Review: in 'time no line,' John Kelly revisits decades of diary entries

In his new show at La MaMa, “Time No Line,” the subject is himself — but then, hasn’t it always been, even when refracted through the creations of others?

“Time No Line,” which Kelly describes as a “live memoir,” draws from the diary he has been keeping since 1976. The narrative alternates between first and third person, with Kelly occasionally referring to himself as “the artist,” as if he were looking at his own past from a cool, outside standpoint. But as quiet as it is, this visually elegant show is anything but dispassionate.

The story begins in 1971, when Kelly, then “a young man from New Jersey,” saw the gender-bending troupe the Cockettes in New York. “This encounter shifted his perspective and sense of possibility,” a slide informs us. “His creative life had begun.”

Kelly trained in dance but eventually realized he had taken it up too late to be good enough, so he switched gears and attended art school in his early 20s. Both trainings are evident in the poise of his movement and in the projected diary excerpts, adorned with sketches and illustrations. The performer also gradually covers the stage in chalk drawings, which he executes with a dancer’s fluid grace.

The show hopscotches back and forth over the decades — the title is derived from the idea that time is not linear — and at this Sunday performance, Kelly would sometimes sidestep the script, one remembrance triggering another. “I’m kind of half-off and half-on book,” he mused at one point.

The most focused section covers 1989-1991, when Kelly and his community of downtown Manhattan friends and lovers, dancers and theatermakers were engulfed in the AIDS epidemic. As diary entries flash by, Kelly draws bodies on the stage in white chalk, like outlines at a crime scene. He then adds red highlights that make those bodies resemble Keith Haring illustrations. Vibrant life somehow seeps forth from death. (A companion exhibition of Kelly’s art, “Sideways Into the Shadows,” is at the Howl! Happening gallery, a short walk away. It features renderings of journal entries on separate panels and portraits of friends and peers lost to AIDS.)

Kelly packs a lot in about 75 minutes, yet he also knows when to let things breathe and he performs songs to signal both parenthesis and emphasis — a Joni Mitchell tune, of course, but also a Purcell aria and the Charles Aznavour ballad “What Makes a Man.” Time, then, is not just nonlinear but magically suspended.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.