Egon Schiele Paints Again in Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte

The current revival of John Kelly’s Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte—a tribute to the Viennese painter Egon Schiele—is itself such a lovely sausage that it practically begs for a side of sauerkraut. Kelly crams the show full of biography, symbolism, expressionism, and eroticism, stuffing the whole into a sturdy dance-theater skin. Though Kelly is now far older than Schiele ever was (he died of influenza at 28), he convincingly inhabits that slight, shock-headed artist. In this wordless piece, Kelly and two similarly dressed dancers (called Alter Egons) portray Schiele’s affair with his model, his arrest for pornography, his marriage, his painterly success, and that premature death. Live dance and mime, all lavishly scored, alternate with black-and-white filmed sequences.

Steven Schreiber

John Kelly and Mackenzie Meehan travel back to Austria.

Details

Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte
By John Kelly
La MaMa, Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East 4th Street
212-475-7710, lamama.org

Related Content

• Free Will Astrology: April 3-9, 2013
  April 3, 2013
• Portrait of Wally
  May 9, 2012
• John Kelly Channels Painter Egon Schiele As He Breathes, Ducks, and Dies Through Art
  December 15, 2010
• Tim Hawkinson's 'One Man Band'; Michael Alan's 'Harmonious Opposites'
  July 20, 2010
• Frank Stella's Carbon Footprint
  July 3, 2007

More About

• Egon Schiele
• Ethnic and Regional Cuisines
• Food and Cooking

Many of the techniques that Kelly employs—deconstruction, bricolage, a sweetly ironic detachment—likely seemed fresher when the piece debuted in 1986. Adjectives such as “fierce,” “extravagant,” and “spectacular,” all used in various reviews to describe the original, do not now apply. But intervening decades have dulled little of the show’s grace or its gentle humor, and Kelly remains as compelling a performer as ever, edging away from mere camp toward something more tender and more true. Twenty-four years on, Blutwurst remains a wiener . . . er, winner.