Artistic Statement 

"The ImPulsTanz utopia is a pressure cooker and a playground: you move, watch, make, party, repeat. It’s everything everywhere all at once. Every year I arrive with questions — How do you survive this much stimulation? Why are you here? What are you hunting for? How do you turn those questions into work that asks more of the world than it takes? Or just ride? I have been asking those questions since my first visit as a danceWEB scholar in 2009. I prepare for them seriously, and I never fully answer them — which, honestly, is the festival’s gift.

I’m honored to return to ImPulsTanz in 2026 as the danceWEB mentor. My modus operandi for the scholars is simple and stubborn: Question Deeply. Require No Return. Accept All Residuals. That’s not a checklist so much as a practice. Ask the messy, uncomfortable questions. Give generously without expecting tidy reciprocity. Sit with the leftovers — the failed experiments, the small collapses, the gifts you didn’t plan for — and see what they reveal.

My work sits at the intersection of choreography, devised practice, queer aesthetics, and the politics of spectatorship. I read bodies as scores and surveillance as choreography: how we are tracked, mirrored, doubled, loved, mocked, and remade. Recently I’ve been thinking harder about the ways our digital doubles change rehearsal rooms and stages — how bodies become data, how attention is rationed, how care looks in an age of algorithms. These ideas shape the practical tools I bring: protocols for attentional hygiene (how to enter a festival without becoming exhausted), rituals for decompression and reflection, and low-tech “score-to-action” templates that help a late-night impulse actually become a project in the world.

With danceWEB scholars I teach methods as much as aesthetics. We invent, we fail, we document. We translate wild questions into repeatable practices: micro-residencies that end with concrete next steps; collaborative documentation that honors process over product; consent-forward performance scores that center safety and risk together. I push for modes of generosity — radical feedback that helps rather than wounds, exit rituals that let you leave a room intact, and archival habits that turn ephemeral experiments into legible trajectories.

This is also about politics: who gets seen, who gets mirrored, who gets the mic. We interrogate camp and glamour as strategies of refusal; we test sci-fi and doubleness as ways to imagine new embodiments; we treat “spectatorship” not as passive consumption but as a muscle to be exercised. I want scholars to leave ImPulsTanz full of invention and also with tools for sustaining their practice — not burnout, but appetite; not answers, but better questions; not spectacle, but practice.

In short: I am here to help artists move from curiosity to craft, from provocation to protocol. We will generate wild propositions and then ask: how do we make this legible, safe, and shareable? How do we turn a feverish 5 weeks into a lifetime of practice? I am dedicated to radical questioning, to infinite propositions, and to service — to making space where complexity and contradiction become the fuel for new work.

Question deeply. Take nothing for granted. Leave with more hunger than you arrived with."

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 latest work, BUNNY BUNNY, premiered 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.