LEGENDARY PERFORMANCE ARTIST JOHN KELLY TAKES A GOOD LOOK ‘UNDERNEATH THE SKIN’ AT NYU SKIRBALL CENTER

BY HENRY EDWARDS

Over the past 40 years, the illustrious performance and visual artist John Kelly has created a staggeringly original body of work.

Kelly, an accomplished polymath who defies easy categorization, has reaped praise as a choreographer, theater artist, writer, vocalist, filmmaker, dancer and visual artist, earning two Obie Awards; two Bessie Awards; an Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; two NEA American Masterpiece Awards; and an American Choreographer Award, along the way.

"If the protean Mr. Kelly has had one recurring theme through the years, it is the shaping of the self through art,” says The New York Times.

Kelly’s efforts include a number of character-driven dance-theatre works that take as their focus real-life artists (more often than not, they are social outsiders) and their creative genius.

Antonin Artaud, Cocteau’s beloved, the cross-dressing trapeze artist Barbette, Caravaggio, Joni Mitchell and Egon Schiele number among those to have received the Kelly very special treatment.

Add to the list, the Ohio-born poet, novelist and educator Samuel Steward (1909-1993), who is the subject of Kelly’s latest effort, the solo dance-theater work, "Underneath the Skin."

The NYU Skirball commission has its world premiere at NYU Skirball Center on Friday, October 11 and Saturday, October 12 at 7:30 pm (www.nyuskirball.org).

Steward led a life that can only be described as fantastical.  In the early 1950s, when he was in his early-forties, Steward abandoned his post as university professor and reinvented himself as one of the 20th century’s most accomplished and influential tattoo artists (as Philip Sparrow) and as a writer of gay erotic fiction (as Phil Andros).

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and he were friends. During visits to Stein’s country home in France, he met other literary figures, including Thornton Wilder (with whom he became lovers), Lord Alfred Douglas (the lover of Oscar Wilde), Thomas Mann, and André Gide.

Steward kept extensive secret diaries, journals and statistics documenting his active sex life, including encounters with Rudolph Valentino and Rock Hudson.

After meeting famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in late 1949, he subsequently became an unofficial collaborator with Kinsey's Institute for Sex Research. During his years of work with the Institute, Steward collected and donated sexually themed materials to the Kinsey archive, gave Kinsey access to his lifelong sexual records, introduced him to large numbers of sexually active men in the Chicago area, and provided him with collections of early hard core Polaroid photographs.

In Chicago, in the 1950s, he became one of the country’s most renowned tattoo artists, later moving to the San Francisco Bay area, where he was the official tattoo artist of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang.

In the 1960s Steward began writing and publishing literate comic erotica under the name of Phil Andros.

Retiring from tattooing in 1970, Steward then wrote a social history of American tattooing published as “Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos.”

John Kelly characterizes “Underneath the Skin” as a work “that aims to introduce its audiences to the brave life of a creative spirit” and to “the details of a life that was driven, dark, sexy and cerebral, but also virtuosic, courageous, celebratory - and in its own way - a liberated manifestation of human expression.”

"Underneath the Skin" employs theatrical movement and choreography, theatrical renditions of Steward’s actual words (culled from his essays and an unpublished memoir), video projections, and digital animations of Steward’s tattoo designs and erotic illustrations.

Ticket availability is scarce, but the few remaining can be purchased online at www.nyuskirball.org, by phone at 212.998.4941, or in person at the box office, Tuesday-Saturday, 12:00–6:00 P.M. 

NYU Skirball Center is devoted to presenting cutting-edge performances and international artists who provoke, engage and inspire.

The 800-seat theatre is located in the heart of Greenwich Village at 566 LaGuardia Place at Washington Square (www.nyuskirball.org).