About This Show

Time No Line is a solo performance work that focuses on how we can recognize collective histories through the experience of an individual. Based on John Kelly’s personal journals and workbooks – 40 years of writing and reflection – the work is theatrically structured as a non-linear work to articulate some experiences and themes that have affected the survivor of a lost generation. This work explores the potential for personal experience as a shared antidote to an interrupted cultural dialogue.

Time No Line will include the components that have comprised Kelly’s past works: physical movement, projections, music and song, and spoken text. Utilizing his work as visual artist, the black floor will serve as a surface for drawing with white chalk – responding to, notating, and erasing experience and memory.

The themes of Time No Line are time capsules that chart a personal history that dovetails with significant cultural events: the East Village performance art scene of the 1980’s, gender performance, the AIDS epidemic, the culture wars, queer history, gentrification, and New York’s evolving cultural landscape: