Mel Gussow, Orpheus Myth In A Whirl Of Song, Dance, And Decor, The New York Times, April 5, 1988

Classical Tragedy With Fancy Footwork

More than most of his peers in the world of performance art, John Kelly defies categorization.  His new performance piece, Find My Way Home, is both a drama without dialogue and a chamber musical that merges grand opera with show tunes. The play is filled with movement, only some of which could accurately be described as dance, and a few of the most dramatic moments are directly connected with the decor.  Combining film and kinetic action, Find My Way Home (at Dance Theater Workshop) draws its essential character from its landscape and from the presence on stage of Mr. Kelly.

Two seasons ago, in Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte, Mr. Kelly offered a dazzling interpretive portrait of the artist Egon Schiele, with himself cast in the principal role. With Find My Way Home, he moves into the arena of Greek mythology, retelling the Orpheus story, in a manner unlike any other one has seen. The tone is lushly romantic, more wistful than mordant.  Those unfamiliar with Mr. Kelly might at first be perplexed as to the relevance of the work to its mythological source.  Theatergoers might even wonder which actors were supposed to represent Orfeo and Eurydice.  As designed by Huck Snyder, the initial setting is an elegantly under-furnished New York apartment.  It is apparently the 1930's of Cole Porter and Noel Coward, and two formally attired couples are lounging, dancing and drinking champagne.  Casually, they toss their empty glasses to the floor, leaving them to be removed by a pretty parlor maid (Kyle deCamp), who would prefer to dream about her favorite radio crooner.  Soon the singer arrives at the party - the lithe Mr. Kelly in the role of a modern-dress Orfeo.  He sweeps the maid off her feet and, Cinderella-style, she becomes a red-gowned Eurydice.  Leaving the soiree, the two amble merrily down a boulevard and are suddenly struck by an automobile (swerving spotlights simulate a crash). 

At the death of Eurydice, the story begins to follow the general outline of the myth, with Orfeo descending to the Underworld to reclaim his love.  Within the tragedy, however, there is fanciful Kelly footwork, circumnavigations that include a dance for people and puppets.  This Hades is evocative but earthly, something like a SoHo art gallery converted into a Surrealistic environment.  There is not a monster in sight.  Synthesized with the setting is Mr. Kelly's collage of music.  He sings arias from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice (in his signature falsetto) as well as several lilting show tunes, like Coward's I'll See You Again.  As eccentric as the show sounds, Mr. Kelly swings between musical levels, singing and dancing with agility.  Acting as director and choreographer, he has surrounded himself with a stylish company of actors and dancers, featuring Ms. deCamp and Marlene Menard.  Musical accompaniment is provided by Jeff Halpern and Christine Gummere (on piano and cello) and a three-man chorus.  All diverse parts coalesce in a fascinating variation on a classical theme.  As he also demonstrated in Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte, Mr. Kelly is an eclectic original.

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Michael Feingold, A Little Bit Of Gluck, The Village Voice, April 12, 1988

Orpheus with his lute made rocks and trees dance in Ancient Greece. Then, moving into the early 20th century, he became a radio crooner, and moved maids' hearts—parlor maids' hearts, to be exact—by singing Noel Coward's I'll See You Again. Orpheus met one such maid, named Eurydice, and fell in love with her while providing parlor entertainment for her employer, a wealthy (or at least expensively kept) woman named Lamorte, in her lavish Art Deco apartment.  Jealous of their love, Lamorte had Orpheus and Eurydice hit by a car; Eurydice was killed and Orpheus blinded in the collision.  When he woke up in the hospital and found out about Eurydice, Orpheus was in such despair he tried to throw himself under a train, but was rescued by one of Lamorte's rich friends (who happened to be wearing a while suit that day and so was in a good mood). This friend showed him the way to the Underworld, where Lamorte was keeping Eurydice in a speakeasy she ran.  When 0pheus tried to take Eurydice back to earth with him, there was quite a brawl, and Lamorte whacked him over the head with a champagne bottle. To his befuddled mind it seemed as though he almost got Eurydice out of there, but he had to do it without looking back at her, and she screamed so much he couldn't help looking back, so she and the whole Underworld vanished.  After going through all that, Orpheus really sang well, only he tended to sing Cluck instead of Noel Coward.

This summary of John Kelly's Find My Way Home sounds satirical, but I can't tell if I'm the satirist, or if Kelly is. This is the most fully sustained narrative piece he's done so far, and it's a real tribute to the depth of his art that something which looked so simple, so brilliantly-hued and sweet and accessible, should prove so complex and elusive in retrospect. Kelly can't be spoofing the myth of Orpheus's pantheistic power, which would be pointless in our unetheized society. And he can't be trying to find a modern expression for the myth, or he wouldn't clothe it in costumes and attitudes from the "20s, an era that's practically a myth to us itself. (Cocteau's 1956 Orphee beat him to the notion, with a Death chicly costumed by Chanel.)

Perhaps Kelly's joke is on the idea of bringing the myth back to life in the first place: a joke on Cocteau and the ‘20s as well as on us. Like Eurydice, the myth doesn't revive; it wouldn't do so even if you replaced her 1920s radio set with a Walkman. The myth is dead, the audience feasts on the old poses and drinks in the old sounds, the artist is left alone in the void. Ha ha.  Clearly, Kelly's joke is a tragic statement, the true butt of it the artist himself—which explains the choice of the Orpheus glory as the field for his caprices: Orpheus, after all, is the essence of the-artist who seems to triumph over everything, then looses it all in an instant. The happy endings, variously tacked on by Gluck, Monteverdi, and others don't really belong, while the variant tragic ending, in which Orpheus is torn to pieces by Thracian maenads bored with his incessant laments, no longer applies: If today's Thraciani don't want to hear Orpheus lamenting the loss of Eurydice. they can switch channels—just as Kelly's Eurydice does when she's hunting for Orpheus's song. (Kelly's musical wit sparkles here: The items she passes over include Ruth Etting singing Shaking the Blues Away and Ethel Merman doing How Deep Is the Ocean.)

The intellectual perplexity of Find My Way Home is heartening because it reveals the mind at the core of Kelly's work.  Gifted with a fascinating presence, and an enormous talent, he’s a performer seeking a reason to perform, in an era that seems to rebuke all reason and turn all art into commercialized dreck.  In such times, you search for predecessors, and Kelly clutches at two sets of roots: the music and visual arts of 1900-1930, especially American popular music and the Viennese school: and the operatic tradition in general.  The Lady Macbeth who sleepwalked in Kelly's Diary of a Somnambulist was Verdi's, not Shakespeare's, and she did it on a set from The Cabinet of Dr. Calinari. When Egon Schiele's lover died of Spanish flu, in Pass the Blutwurst, Bilte. he lamented her loss to L’altra notte from Boito's Mefistofele.

Marleen Menard, who embodied both Lady Macbeth and the Spanish Influenza , (in the latter role dancing the Habanera in a kimono), plays a similar death force here as Lamorte, ornately clad, giving off menacing looks and mournful French cabaret songs.  While the maid listens to Kelly sing Noel Coward. Lamorte and her guests sip their cocktails in a sonic bath of Alban Berg; later, Orpheus enters her speakeasy to an ironic blast of Gershwin's I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise.  Even Kelly's choreography is more often a matter of repeated postures than fluid moves—a set of images of dancing from '20s films, paintings, still photographs.

What's new is that the images, like the props, the music, and the events, are all built into a dramatic action.  The two sleepwalkers of Diary of a Somnambulist didn't do anything except circumnavigate each other balletically; Pass the Blutwurst simply narrated Schiele's career in blips and tableaux. Because Orpheus's story is acted out, albeit in Kelly's lush, polished, high-deadpan style, we instinctively look for the organic depths, for the three-dimensionality that the stage brings a story.

