ACCESSIBILITY

Captioning will be available. 

Raja Feather Kelly 

(New York, NY) 

Raja Feather Kelly’s HYSTERIA

DESCRIPTION

In Raja Feather Kelly’s HYSTERIA, Kelly continues his study of pop culture and its displacement of queer Black subjectivity. Picking up where his 2018 performance UGLY left off, Kelly re-situates himself as a glamorous, extraterrestrial entity—both alien to the world and wholly consuming its pop-cultural byproducts. HYSTERIA marks the collapse of fiction into fact, tracking the subsequent inner turmoil, confusion, and mania that Kelly sets out to exorcise. 

HYSTERIA is choreographed, directed, and performed by Raja Feather Kelly, with video by Laura Snow with Kelly, photography by Kate Enman, sound by Raja Feather Kelly and Remy Kurs, and cinematography by Laura Snow with CJ Ferroni. Set and prop design is by Kelly with Enman and lighting design is by Tuce Yusak.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Choreographer/director Raja Feather Kelly is the artistic director of New Brooklyn Theatre. In 2009, he founded the dance-theatre-media company the feath3r theory. The two companies merged in 2018. Raja has been awarded a Creative Capital Award (2019), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019), a Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (2018), Dance Magazine's inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018), the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), and is a three-time Princess Grace Award winner (2017, 2018, 2019). He was born in Fort Hood, Texas, and holds a B.A. in Dance and English from Connecticut College.

Raja has been named as the 2019–2020 Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts and is an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. Raja has also been awarded a New York Dance Performance "Bessie" Award, a Bessie Schonberg Fellowship at The Yard, a DanceWEB Scholarship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellowship, a HERE Arts Fellowship, a 2018 Creator-in-Residence award at Kickstarter, and a Choreography Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU. 

Over the past decade, Raja has created fifteen evening-length works with his company the feath3r theory, to critical acclaim—most recently, UGLY (Black Queer Zoo) at The Bushwick Starr, and We May Never Dance Again® at The Invisible Dog in Brooklyn.  Professionally, Raja has performed with Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group, David Dorfman Dance, Kyle Abraham|Abraham.In.Motion, and zoe | juniper. He has also managed a number of dance companies: Race Dance, Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion, zoe | juniper, and Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group.

Since 2016, Raja has choreographed extensively for Off-Broadway theatre in New York City, most notably for Signature Theatre, Soho Rep, and New York Theatre Workshop and Playwrights Horizons. Frequent collaborators include: Lileana Blain-Cruz, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Sarah Benson, and Lila Neugebauer. Other theatre credits include choreography for Skittles Commercial: The Musical (Town Hall), The Chronicles of Cardigan and Khente (SohoRep), Everyday Afroplay (JACK), GURLS (Princeton University, Yale Repertory Theatre), Electric Lucifer (The Kitchen), Lempicka (Williamstown Theatre Festival), The House That Will Not Stand (New York Theatre Workshop), Fireflies (Atlantic Theatre Company), If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka (Playwrights Horizons, nominated for the 2019 Lucille Lortel Award and the 2019 Chita Rivera Award for Outstanding Choreography), The Good Swimmer (BAM), and Faust (Opera Omaha). Raja’s most recent work includes A Strange Loop (Playwrights Horizons) and Fairview (Soho Rep, Berkeley Rep, TFANA and winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama).

SPONSORSHIP

Commissioned by Live Arts, Kelly’s solo dance, theater, visual performance and installation will reach 7 cities in 7 months with more dates and locations to be announced. Co-presenters and tour locations include: On the Boards in Seattle, WA (Film Screening), Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH (Film Screening), Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston, ME (Film Screening), ImPulsTanz - Vienna International Dance Festival in Vienna, Austria (Live), and The Time-Based Art Festival at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Portland, OR (Film Screening).