Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte, La MaMa, New York

Transfixing: the multi-talented John Kelly shines in ‘Pass the Blutwurst’

According to the programme for the transfixing Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte, John Kelly, the director/ choreographer/central performer of the piece, recently starred in a film directed by James Franco called The Clerk’s Tale. Nothing could be more inevitable. Like Franco, Kelly wears many hats: writer, actor, painter, musician, dancer, singer. And, like Franco, Kelly excites comment among those for whom the uncategorisable creative soul causes confusion rather than celebration.

In a career that has spanned more than three decades, Kelly has been drawn to other artists who defy pigeonholing, such as Jean Cocteau. Just as often, he has been inspired by the transgressive spirits who, true to the needs of Romantic mythology, die at an age we moderns consider premature. Caravaggio, for instance, will be the subject of his next piece, The Escape Artist, premiering in New York in April.

Blutwurst is a revival of sorts. It was first done in the mid-1980s; and then at La MaMa, home to this engagement, in 1995. This latest 75-minute production incorporates two new scenes and a new film section.

Through dance, film and wordless acted scenes, Blutwurst gives us Egon Schiele. This is not a dusty downtown-Manhattan version of a biopic. Oncue cards held by the two other male performers in this five-piece ensemble, the fast facts are dispensed with at the outset: the Austrian painter was born in 1890; mentored by Klimt; lived with his mistress/model, Wally Neuzil; had “pornographic” drawings seized by the police; married Edith Harms; and died of the Spanish flu in the autumn of 1918, three days after his wife, who was six months pregnant.

Kelly’s choreography, which slyly quotes Giselle, is based on the motif of the arm crooked to 45 degrees. Some of Schiele’s paintings are referenced; and there is a related exhibition called Schiele-Kelly at La Galleria, not far from La MaMa.

Blutwurst reflects Kelly’s wide-ranging, pitch-perfect taste in music, including Berg, Boito, Mahler and Richard Strauss. I was surprised only to hear no Schubert (one of Schiele’s most famous works is called “Death and the Maiden”), but only because Schubert is the kind of lyric genius, dying young, for which Kelly has shown such affinity. (

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