And Kelly keeps elegantly folding down the corners of his picture-postcard scenes, to show us that they're flat, with nothing behind them.  Only the music, whether Gershwin or Gluck, has substance (especially when Kelly sings, with his unearthly counter-tenor voice), and we know that it's the substance of a different era, a paradise as lost to us as Orpheus's Elysium.  Even if we didn't know this, his stylized attitude towards the music would tell us. (Watch his hands mime the lyrics as he sings the Coward song.)

Clearly in love with the arts of the past, Kelly's the first to realize that his love is a fool's journey, an escape from a futile present into some predecessor's imagination.  He lures us on in the same way Orpheus made the rocks dance, with sheer beauty of sight (Huck Snyder's Deco-Bakst-Leger designs, Stan Pressner's lights, Gary Lisz's thrift-shop-gorgeous costumes), of sound (his own singing, Jeff Halpen's arrangements), of movement. And he makes us laugh while throwing all that beauty at us.  If we don't weep at the end, when he sings Che faro senza Euridice alone in a black void, it's because he's shown us that his tragedy is ours: We don't have a Eurydice or an Elysium or a Gluck to paint them with musical perfection either. Instead of myths we can subscribe to, we have a crumbling society and an occasional, rare John Kelly to remind us that things once were different.   

               

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John Howell. Striking Poseur: John Kelly Goes To Hell, 7 Days, April 20, 1988

With Find My Way Home, director-choreographer-actor-dancer-singer John Kelly seals his claim to the role of our Cocteau.  First as a solo performer in late-night club sketches and recently as the auteur of full-blown, mixed-media performances, Kelly has developed and refined in his works an ambience of sensitive narcissism and soulful vision singularly reminiscent of the great French filmmaker and dilettante.

Diary of a Somnambulist, which revamped the proto-Expressionist film The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, and Pass The Blutwurst, Bitte, which explored the life and work of artist Egon Schiele, are two Kelly pieces that have helped fix their creator’s position in Cocteau’s conceptual territory: eternal angst, behavior beyond ordinary bounds, fanciful humor, otherworldly apparitions.  As the hero of all his performances, Kelly presents a consistent persona, one haunted by the gap between harsh reality and intuited superreality; like most Cocteau characters, “Kelly” seems to be in a perpetual swoon of free-floating dislocation that would be annoyingly precious if it were not so earnestly sincere and powerfully executed.

Find My Way Home is a performance-art chamber opera about the myth of Orpheus that begins in a swank ‘30’s drawing room setting, detours through a ghostly hospital where the dead Eurydice and injured Orpheus are deposited after a car accident, and ends up in hell, which is staged as a marathon dance contest.  Its mélange of visual, dramatic, and musical quotes includes elements from Orphee, Cocteau’s surrealist cinematic revision of the Orpheus myth, straightforward sections of Orfeo ed Eurydice (Gluck’s 18th century opera version), snatches of Berg, Verdi, Mussorgsky, and Coward.

Acted in silence except for moments of live singing—Kelly’s falsetto accurately assays the Gluck Orpheus part usually sung by a female contralto—the performance is a meditative drama of silent movie-like mime, period dance numbers, eerie tableaux, and moody film sequences that plays as good as it looks.  And it looks great.  Along with a superb group of performers, Kelly’s talented collaborators include Huck Snyder (the neo Cocteau sets), Anthony Chase (the neo-surrealist film), and Stan Pressner (the neo-Expressionistic lighting).  They create, in Find My Way Home, a perfect model for what mixed-media performance can achieve.

Look for Kelly, by the way, in May at the Kitchen, in S & D, a collaboration with Charles Atlas, David Linton, and Diane Martel, and in June at the Public Theatre in Martha Clarke’s Miracolo D’Amore.

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Craig Bromberg, Kelly In Character, Vanity Fair, April, 1988

As the first notes of a Pergolesi aria ring out.  A tall, cadaverous man in a powdered wig steps into a single pool of light and begins to sing in a sweet, tremulous falsetto.  For the next ten minutes, John Kelly is an eighteenth-century court singer, eloquent and full of the comic vitality of opera buffa. 

