Live Artery: "HYSTERIA"

In HYSTERIA, New York Live Arts 2019-2020 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist Raja Feather 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. HYSTERIA premiered at New York Live Arts in December 2020 as both a performance and parallel installation in the Ford Foundation Live Gallery.

Raja Feather Kelly is also an Obie, Bessie, and three-time Princess Grace Award Winner and the choreographer for the 2019 and 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winning Drama’s Fairview and A Strange Loop.