Stephen Holden, Mona Lisa (Eating Pasts) And Other Muses, The New York Times, July 25, 1992

John Kelly suggests a waifish East Village version of John-Boy Walton with a penchant for cross-dressing. He is also an extravagant romantic with a tart post-modern sense of humor.  The contradictions between the lost little boy and the urban sophisticate, between the hopeless romantic and self-mocking clown in Mr. Kelly make him one of New York's most compelling performance artists.  And because he moves with the grace of a classical dancer and sings operatic arias associated with famous divas in a falsetto that is somewhat better than a shrieking drag caricature, his loving imitations of classical performance carry an ambiguous weight.

These crosscurrents pull against each other delightfully in his new solo performance piece, Divine Promiscue, which had its world premiere at Alice Tully Hall on Thursday evening as part of Lincoln Center's Serious Fun! festival.

In the 70-minute sequence of interlocking fantasy tableaux, the dancer, singer, director and choreographer depicts a lonely young artist's dark night of the soul in song, dance, pantomime and film.  Along the way, he impersonates everyone from Maria Callas to the Mona Lisa to a white-winged angel singing an aria by Purcell while shivering in front of an electric fan.

The opening scene of the piece finds Mr. Kelly sitting morosely at a desk trying to create a new work.  As he dreams, his muses appear, and he transforms himself into a series of artistic alter egos, beginning with Maria Callas (a character Mr. Kelly calls Dagmar Onassis), who strolls grandly across the stage trailing a 20-foot crimson train while singing an aria from Francesco Cilea's opera Adriana Lecouvreur.

Suddenly restless, he changes from his gown into a black leather jacket and baseball cap, hops on a bicycle and pedals to a disco where he strikes provocative macho poses and sings Joni Mitchell's Rainy Night House.  Back home, he wistfully croons Rodgers and Hammerstein's If I Loved You while cuddling a giant pillow on which is printed the word “lover.”

Drifting off, he dreams he is Mona Lisa in an amusing filmed sequence in which Leonardo's most famous model alternately reclines in grand classical poses and ludicrously munches on pasta and picks at her toenails.  The Mona Lisa inspires Mr. Kelly's character to ask blunt basic questions about art and love, which for him are expressions of the same romantic longing.

Realizing that the ideal of an artistic masterpiece and of a transcendent passion are both myths, he is overcome with despair and contemplates death.  And in the piece's most striking scene, he is lifted to the top of a stage on an elevator and sings a duet of a Purcell aria with a film of himself standing beside an open grave.

The final image of Mr. Kelly as a shivering, ashen-faced personification of Winged Victory is buffoonish enough to seem like less than a happy ending.

Mr. Kelly's performance on Thursday flowed seamlessly between pathos and gentle self-mockery. He became an endearing stand-in for everyone who has pursued divinity in art and love and who, while frustrated most of the time, has enjoyed enough glimpses of perfection to keep on searching.

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Aileen Jacobson, Victory In Persistence: Divine Promiscue (Music While Waging Victory), New York Newsday, July 25, 1992

"PERHAPS MY DESPAIR will allow me to create a masterpiece," John Kelly says, both despondently and self-mockingly, in his newest multimedia performance piece.

He needn't worry so much about his creative powers.

While Divine Promiscue (Music While Waging Victory), isn't a masterpiece on the order of the Mona Lisa, which he uses as a standard, it is a poignant, moving work of art.

Born of desperation, and touching on the anguish of an artist and the profound loneliness of a man who can't find (or has lost) love, it's a multilayered work that communicates via music, dance and visual imagery, as well as through occasional words.

An award-winning downtown performer who has already established himself in mainstream circles, Kelly fits smoothly into Serious Fun!: his dark vision is dappled by wry humor.  

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The Mona Lisa — an image that becomes one of Kelly's themes, as it has in previous works — is a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, he concludes: "I'm sure there's garlic breath lurking behind that smile." But she's a myth, he adds, and it's the "job of an artist to reveal what's behind the myth." I'm not sure he does that, since his meditation on art and love is hardly linear.

At the end of his riff on the painting, Kelly adds, "Love is a myth," and this observation leads to one of the diverse songs he delivers in a quavering, expressive voice: the Rodgers and Hammerstein ballad, If I Loved You.  His rendition is heart-breaking, though he's addressing a pillow embossed with the word "LOVER."

Kelly is also a graceful dancer and a wit. As the show begins, he's convincing as a choreographer making a new dance. In one of many nice details, he indicates through mime that he's passing through a barrier when he moves from his desk to his dance space. Later, he pokes fun at the gesture: He raises his hands hurriedly, as though it's an annoyance now to go through the imaginary wall he's created.

A little later, Kelly appears as his signature character, a diva named Dagmar Onassis, singing Io Sono L'Umile Ancella. As with much of this material, there are many layers of allusion here. Dagmar isn't introduced; she just marches on, in a puny red dress and long train.

In the song, the title character of Francesco Cilea's opera Adriana Lecouvreur asserts that she is only a handmaiden of the arts. Adriana is an actress whose tragic love affair ends. in her death. For cognoscenti (not me — I had to look it up), the song might foreshadow Kelly's later images of death. In one of the film dips he incorporates, the Mona Lisa (Kelly in black wig and dress) flits mischievously about a graveyard.

