By John Kelly
time no line is a solo performance based on John Kelly’s 40 years of journal writing. The work theatrically combines his deeply personal texts with movement, video, music, song, and live drawing into a ‘live memoir’. His experiences within the East Village art scene of the 1980’s, gender performance, and the AIDS epidemic, have defined his status as a survivor whose presence challenges the ruptures in our cultural and generational dialogue.

The downtown New York City art scene comes alive in performance artist John Kelly’s multimedia solo show, Time No Line, playing at La MaMa. A play on the word timeline, Time No Line incorporates Kelly’s own personal journals from the past 40 years to create a live memoir of a career that took many twists and turns. Using movement, video, text, dance, and song, Kelly recreates moments of his storied career as a performance and visual artist in the queer art and drag scene in New York City. Starting with his move from New Jersey to New York in 1971 as a 17-year-old ballet dancer, to his pursuit of the visual arts attempting to paint like Egon Schiele, and finally to his discovery of drag and performance art, Kelly introduces the audience to some of the characters he’s created. These include Dagmar Onassis, the fictional daughter of renowned opera singer Maria Callas and, most notably, Joni Mitchell, whom he has impersonated for many years in various shows both in and out of drag. Throughout Time No Line, we see a crossover of high art and punk rock. Kelly is an opera devotee and often speaks of his admiration for soprano Maria Callas. At these times, the stories are a bit high-minded …Read more