Artists Reach Out: Raja Feather Kelly

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Raja Feather Kelly

Raja Feather Kelly
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer, director, and the artistic director of the feath3r theory and New Brooklyn Theatre. A three-time winner of the Princess Grace Award, Raja is the 2019–2020 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and a 2019 Creative Capital awardee. He is a current fellow of HERE Arts, the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, and a Creative Associate at The Juilliard School. Over the past decade, Kelly has created fifteen evening-length premieres with his company the feath3r theory as well as directing and choreographing extensively for Off-Broadway theater in New York City. In 2019 he was nominated for the 2019 Lucille Lortel Award and the Chita Rivera Award for Outstanding Choreography. His choreography has garnered a 2018 Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) and he is a 2019 SDCF Joe A. Callaway Award finalist for outstanding choreography (A Strange Loop, Fairview), Dance Magazine's inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018), and the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016). He was born in Fort Hood, Texas and holds a B.A. in Dance and English from Connecticut College.

Above: The Feather Theory (photo: Andy Toad)
Below: Ugly (photo: Maria Baranova)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

“CHANGE IS THE ONLY CONSTANT”

So much of my work has been affected and on so many fronts. It’s devastating. I have had work cancelled until August. That includes: three full performances, five workshops, two week long residencies, and numerous teaching gigs, and this is aside from my ongoing rehearsals with my company. I am a freelancer; still and always, right? So in some ways, I know what it’s like for things to get cancelled and to be postponed, but in this case, I can’t even plan for the future because so much is uncertain. It is scary, but also, I am a workaholic; I haven’t taken a break since my Junior year of college, no joke. I mean, I had a wedding last year, and I started a show the day after. I work. I came to work. It is a large part of my identity, and it’s shaken.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

“EVERYBODY MUST HAVE A FANTASY”

I can’t even begin to really nail down how I got involved, but I believe it had something to do with the coming together of two things for me: getting out of myself and getting out of my town. It has only recently felt like a kind of “practice” that I could identify. Everything I have participated in up until now has been a following of my interests and a fear of boredom, death, or crime. Watching television as a child gave anchored time for me; making dances as a teenager gave me a purpose; memorizing poetry gave me solace. What was extra-curricular, growing up, became a study through college, and now performing, teaching, choreographing, and directing is a hopscotch game between the career box, a business box, and the box of artistic practice.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

“DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE?”

I practice Storytelling. That is my main interest in all that I do. It requires what is most important to me: the process of using fact and narrative to communicate something to your audience. And while some stories are factual, some are embellished or improvised in order to best explain the core message.

As a Storyteller of my own creations and also a realizer for others' stories, my mission--or what I envision--is to challenge my audience and collaborators to collectively interrogate and celebrate our shared relationship to human empathy and personal ethics, but specifically, as they are as expressed in and distorted by popular media. You know I love me some Popular Culture.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

“IT IS NOT WHAT BUT HOW”

What I care about most seems to change more often than I can keep up with. Somehow, however, having a practice holds me to a kind of integrity that surprises me and keeps me in line with my vision, and my vision, in many, ways represents a kind of humanness that I care about most. Courage, Empathy, Curiosity, Determination. This kind of totem allows what I care about to shift, but my approach to them does not waver.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

I assume you mean, “the world we have now” as in the state of the world we are in now and that which will forever change who/what we are and what/how we do (it)? The impact of the ___________ (I can’t bear to say the C word, either of them.) Anyway, as you can see, I have a mantra for almost everything I think about. Like a good title, a little quote or mantra can certainly lead you forward. My approach to this time, which I secretly feel has a lot to teach us--particularly to appreciate life more--my mantra for this time as it relates to my practice is:

“LIVE THE WAY YOU WANT YOUR STORY TOLD...
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“OR FAIL TRYING”

Briefly share one self-care tip that has special meaning to you now.

RFK: Do nothing, until something makes you do it.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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A family affair: Jackie Sibblies Drury's "Fairview" at Soho Rep

Jackie Sibblies Drury's Fairview--now in a mostly sold-out run through July 22 at Soho Rep--is a high-speed autowalk masquerading as a clever ensemble play about an affluent Black family. It rolls out over a solid two hours. You embark within what appears to be safe, familiar sitcom-land--generically appealing, mainstream characters working through daily banalities and minor disputes while preparing a dinner party--and wind up whizzing through unsettling soap opera territory. I won't spoil any of Sibblies Drury's brilliant strategies and surprises. You absolutely should not go knowing what you're getting yourself into. Please, if you haven't already, don't read anything else that has been written about this play!

I will just say that, ultimately, Sibblies Drury has crafted this play with two distinct audiences in mind. I belong to one of them, and I felt duly amused and nourished.

The actors are vivacious, with standout turns by MaYaa Boateng (teenager Keisha, eventually calling b.s. on everything) and Roslyn Ruff (glamorous, meddlesome aunt Jasmine). The actors' deft timing and overall charisma benefit not only from Sarah Benson's direction but also Raja Feather Kelly's playful choreography which infuses and gives life to the entire proceedings. This work would not be the same without the way it claims and defines space and mobilizes bodies.

