There are many reasons and many ways to write a love letter. ‘Scenes for an Ending’ is a love letter to the past, to a friend, to a lover, to the future, it is touch, it is poetry, it is and is not a dance. Whatever you see is real, it’s actually happening. You will, as Emily and I did, and as this incredible company will do every time they perform-

SCENES FOR AN ENDING

Choreography by Raja Feather Kelly
Music Composed by Emily Wells
Costumes: Melissa Younker
Lighting: Hanna Bartnicki 
Performed by Ririe Woodbury Dance Company

In collaboration with musician and artist Emily Wells, Scenes for an Ending–Raja Feather Kelly’s third work for Ririe Woodbury– is about relationship; the way in which two or more people or groups regard and behave towards each other. 

As part of an ongoing collaboration with Ririe Woodbury and an ongoing collaboration with Emily Wells, Raja Feather Kelly brings together his desire for understanding how people come together and why they fall apart, with his inexhaustible appetite for reinterpreting history and unearthing empathy through popular culture. 

In Scenes for an Ending, Kelly matches his dance/theatre style of virtuosic behavior with Wells’ textured orchestral pop from her latest album - Regards to the End- inspired by the AIDS Crisis; climate change, and the Art that was and is sown from these pandemics. 

Scenes for an Ending is about the relationships you will see on stage, and the relationships you will not; your relationship to this, and our collective relationship to the places, people, feelings, history, the world often forgotten.

ABOUT EMILY WELLS

Forging a bridge between pop and chamber music, composer, producer, and video artist Emily Wells builds songs from deliberate strata of vocals, synths, drums, piano, string and wind instruments. Her evocative music (described as “visionary” by NPR) and performances (called “quietly transfixing” by the New York Times) impel listeners to be attuned. Wells’s latest release, the ten-song album Regards to the End, explores the AIDS crisis, climate change, and her lived experience watching the world burn. A work of radical empathy, Regards to the End foregrounds the power of art, critique, and care to connect and perhaps redeem us.