ACCESSIBILITY
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Artist Conversation: Raja Feather Kelly with SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY
DESCRIPTION
Raja Feather Kelly, a dance and performance artist and choreographer, is joined by artist and educator SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY for a discussion of the digital adaptation of Kelly’s performance HYSTERIA for TBA, a project that builds on Kelly’s previous work and continues his examinations of pop culture, Black queer subjectivity, alienation, and consumption. Kelly and holloway first met and recorded some of their conversations as part of PICA’s Spring 2021 Creative Exchange Lab residency program. Now, they reunite for this virtual TBA Institute event!
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
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).
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SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY is a new media artist and poet. Known for using sound, video, and performance, HOLLOWAY shapes the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like The New Museum (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. SHAWNÉ was a 20-21 Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Queer Theatre & Performance Resident and is currently teaching across the New Arts Journalism and the Film Video New Media and Animation departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
www.shawnemichaelainholloway.com
ABOUT TBA:21 INSTITUTE
TBA Institute is a series of free, public programs that connect artists and audiences through deep discussion and critical conversation and serve to illuminate the ideas and inquiries behind festival artists' projects. Through the Institute, artists share their processes of creating and collaborating; their forms of engagement with communities and publics; and the social, political, cultural, and aesthetic contexts and concerns surrounding their work. Through guest artist lectures, panels and dialogues with invited moderators, and interactive workshops, the TBA Institute offers a range of ways to engage more deeply with the festival and with each other.
Please note that some TBA Institute events will be virtual (streamed online), while others will be held in-person for a limited-capacity, masked audience/participant group in the PICA Pavilion (back lot of PICA). We know that not everyone is able to gather in place right now. As such, most in-person events will be recorded and made available and accessible online shortly thereafter. Some of these recorded videos will be captioned.
Please refer to the TBA Festival website for a full Institute schedule, specific information about each event, accessibility, and other details.
Please note that a few events will require pre-registration, with instructions provided on the event webpage.
All virtual events (streamed online) will be captioned via auto- or CART captioning.
Some virtual events and some live, in-person events will be ASL-interpreted. These will be noted on each event listing on the TBA website.
All of the above information regarding access will be updated as confirmed.