Ever since he began performing seven years ago, downtown audiences have been wowed by Kelly's exquisitely wrought mixed-media portrayals of art-historical figures from Mona Lisa and Leonardo to Egon Schiele and Joni Mitchell.  Originally trained as a dancer—for four years he studied at the American Ballet Theatre School—the twenty-nine-year-old Kelly actually began his stage career lip-synching to Maria Callas on top of the bar at New York's Pyramid Club.  In his latest work. Find My Way Home. at Manhattan's Dance Theatre Workshop this month, Kelly tackles Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice: with a melange of film, singing, and painted sets, he turns the classic tale of a bard who brings his wife back from the underworld into the story of a Depression-era crooner lost in a haze of nightmarish bar scenes.   

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Wendy Liberatore, Poetry In Motion: Orpheus Legend Told Through Movement And Music, The Daily Gazette, Schnectady, NY  1996

     John Kelly asks audiences of his Find My Way Home to receive his performance piece  with an open heart and mind.

'People always ask, 'What is this?  Is this theater?  Is this dance?”  Kelly said.  "It is what it is.  If you want to laugh, laugh.  If you want to cry, cry.  And when it's over, then decide if you like it or hate it."  Find My Way Home, conceived in 1988 by Kelly and six other artists, has best been described as "a drama without dialogue and a chamber musical that merges grand opera with show tunes."  Sound complex?  Well it is. 

According to Bill Finlay, director of the Yulman Theater at Union College, this play/dance/opera is the most elaborate show ever presented by Proctor's Too.  Set for tonight and Saturday, it features a cast of nine, dancing and singing in a modernized staging of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

"It's a multimedia piece," said Kelly who not only stars in the work, but also directed and choreographed it.  "I take all these things that are appropriate, make a new recipe and blend them into a tasty stew."

     But to create Find My Way Home, Kelly himself must have a taste for all the ingredients. And the 37-year-old New Yorker, who personifies the quintessential Renaissance man, does. He's an actor, dancer, choreographer. countertenor, painter and director. Yet Kelly refers to himself as a poet.    

   "I conceive things two-dimensionally," said the winner of two Obies and two Bessies awarded in theater and dance, respectively.  "I write storyboards. narrations, scripts and use words and images to help the collaborators affect the piece, to get my ideas across." The three-dimensional final form, however, uses no words. Only movement and music.  To tell the story of Orpheus, the Greek god who followed his dead wife Eurydice to the underworld. Kelly drew from Gluck's baroque opera Orfeo ed Eurydice.  In addition to some arias, which Kelly said challenged his voice, he also sings several other tunes, such as Noel Coward's I'll See You Again.

"Orpheus is one of the great musicians of antiquity," said Kelly of his motivation behind Find My Way Home.  "Orpheus is the god of music and poetry and that was the main thing that appealed to me. And beyond that, it was the romance." 

According to the myth, Orpheus charms Hades with his music and consequently persuades the god of the underworld to release Eurydice. But under one stipulation: Orpheus does not look upon her face until they return to Earth.  At the last moment, he can't resist looking upon the woman he loves.  As he turns, she vanishes. Orpheus loses Eurydice again.

"In 1988, when I made the piece, I was dealing with the AIDS epidemic," said Kelly. "The piece is a way of dealing with one's rage and frustration about death. It also looks at human frailty."

Kelly and his collaborators — set designer Huck Snyder, filmmaker Anthony Chase, music director Jeff Halpern, costume designer Gary Lisz and lighting designer Stan Pressner — relocate Orpheus and Eurydice to a Depression-era America.

     Orpheus is a famous radio crooner, Eurydice, a lowly parlor maid.  The gates to the underworld are a 1930s dance marathon.  And the underworld itself is a brilliantly colored speakeasy.  "We wanted to reset it in a recognizable setting," said Kelly, adding that the 1930s was a time of contrasts in America—notably rich versus poor and white versus black—that served to heighten the elements of life and death.

