Dance Magazine’s cover story profiles Raja Feather Kelly ’09

Award-winning dancer and choreographer Raja Feather Kelly ’09, who serves as the artistic director of the New Brooklyn Theatre and leads his dance company, The Feath3r Theory, is profiled in the cover story of the February 2020 issue of Dance Magazine.

Journalist Brian Schaefer calls Kelly a “visceral and cerebral artist” whose work is “smart, a bit splashy and utterly singular.”

“The witty, wordy works he creates … [are] known in the dance world mostly for a series of droll and whimsical shows inspired by Kelly's obsession with Andy Warhol,” Schaefer writes. “Recently, though, he has gained more attention for his contributions to several important plays—like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fairview—where he meticulously distills human behavior.”

Kelly is currently participating in a two-year residency at New York Live Arts, with a premiere set for late 2020, and a three-year residency at HERE Arts Center, with a new work scheduled for spring 2021. He’s also heading into a laboratory period with the new musical Lempicka, about a famous Polish artist, which has its sights on Broadway next season. And this month, he is both choreographing and directing the off-Broadway play We're Gonna Die, by Young Jean Lee.

At Connecticut College, Kelly studied dance and English, and, Schaefer writes, “discovered the avant-garde European dance-theater artists who inspired him: Jan Fabre, Maguy Marin and Wim Vandekeybus. (Jerome Robbins is also a hero.) And he found a mentor in the choreographer David Dorfman '81, who invited Kelly to join his company.”

“I graduated at 12 p.m. and was in rehearsal at 2 p.m.,” Kelly told Schaefer. 

Read more about the artist a New York Times theater critic dubbed “the hot dance master of the moment” in this month’s issue of Dance Magazine.