The background knowledge is useful but not vital. You can't miss the aching longing in Me, 0 Ye Gods, a song by Henry Purcell and Abraham Cowley, that Kelly sings as a duet with his own image on film. And you can't miss the effort that goes into his final aria, The Frost Song, by Purcell and John Dryden, which he sings in front of an industrial-sized fan while dressed as the Winged Victory. This, finally, must be the title's Music While Waging Victory. The wind — a sound heard often during the piece — chops up his words, but he persists. This is victory.

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Stephen Holden, Two Solo Performance Artists Confront The Limits Of Personal Experience, The New York Times, July 17, 1992

The creation of new work poses special challenges for solo performance artists. How far can one person stretch his or her own experience before the material wears thin? And how can a devoted audience be kept off balance enough that the work doesn't register as cozy shtick?

Both Eric Bogosian and Karen Finley, who are appearing in Lincoln Center's Serious Fun festival over the next few days, are confronting these questions in their newest works. Mr. Bogosian's "Dog Show" had its premiere last night at Alice Tully Hall, and there is a second performance tonight at 8. Ms. Finley is performing her new piece, A Certain Level of Denial, at Alice Tully Hall on Tuesday and Wednesday. Obnoxious and Abrasive

"When I did Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, I said I wasn't going to do another show, and here I am doing another solo show, partially because Serious Fun asked me do one," Mr. Bogosian said in a recent telephone interview. "I think I have to deal with the modicum of celebrity I have, because I've begun to notice that audiences don't come in as doubtful about me as they used to. For a long time people just didn't get what I was doing. But in the last couple of years, when I've come out and done something disturbing about a guy begging on the subway, it's like hardy-har-har-har. I hear horse laughs from the audience, and it troubles me. I figure the only way to get around this is to start talking a little more directly to the audience and dealing with the guy who stands behind the characters."

But instead of just being himself, Mr. Bogosian said, he intends to play with the audience's notions of who he might be. "When you go to see a performer, you almost always infer a persona," he said.

Dog Chameleon, the character Mr. Bogosian is presenting as a version of himself, is a variation on a character he invented many years ago, an "obnoxious comedian" named Ricky Paul. Dog is also a descendant, he said, of Barry Champlain, the abrasive talk-show personality who was the central character in his play and film "Talk Radio."

"Dog is at war with himself trying not to be evil," Mr. Bogosian explained. "He's me, but he's also an alter ego."

"Dog Show" is also an attempt to recapture some of the spontaneity of his earlier performance pieces. "I have to feel," Mr. Bogosian emphasized, "that I'm bringing this show back to a 'flying by the seat of my pants' kind of performance." Tweaking Liberal Pieties

Ms. Finley is also looking for new ways to challenge a cult audience that is too admiring to be an effective sounding board for work whose reputation shocks and offends conservative critics. One of her strategies in A Certain Level of Denial is to dig beneath her audience's liberal pieties. Among other subjects, she said, the work deals with the attitudes of "straight liberals" toward AIDS.

"I'm talking to straight liberals who give to Gay Men's Health Crisis but who, when someone they know is H.I.V. positive comes to their house, will not use the same bathroom, to people who don't feel good if their child is queer," she said in a telephone interview. "These little things we do in our personal lives and at home are important. I also want to talk about the denial of seeing someone sick and dying. I have friends who are dying right now, and you would be surprised at how few people there are who are around for that process. The denial of death is something that goes to the very heart of our culture."

The piece also includes some original stories that Ms. Finley described as "modern fairy tales" and uses some of her original paintings, projected as slides.

"The action will be very raw," she promised. "And the anger is even stronger than in my last piece," in which she stripped nude and covered herself with chocolate. Camp and Pathos Flirt

On Thursday, John Kelly, will perform his new solo piece, Divine Promiscue, which he described as the meditation of a man "confronted by his mortality."

"It's a series of songs and arias strung together with choreography and an orchestral score," said the androgynous performer, who wrote, choreographed and directed the piece and sings in an eerie, heart-tugging falsetto. The music ranges from Purcell to Joni Mitchell to Cilea to Kurt Weill.

"I always like my work to function on the edge between pathos and irony or camp," said Mr. Kelly, who appears as Joni Mitchell and as a drag character named Dagmar Onassis.

"When people do drag, audiences don't expect something compelling," he explained. "I like to surprise people, to thwart their expectations, to take them somewhere else."

Next Friday and Saturday, David Shiner, the Chaplinesque clown from Cirque du Soleil, will team up with another distinguished clown, Bill Irwin, and the Red Clay Ramblers, a bluegrass band, for two evenings of play.

Mr. Shiner and Mr. Irwin became friends while working in Silent Tongue, a new film written and directed by Sam Shepard, in which they play clowns in a traveling medicine show in New Mexico in 1879.  The movie stars Richard Harris, Alan Bates and River Phoenix. The Red Clay Ramblers wrote and perform the music. Definition of a Clown

"Bill and I work very much in a similar style," said Mr. Shiner, who was born in Boston but has worked in Europe for the last decade. "We're both drawn toward the silent-film era. I'm working in more of a European tradition, which combines a bit of dance and pantomime with straight clowning. For me, the clown is always the same: the lost soul trying to figure out where he is and who he is."

If Mr. Shiner and Mr. Irwin share similar styles, their clown personalities are very different.

"Bill's character has got to think everything through carefully before he makes a decision," Mr. Shiner said. "He's very hesitant and lost. I'm very brash and want to get things done now and be in control. They're interesting together."

The Serious Fun! festival is at Alice Tully Hall.