to Mahler and Joni Mitchell.

     The "plot" devolves from his own life experience. "At one point while I was living in New York," Kelly says, "I'd been doing my share of debauchery—smoking, drinking etc. I contracted double pneumonia, and had to return to my parents' house to recover. This piece is about a guy who goes to the big city, gets wasted and has to go home, and then goes back to the city, but grown up a bit in the process."

     After the Dance Place engagement. Kelly travels to Minneapolis to perform in a series called "Cultural Infidels," under the aegis of the Walker Art Center. And in his plans for the future there figures a curious, roundabout return to the ballet world: The American expatriate choreographer William Forsythe— the enfant terrible of contemporary ballet—has commissioned Kelly to create a work next season for the Frankfurt Ballet, which Forsythe directs.

*

Jennifer Dunning. Images Of Expressive Dancing, The New York Times, August 24, 1986

     As each dance year ends, one looks back and almost automatically summons up the most vital of the images that start out from the continual rise and fall of stage curtains. This year, the images that remain are chiefly of sudden windfalls of unusually expressive dancing with lessons to teach about performing and even about life. Out of the nothing of the unknown, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, one has come on major weather.

     A dance performance is about to begin. The stage has a vacant look that is both eerie and exciting. A chair, large desk and mattress wait to be coaxed into theatrical life. And then a man steps into that listless yet expectant universe. He speaks a few words, tersely. He scribbles across a piece of paper. He returns to the front of the stage and gazes out into the audience. The materials are simple. But by the end of the evening we have taken a journey through the powerful and complex world of Steve Krieckhaus, a young Philadelphia-based performance artist whose ''Missouri Driver's License'' was presented in Dance Theater Workshop's ''Out-of-Towners'' series this summer. It is a world whose events and impulses are drawn from the mundane activities and unruly underlying imaginative life of everyday routine.

     The man before us cannot sit in the chair without eventually upending himself in one sudden, almost imperceptible flip of his body. He pops like a flea from one spot in the humdrum landscape to another. Cogitation is a slow and broken roll across the floor. The people encountered along some vast American highway are reduced to the feet and heads - wooden shoe-stretchers and balloons that look like resting motorcycle helmets - of victims of an impulsive murderer. The maddening buzz of daily life, with all its insistent push of useless information, is summed up in Mr. Krieckhaus's shrugging thrust of a telephone receiver into a toilet that will itself soon begin to hum with radio news and music as a long night unfolds. An artist of remarkable daring, imagination and physical control, Mr. Krieckhaus has taken us beyond the microcosm of the stage into an unbounded private galaxy that is instantly familiar.

     There was more major weather from Karen Brown in an extraordinary portrayal of Lizzie Borden in Agnes de Mille's ''Fall River Legend,'' during Dance Theater of Harlem's spring ''Harlem Homecoming'' season at City College's Aaron Davis Hall. The role is an actress's dream and has been memorably interpreted by such great dramatic ballerinas as Nora Kaye and Sallie Wilson. But Ms. Brown seemed to be living out Lizzie's life on stage - a good little girl of formidably upright posture, whose churning capacity for passion emerged with her first, delayed moments of adult romantic love. Ms. Brown's gentle but taut-nerved characterization was filled with acutely observed dramatic detail. But it was the burning intensity of her emotional commitment that made Borden's strange, precarious life seem more real than one's own, preoccupied existence.

     One of the loveliest surprises of the dance year was a performance by Moira Dorsey in a production of ''Giselle'' presented by the Darvash Studio in May at the Martin Luther King High School. A young and inexperienced performer, Ms. Dorsey took serene command of the stage as one of the best Myrtas this dancegoer has ever seen. The role of the vengeful spirit queen is a hard one, demanding both chill distance and intense physical concentration. Regal authority must be matched by ethereal abandon. The 17-year-old Ms. Dorsey did not look much like the typically tall, wraithlike Myrta, and she danced on an undisguised high school auditorium stage. But from her first floating, beautifully articulated moments there, one was drawn into the dismal kingdom of death-dealing ghosts and Ms. Dorsey's glacial, otherworldly dominance.

     Confidence, emotional commitment, a developed technique - and the look of utter inevitability - help to define the best performing. So does that sense of journeying through the dance into another world with the performer as a guide, our belief both suspended and intensified. The signposts embedded in the material performed are not enough to draw us along. Some work seems inseparable from its creators. That is true of ''Missouri Driver's License.'' And it is true of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, whose ''Anarchy, Wild Women and Dinah'' was performed by Ms. Zollar's Urban Bush Women last month at the Douglas Fairbanks Theater, as part of Clark Center's ''Summer Dance '86'' festival.

     Ms. Zollar is a gifted improvisational performer, and she has gathered around her a company of strong and fearless performers. But none is quite so daring as she, and that daring and searing dramatic power were captured in one scene Ms. Zollar performed with Edwina Lee Tyler, a drummer who appeared here as a guest artist, matching Ms. Zollar moment for intense moment.

     Dressed in odd scraps of black clothing and clumsy, boot-style shoes, Ms. Zollar plummets onto the small, darkened stage puffing a cigar and lugging a bottle of liquor and a Bible. The sometimes frightening but undeniable life of renegades and the possessive dispossessed fills the stage. And we begin to understand it with a new immediacy as we watch this sprite erupting to the encouraging beat of Ms. Tyler's drum. Then that life breaks loose and Ms. Zollar's small, wiry body explodes with a kind of ferocious pure energy in a climax that seems, deceptively, to transcend performing. Dance is reaping the rewards of reaching beyond toe shoes and contractions and releases. Another highlight of this viewer's year was the performing of Liz Lerman's Dancers of the Third Age in ''Still Crossing,'' which Ms. Lerman presented in the ''Liberty Dances'' program at Battery Park. A Washington, D.C.-based choreographer who has done extensive work training the elderly to perform, Ms. Lerman forged a smooth integration here of old and younger dancers in a visionary work of extraordinary eloquence. A good measure of that eloquence came from the white-haired men and women of the Third Age company. Their slow rolls across the floor suggested a vital, life-producing sea and matrix for the younger dancers who stood amongst the shifting bodies. A measured processional across the back, arms raised at times in mysterious signals, was performed with a quiet power and dignity that suggested that the past may be remembered as a guide to humane and moral living.

     Two other ''performances'' complete this catalogue of random memories. One was the lighting design by David Ferri for John Kelly's ''Born with the Moon in Cancer,'' presented in the Veselka Performance Festival at P.S. 122 in May. Moving through Mr. Kelly's persuasively eccentric goings-on like the omnipresent narrator of a Victorian novel, Mr. Ferri's lighting unobtrusively created unheated garrets, chill street-corners and gothic crannies by means of pale light and dense shadow in the small circle of space in which Mr. Kelly chose to move.

     And last, there were the warm, wise presences of Susana and Antonio Robledo, who pass on their craft to young Canadian ballet students in ''Flamenco at 5:15,'' an Academy Award-winning documentary broadcast this year on public television. Working in a studio at the school of the National Ballet in Toronto, the Robledos teach the earthy magic of flamenco rhythms, steps, postures and gestures. They also teach their students - caught in mid-flight as they hurtle toward the ballet stage -about life and time and artistic truth. ''In flamenco, we only dance when it is necessary,'' Susana Robledo says, ''because we want to now - and not because the orchestra is there and the curtain rising.''