Artistic Statement 

“The ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival is a kind of utopia. You dance, watch, engage, create, party, release, repeat. In some ways it is a Darwinian feat of survival. How do you find the balance of so much stimulation? Why are you here? What are you looking for? How might you walk away with a feeling of inspiration and a hunger to contribute to the world as your best artist self? How do you assess what feels like an artistic state of the union? How do you safely enter, take advantage, give yourself fully, and transform your queries into action (or not) by the time you leave? These questions are what I have asked myself every year at the festival since my first visit as a danceWEB scholar in 2009. While I take the preparations of these questions quite seriously, never ever have I answered them… this is the gift the festival has offered me. Having been invited back under so many different facilities at ImPulsTanz, I am truly honored and excited to be back as the danceWEB mentor in 2025, and to offer this modus operandi to the 2025 scholars. Question Deeply, Require No Return, Accept all Residuals. Engage and interact, behave and reflect, create and accept. How do we think more, feel deeper, and create new pathways for this to happen in all that you do, and to then find the best means to express, share, and create experience out of your findings. From language and behavior to performance, Do we create culture or does culture create us? Why do we come together and how do we fall apart? The danceWEB scholars are a devised ensemble group documenting not what but how and with this how…how do we desire, how do we need. Where do our different ‘how’s’ parallel, intersect, cross, divide, circle, circumvent, reverse, loop, intertwine, and end? and then back 2 back to what? What does this mean to you? I am curious and dedicated to being of service to radical questioning and infinite propositions.”

Biography 

Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer and director, and the Artistic Director of the feath3r theory (TF3T), a Brooklyn-based dance-theatre-media company that he founded in 2009. Over the past decade, he has created 19 evening-length works with the feath3r theory to critical acclaim, most recently The Absolute Future, which premiered April 2024 at the NYU Skirball Center. Other notable works include: WEDNESDAY (New York Live Arts), and the UGLY trilogy (Bushwick Starr, New York Live Arts, and ImPulsTanz/Chelsea Factory). TF3T’s forthcoming work, BUNNY BUNNY, will premiere in 2025 at the Invisible Dog Arts Center. 

With his company, Kelly’s mission is to broaden the space for unheard voices and repressed histories, to bring into the theatre those sometimes left out, and to use theatre to provoke much-needed public conversations. His focus is in challenging his audience and its creators to collectively interrogate – and celebrate – its shared relationship to human empathy and personal ethics as expressed in and distorted by popular media. The work of TF3T synthesizes absurdity, existentialism with dance, visual media, fashion, and narrative theatre into virtuosic, expansive, radical and surreal pop-culture phenomena. 

Raja has received dozens of awards, fellowships and honors including a Princeton Arts Fellowship (2023-2025), a Mellon Foundation grant (2021), an Obie Award and Outer Critics Circle Award honor for choreography for A Strange Loop (2020), an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019–2021), a Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts (2019–2020), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019–2021), a New York Dance Performance Bessie Award (2009), a Creative Capital Award (2019), three Princess Grace Awards (2017-2019), 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), a Creator-in-Residence at Kickstarter (2018), and a Choreography Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU (2017), a Bessie Schonberg Fellowship at The Yard (2017), the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), an ImPulsTanz Festival danceWEB Scholarship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellowship (2016). He was featured on the cover of the February 2020 issue of Dance Magazine.

Kelly has performed with Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group, David Dorfman Dance, Kyle Abraham|Abraham.In.Motion, and zoe | juniper.
Kelly has held teaching positions at universities nationwide, including Yale, Princeton, The Juilliard School, and New York University, among others.

His off-Broadway choreography can currently be seen in the musical TEETH at New World Stages, written by Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs. Kelly choreographed the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical A Strange Loop (Lyceum Theatre, premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon) and Fairview (Soho Rep, Berkeley Rep, TFANA), both winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He was hailed by The New York Times as the choreographer who “can make your play move” for his extensive work on and Off-Broadway, including the musical LEMPICKA. Recent credits include Bunny Bunny (UC San Diego–the first production outside of TF3T for which he was the writer, director, and choreographer), We’re Gonna Die (Second Stage Theater – his directorial debut), SUFFS (The Public Theater), and Lempicka (La Jolla Playhouse). Frequent collaborators include Lileana Blain-Cruz, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Sarah Benson, and Michael R. Jackson. Other theatre credits include choreography for Skittles Commercial: The Musical (Town Hall), The Chronicles of Cardigan and Khente (Soho Rep), If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka (Playwrights Horizons), The Good Swimmer (BAM), and The Listeners (Oslo Opera). He recently choreographed Scenes for an Ending in collaboration with musician Emily Weeks for the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company.

He was born in Fort Hood, Texas and holds a B.A. in Dance and English from Connecticut College as well as a certificate in Psychoanalysis and the Creative Arts from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute where he was as an Ecker Fellow.

Go to danceWEB Scholarship Programme.