Raja Feather Kelly | the feath3r theory
the feath3r theory (TF3T) is a New York City–based dance-theatre-media company founded in 2009 by Artistic Director, choreographer, director, and writer Raja Feather Kelly.
A collaboration of performers and designers, TF3T creates highly theatrical work at the intersection of dance, theatre, media, and popular culture. Described by Time Out New York as combining “audacious maximalism” with “witty, cerebral deconstructions of pop culture,” Kelly’s work has been called “clever, campy, pop-culture obsessed, and endlessly resourceful” by The New Yorker.
At the center of the feath3r theory’s work is a persistent question: How does popular culture teach us how to be human?
Through performance, TF3T examines how the images, stories, technologies, and entertainment we consume shape the ways we understand intimacy, desire, race, gender, queerness, success, failure, violence, and belonging. Borrowing freely from film, television, social media, celebrity culture, melodrama, fashion, and the internet, the company turns familiar cultural material into something strange enough to be examined again.
The mission of the feath3r theory is to broaden the space for unheard voices and repressed histories, bring into the theatre people and experiences too often left outside of it, and use performance to provoke necessary public conversations about empathy, personal ethics, representation, and our responsibility to one another.
TF3T’s work is funny, excessive, intimate, unsettling, rigorous, and deeply human. Popular culture is not simply referenced; it becomes material for investigating who we are, how we arrived here, and who we might become.
Since its founding, the feath3r theory has created and presented work with institutions including New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, The Invisible Dog Art Center, Danspace Project, MASS MoCA, and the National Center for Choreography at Akron, among others.
