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 resituates himself as a glamourous, 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.
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. 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. Over the past decade he 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. 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.