Performers: MaYaa Boateng, Charles Browning, Hannah Cabell, Natalia Payne, Jed Resnick, Luke Robertson, Roslyn Ruff and Heather Alicia Simms

Set Design: Mimi Lien
Costume Design: Montana Levi Blanco
Lighting Design: Amith Chandrashaker
Sound Design: Mikaal Sulaiman

Fairview continues through July 22. With the exception of July 8th's 7:30pm show ("99-cent Sunday"), where tickets must be purchased at the door, performances are sold out. For information, click here.

Soho Rep
46 Walker Street (between Broadway and Church), Manhattan

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"TROPICO": between what is solid and what is not there

Director-choreographer Raja Feather Kelly performs in TROPICO.
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Above and below: Dancers of The Feath3r Theory
perform TROPICO in the sanctuary of St. Mark's Church.
(photos: Ian Douglas)

I remember some years back, a few people started talking about how we'd simply have to get used to a new reality--that, in order to survive in our brave new world, dance would have to move out of live performance and into cyberspace and new media. That got my back up, and I'm glad to see that live performance in real time and real space seems not only alive but livelier and feistier than ever.

Case in point, a new production from director/choreographer Raja Feather Kelly and his troupe, The Feath3r Theory, running (amok) this week at Danspace Project.

Let's start by invoking its full name. Are you ready? Here we go!

the feath3r theory presents: Andy Warhol's TROPICO or Zeitgeist - the fall of man, the age of desire, Adam and Steve in the Rite of Spring, Lana Del Rey's 'It's Always Everything' staring Allen Ginsberg as William Shakespeare or the greatest story (of survival) ever told.

Now, normally, I'd italicize and boldface that entire name-dropping title (with a hyperlink), but I'm giving it to you the way Kelly gave it to us in order to minimize confusion. You're welcome.

But I understand it's okay, between friends, to refer to Kelly's opus as TROPICO, which also appears to be the name of a nation, or a people, with its own anthem. Although it makes a pretty good name for a queer, campy pop-opera with multiple musical references to everything from a Christmas carol to The Rolling Stones to The Wiz.

I like that Kelly's work not only demands its life but does so while living large. Generally speaking, I can appreciate dance ("multidisciplinary, boundary-breaking dance theatre," as Kelly's promo material would have it) envisioned on the plus size, specifically where it amplifies the creative voices of typically marginalized people. Katy Pyle's Sleeping Beauty & The Beast and Kelly's TROPICO are recent prime examples, both involving prodigious ambition and sprawl.

TROPICO, though, might have Pyle's piece beat for sprawl. (Did I mention it's also a graphic novel? And a downloadable musical collaboration between Kelly and Bryan Strimpel?) I entered TROPICO's befogged atmosphere shortly before 8pm and left it close to 10:30 having spent all that time in an unholy mixture of fascination (genuine) and impatience (equally genuine). Let's deal with that last part first.

Lord, is this piece long! Most maddening are those numerous times when it seems to be building to a possible end only to sprout something new. Honestly, it got to a point where every time an earnest player showed up with mic in hand--to recite, to exhort or to sing a little tune--I wanted to snatch that mic and throw it as far as possible.

For TROPICO, the audience sits on the bare (okay, thinly-carpeted) risers flanking the space. No cushioning, no back support, no intermission. And, as we all know, the humidity inside St. Mark's on a warmish spring or broiling summer evening needs a name as long as this dance's official one. Near-continuous fog-making only contributes to the airlessness.

I'm not whining here, just being real. This is a real experience--and, likely, deliberate. It's legitimate to talk about it.

But, at the same time, let me admit I loved the near-continuous fog-making--if not that humidity. The fog--and the dancing and dramatics within it--took over that familiar space like nothing I've seen before, and I digged that. Tuce Yasak's nimble lighting design played off that fog and the flesh, costumes and neon-colorful wigs of the dancers with maximum witchery, directing our eyes and carving out areas of dramatic interest. Yasak matches Kelly in the painterly ability to take a basic bunch of space and make us feel dimensions and possibilities within it.

Kelly's work proceeds with dream-like pacing, scrambled sequencing, mystifying vagueness and excess. Warhol meets the Symbolists for a drink at the Dada Bar. It's as if a dream has exploded within the sanctuary of St. Mark's Church. Sometimes that ongoing explosion happens in drifting slo-mo; sometimes it bursts out into a crescendo of noise and aggression--dancers gyrating, bouncing, bounding, squatting, strutting, humping the floor or roughhousing for no discernible reason. And sometimes Kelly forces some of us to look at things from weird angles (or through a barrier of tightly-spaced bodies) that makes them fairly impossible to see. Our imaginations take over from our eyes as the initial frustration gives way to wonder--except, of course, in the case of the handful of people who simply got up and walked out.

Kelly has quoted Warhol: “It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.”

I don't know if Warhol had a point, but I think Kelly is fighting back with a barrage of live art that's about not telling you any of these things but maybe pushing you to figure out how to be with it and with yourself inside it.

