With ‘Tao’ as guide

“I’ve gone to the hospital three or four times to die,” Scott Kelman says. In fact, at 69, this pioneer of the L.A. performance art scene has survived four heart attacks, is outfitted with five stents and a pacemaker, and carries an inhaler to cope with emphysema.

Yet he’s still here. And this month, after a decade in Portland, Ore., he’s back in L.A. with a new show, “Tao Soup.” A contemporary, intermissionless riff on the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism -- blending spoken word, movement and wild sound effects -- it will receive the last three of seven local performances Thursday through Saturday at the Electric Lodge in Venice.

The show looks more like a rebirth than the work of a man with death on his mind. Kelman and his quintet of Oregon-based performers, whose ages are roughly half their director’s, “create an event that is both entertaining and penetrating,” David C. Nichols wrote in The Times. “Essential Tao tenets land with insight and humor.” The production is “a matchless opportunity for creative spiritual nourishment.”

Nevertheless, “Tao Soup” ends with an enactment of death, depicting it as a calm, measured, natural process. “Every time I get depressed,” Kelman says, he asks to see this scene. “I feel a lot better. It doesn’t look like such a bad place.”

From 1981 to 1993, Kelman ran Pipeline Inc. out of three small downtown L.A. spaces: Factory Place, Boyd Street and the Wallenboyd theaters. He was L.A.’s busiest presenter of theatrical performance art through most of the ‘80s, producing more than 300 shows. Many of the artists whose appearances he sponsored were to become much better-known, among them Whoopi Goldberg, the Actors’ Gang, Harry Shearer, Luis Alfaro and John Fleck. Kelman also taught privately.

But those Pipeline years, during which he won Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle and LA Weekly awards, were preceded and followed by periods in which he swore off the stage.

As a young man in his native New York, he had first tried his hand at conventional theater but found it no more satisfying than his other career option -- the family’s jewelry business. He found his calling, though, in the ‘60s and early ‘70s in experimental theater.

Then, in 1975, he suffered his first heart attack, and he retreated to a farm near Woodstock, N.Y., and life as a performance teacher. Five years later, he even gave up teaching for a brief period when he finally joined his sister, Pepi Kelman, in her Beverly Hills jewelry business.

When he moved to L.A., “I thought I was going to Babylon,” Kelman says. Within a year, however, he had decided to return to experimental theater, which he figured could be done in L.A. as well as in New York. He started Pipeline.

After another five years, he says, he felt burned out. So he decided to give up theater -- again -- and move with his girlfriend to Park City, Utah, where his sister has a second home, for its “peace and quiet.” But on the eve of their departure, he dreamed that his friend Paul Krassner -- the countercultural writer and editor -- was sending him a message to avoid Utah. Kelman chose Portland instead, explaining to his girlfriend (now his wife, Anet Ris-Kelman) that “we’ll find out why when we get there.”

A decade later, Kelman -- whose retirement from teaching lasted only a year -- cites plenty of factors to justify his choice of Portland, at least in contrast to L.A.

“There are none of the same pressures to produce. In L.A., I couldn’t do ‘Tao Soup.’ There are too many distractions for the actors. In Portland, you don’t have the same talent pool, but you have the opportunity to stay focused.”

Also, Portland is “a good place to be sick. There are lots of good doctors.”

Kelman found a warehouse space, called it Brooklyn Bay and began teaching again. (His techniques are also taught by a group in England.)

Marc Otto, the only man in the “Tao Soup” cast, and his wife, Melanya Helene, Brooklyn Bay’s co-artistic director and also a cast member, say they had never heard of Kelman until Otto found a flier for his classes at a favorite coffee hangout.

“Once we got into his work, it was shocking to have not found him,” Otto says. After a month of their work together, Kelman was hospitalized. To this day, Otto says, he asks himself, “How can I keep this man alive and creatively invested?”

Despite such support, Kelman has only recently begun to produce again for the public. One production, last year, was about as public as performance can get. At restaurants, galleries and bus stops, the performers rose one by one, without warning, and -- beginning with “God bless America” -- offered blessings to more than 100 countries.

“Tao Soup,” similarly, contains a number of political references.

“My whole entry into theater was both a political and a spiritual quest,” Kelman says. “In the ‘60s, theater was a vehicle for something greater than theater.”

He draws a distinction between “the performer who is there to be loved by the public and the performer who feels a sense of service to the public.”

Kelman plans to offer some of his classes at the Electric Lodge in December and says he might bring “Tao Soup” back to L.A. next year.

He says he sometimes misses “the people and the mind-set in L.A.” But he doesn’t plan to revisit his former downtown haunts, which he has been told are now occupied by toy district businesses. “It’s over. I have lots of great memories.”

For this Taoism follower, who left Judaism after his bar mitzvah and found spirituality in Chinese writings, the present counts for more than the past or future.

He’s convinced, he says, that he hasn’t died “because of my curiosity. I know the angel of death is coming -- and I’m so wide awake awaiting her, she doesn’t take me.”

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‘Tao Soup’

Where: Electric Lodge, 1416 Electric Ave., Venice

When: 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday

Price: $18

Contact: (310) 823-0710 or www.electriclodge.org