WEB ARCHIVE
Awards and Nominations:
AudioFiles Award - Euphoria
OffWestEnd Award finalist - Zelda
OffWestEnd Award nominee - The Marriage of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein
Artist in Residence:
Wilton's Music Hall, London, 2024
L'Air Arts, Paris, 2020
Welcome to Kelly Burke’s web archive.
Kelly is an expat performance artist and arts activist based in London, UK. Her work has been performed from the West End to Off-Broadway, across the UK cabaret circuit, and in site-specific venues ranging from hotel rooms to abandoned warehouses to underground bars.
Kelly’s work explores how voice and the body intersect with ideas about space, belonging, power, and authenticity — with a particular interest in queer, feminist, and other marginalised voices. Take a look at some of her past projects below.
CURRENT AND UPCOMING
MAE RIOT'S SCREAMING TWENTIES - on stage
'This is the place where the misfits go: the artists, the trouble-makers, the revolutionaries, the queers. It’s where the cynics go, who don’t believe in a better world but are looking for someone to show them it’s possible anyway.'
ABOUT:
A hijacking of traditional cabaret via time-slipping, lesbian modernist poetry, and AI.
LISTEN:
Coming soon
REVIEWS:
Coming soon
MAE RIOT'S SCREAMING TWENTIES - podcast
ABOUT:
Trailer and proof-of-concept episode for podcast in which real-world artists and activists are interviewed in the imagined Bar of Amateurs by Kelly’s cabaret persona, Mae Riot.
LISTEN:
REVIEWS:
5* rating on Spotify
RECORDED MEDIA WORK
APOSTROPHE
'There is something inside the wall. Something that can no longer cry out, but cries out nonetheless.'
ABOUT:
A pandemic experiment in glitch feminism and text collage: a mash-up of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper', Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties, and Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina. It explores ‘ownership’ of voice and the intersection between absence, presence, and subversion.
WATCH:
all the dead stars
There is no Monday. Monday is all night. Monday is all month. Monday is all the dead stars.
ABOUT:
Writing commission and voice over experiment for Blue Goat Theatre, made in international collaboration with choreographer Aaron Samuel Davies (Germany) and composer Augustin Gressier (France). It's about the nature of distance, love, space-time... and pigeons.
WATCH:
'Nothing about me must surprise you. I'm an American.'
ABOUT:
Commissioned as a stage play by Shakespeare's Globe, London, where it was performed in 2020. The show explores the sensational life of the Parisan-American icon whose legendary literary salon gave birth to Modernism, and whose Sapphic affairs scandalised polite society.
The script was reworked as an audio drama in a commission from Reading Fringe Digital, investigating the impact of voice-only format.
LISTEN:
REVIEWS:
'Part audiobook, part drama and part inspirational guide, Burke’s script is beautifully quotable and romantic. Austen-esque and heightened in delivery, this piece is a delight as a listener.'
A YOUNGER THEATRE
LIVE WORK
ABOUT:
A musical-play using songs from the 1930s to tell the story of down-on-her-luck singer navigating sex, poverty, and life abroad.
The show sold out Wilton's Music Hall and the Edinburgh Fringe before transferring to the Soho Theatre, Off-Broadway.
'Oh show us the way to the next whisky bar — oh, don't ask why.'
WATCH:
REVIEWS:
TimeOut Critics' Pick
TimeOut 'Top 10 Things to Do in New York' list for 6 weeks
'A heartfelt and stylish show which is as intelligent as it is decadent.'
THE LIST
'Kelly Burke seems to have come to life from a Henry Miller novel and walked straight onto the set of Casablanca. In this cheap bar with a “cheap pianist” we have an intimate conversation about the human heart — and Burke’s talent is spectacular.'
FRINGE GURU
'Smoky, spiky and intelligently textured.'
FEST
‘This show begs to be watched.’
FRINGE GURU
ABOUT:
REVIEWS:
'Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist. Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty.' - Ring Lardner
A favourite of critics and audiences alike, ZELDA is about the thwarted ambition and irrepressible creativity of bi-sexual painter, dancer, and writer Zelda Fitzgerald. The show has played everywhere from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to the West End, earning rave reviews and an OffWestEnd Award nomination.
OffWestEnd Award finalist
'An outstanding piece about the agonies of art and the burdens of love.'
WHATS ON STAGE
'Burke is a captivating presence. Her intelligent performance makes Zelda beguiling - positioned on the edge of sanity with admirable restraint. The end arrives with a painful enforcement of the costly price Zelda paid for her life with the great man Fitzgerald. This is a carefully layered piece, superbly performed, that will stay with you far longer than its hour-long duration.'
LONDON MAGAZINE
'Witty, thoughtful and full of subtle nuances, this play about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife is not to be missed. Kelly Burke’s performance as Zelda is a tour de force — enthralling. Burke effortlessly creates this attractive, intelligent heroine, making her sympathetic, enigmatic and engaging in equal measure. Brilliantly written, smoothly staged and superbly acted, Zelda is one of the best hours you will spend this festival.'
THREE WEEKS
'This is a tragic story of excess, unhappiness and wasted potential. Burke plays it with poignant charisma in a beautifully modulated production.'
TIME OUT
'Vivid and fascinating, performed with zestful brilliance.'
THE SPECTATOR
IN OTHER WORDS...
'We are inside each other’s bodies when we sing, when we speak, when we laugh, when we sigh. Our voices live in other bodies. They are brought into being, into meaning, there.'
ABOUT:
A paper thinking through the intersections between voice, performance, power, authenticity, and marginalisation.
READ:
Have a read here - and get in touch if you'd like to participate in upcoming creative experiments around performative voice.
NEXT UP
A WHALE IS ITS OWN HOUSE
'We should meet somewhere else. On purpose.'
ABOUT:
Play currently in development about queer diaspora, urban precarity, and found family
THE LOST GENERATION
ABOUT:
Streaming series currently in development