Harvestworks

Underneath the Skin

Underneath the Skin

Underneath The Skin is a multi-media dance theatre work based on the life and work of Samuel Steward (1909-1993), a brilliant closeted queer scholar who left academia to create his own survival strategies, reasonably flourishing as a tattoo artist, diarist, novelist, and writer of erotic fiction. The live performance will include multi-channel video projections, including animation renderings of tattoo designs, and various modes of rendering written texts.

Underneath The Skin is a multi-media dance theatre work based on the life and work of Samuel Steward (1909-1993), a brilliant closeted queer scholar who left academia to create his own survival strategies, reasonably flourishing as a tattoo artist, diarist, novelist, and writer of erotic fiction. The live performance will include multi-channel video projections, including animation renderings of tattoo designs, and various modes of rendering written texts.

John Kelly

John Kelly is a performance and visual artist. His character-driven dance theatre works focus on the threats of survival resulting from the personal and public struggles encountered by artists and social outsiders, and the nature of creative genius. Kelly’s visual artwork frequently involves self-portraiture, including drawing and painting, photography and video; 2 of his films ‘The Dagmar Onassis Story’ and ‘The Mona Lisa’ were recently acquired for the permanent collection of MOMA. His solo exhibition ‘Sideways Into The Shadows’ includes 52 hand drawn memorial portraits of friends and lovers lost to the AIDS epidemic, and dated journal transcriptions rendered on paper, was recently exhibited at Howl! Arts.