Since 1983, Kelly and this group of artists have worked on various projects in clubs, cabarets and alternative performance spaces on the Lower East Side.  However, Kelly has made a name for himself as a soloist, too, creating such works as Paved Paradise, in which Kelly portrays singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell, and Love of a Poet, a work based on the tormented life of the lovelorn composer Robert Schumann.  "I guess I'm a romantic," said Kelly.  "But not in a flimsy way.  It's about the presence of emotions, the human element.  I like to hold up the human element."

  And in this case, wrote one critic, Kelly has proven to be "a poet in a decidedly un-poetic world.''

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Steffen Silvis, Orpheus Decending: John Kelly’s Talents Are So Numerous That, Like Cocteau, He Can Only Be Described As A Poet, Willamette Week, Portland, Oregon, May 21, 1988

     It's not often that an artist in America has the leisure to hone a piece of work. John Kelly premièred his electrifying modern masque based on the Orpheus myth 10 years ago in New York, and this week sees the long-awaited revival opening in Portland.  Find My Way Home places the story of Orpheus in early 20th-century America, with the contemporary always present in spirit.  The action is placed in a Depression-era metropolis, where Orpheus is a radio crooner, and the Furies swirl in a mad dance marathon.  

     Kelly is a consummate performer, having made his name in a number of different disciplines.  He is a visual artist, an accomplished countertenor, a popular cabaret performer and a famous impressionist who has transformed himself into such personalities as Jean Cocteau, Egon Schiele and Joni Mitchell--the latter just seen earlier this week at a benefit for PICA at the Conduit, along with Kelly's own creation, Dagmar Onassis.  Find My Way Home is full of striking set pieces.  The story begins above ground in a monochromatic world.  After the death of his wife, Eurydice, Orpheus descends into the vivid color of the Underworld to retrieve her.  Inspired by Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Eurydice, Kelly marries the Baroque with the Modern, creating a stunning tour de force. 

     WW spoke with Kelly last week while he was performing Find My Way Home in Seattle. 

Willamette Week: How much has Find My Way Home changed? 

John Kelly: It's grown in terms of the number of people on stage. Originally, there were six dancers and performers, with three singers who stood on the side of the stage.  Now the singers have increased to four and are major characters in the action.  Aside from that, the set design hasn't changed much, but the choreography has become more dense.  In general, the piece is tighter and richer. When we did the piece in '88 I had put it together in four weeks.  It was a sketch, but an excellent sketch that suddenly was attracting awards and an audience.  I've since had 10 years to think about it, and the sketch is now a mural.

WW: Thinking back on the late '80s, at the time that you were developing the piece there seemed to be a sudden surge of interest in Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurydice.  There were a number of important productions, one of which helped to establish Joachim Kowalski as a leading countertenor. How much of an influence was this on your work?

John Kelly: The reason I wrote my piece was because of Gluck's music.  But I'd first heard it in the early '70s in a recording by Maria Callas.  In the late '70s, after I left art school, I began lipsyncing Callas' version of Eurydice in angry punk drag, and performed in clubs and bars like the Anvil.  Then perhaps you started this reexamination of Orfeo.  There does seem to be these periodic surges of interest. My friend Martha Clarke is directing an Orfeo for City Opera this fall. It's funny, I was actually working with her 10 years ago on a project while I was putting this piece together. Now here we are today both doing the same thing. 

WW: Recently, you've been studying Decroux's corporeal mime technique in Paris. 

John Kelly: I've deliberately avoided mime up until now, because it's a pretty hateful thing when it's done badly. But I always thought Decroux's techniques were close to modern dance, with his emphasis on the entire body. But another reason for never studying mime was that I assumed I was independently arriving at the same conclusions in the creation of a movement vocabulary.  As for silent mime, well, I've never had much of a desire to speak on stage anyway. I suppose if we were living in the '20s, I'd be seeking work as an actor in Hollywood.