With performances by Raja Feather Kelly, Shaina Branfman, Amy Gernux, Beth Graczyk, Sara Gurevich, John Gutierrez, Lindsay Head, Rebecca Hite Teicheira, Nik Owens, Rachel Pritzlaff, Collin Ranf and Aaron Moses Robin. Video by Aitor Mendilibar +  Laura Snow. Costumes by Melody Eggen

Andy Warhol's Tropico continues tonight and tomorrow with performances at 8pm. Tickets are sold out, but you can join the waiting list at the door at 7:15 each evening. For information, go here.

Danspace Project

St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery

131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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We're doing it again! Not The Master's Tools at Gibney!

I'm so excited that Gibney Dance Center will once again host Not The Master's Tools: Dance Artists Create Alternatives on Monday, December 7. Guess who's presenting and chatting with us this time?

André M. Zachery

Raja Feather Kelly

Jen Abrams

Larissa Velez-Jackson

Remember, hold Monday, December 7 (6-8pm).

These conversations are free and open to all.

Your pre-registration [CLICK HERE] will help us plan for the best space, but walk-ins are certainly welcome. Help us spread the word, and bring your friends and colleagues!

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

Super WE: Raja Feather Kelly and Tzveta Kassabova

Tzveta Kassabova and Raja Feather Kelly
present their program Super WE at Danspace Project this weekend.

Who folded the programs into paper airplanes? Was it Raja Feather Kelly? Was it Tzveta Kassabova?

I don't know, but it could have been either of these whose dancing displays such sharpness, such a sense of daring, of serious play. Super WE, their hour-long show at Danspace Project, is a paper airplane with deliberate aim. Kelly and Kassabova have filled the space with artificial fog, and together they shine through and pierce through that soft filter.

Their space is ringed by lights that establish not just any arena for dance but a theatrical hothouse, perhaps a sacred precinct.

The slim, bewigged Kelly, a Black man with lips slathered orange-red and face smeared in matte makeup the color of blueberries, opens with one of his Andy Warhol studies--25 Cats Name SAM and one Blue Pussy, Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, or How Can You Dance When Every 7 Minutes Human Conversation Lapses into Silence. The music's percussive impulses call for crunchy, flattened, expansive movement and primitive perambulation that might get a body somewhere but only after struggle and never too far. The understated poignancy of the solo suddenly gives way to an outburst of Streisand in full brass: "Gotta move, gotta get out/Gotta leave this place, gotta find some place/Some place where each face that I see/Won't be staring back at me/Telling me what to be and how to be it...."

Bulgarian-born Kassabova follows with her charged, staccato Letter (to Ed). Every single movement in this solo says, "I am here for this. I am here to give myself away." With her shaggy head of dark hair and her tendency to strain joints and muscles to the max, she reminds me of a rock star at the height of abandon.

The program continues with Be Still, My Heart, a duet by Sara Pearson--the dancers first met while performing with Pearsonwidrig Dance Theater--and the ferocious joint project, Super WE. Embracing virtuosity, Kelly and Kassabova match skillful precision to intense expression. They are compelling, must-see performers.

Music, played live by Aleksei Stevens
, and Tuce Yasak

's lighting design bring nature indoors with dense cacophony and subtle legerdemain.

Super WE continues through Saturday, January 31 with performances at 8pm.

Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

I love you Raja Feather Kelly

Raja Feather Kelly
has been doing some more thinking
about Andy "Drella" Warhol.
(photos by Andy Toad)

The name of this winning and humorous ensemble piece from dance artist Raja Feather Kelly might be The Feath3r Theory Presents: Andy Warhol's DRELLA (I Love You Faye Driscoll), as it appears in promotional materials, or The Feath3r Theory Presents: Andy Warhol's DRELLA (I Love You Faye Driscoll) Black by Popular Demand, as it appears in the black-on-pink program notes. Either way, you get the picture: a mashup of race, gender, the cult of personality, runway models in white face, drag and house culture, karaoke, mad juggling of archetypes and stereotypes and ebullient ballet steps performed in dirty ankle socks. Let's call this craftily messy beauty Drella for short--that name itself a shortening of Dracula and Cinderella and an invocation of Warhol.



For a few additional clues, I snipped this passage from the artist's statement on the beloved Faye Driscoll's Web site:

I am obsessed with the basic problem of being "somebody" in a world of other "somebodies," and in my work I attempt to pull apart this daily performance of self. I do this by enacting it in excess, blowing it up to the extreme in order to reveal its edges and create more space, more possibility for who we can be.

Likewise, Raja Feather Kelly is about creating more space and, from the looks of things, he knows exactly what to do with it.

Last call to see The Feath3r Theory in Drella at The Invisible Dog in Brooklyn is tonight, 7:30pm. The show runs 70 minutes, and there's not a dull minute among them.

Seating is very limited. Check here for possibilities or, if you can't get in, do as some neighbors did last night: Catch it all through the center's storefront window!

Drella afterparty tonight at 9pm (free and open to the public). Information here.

The Invisible Dog
51 Bergen Street (between Smith and Court Streets), Brooklyn
(map/directions)