About this Event
KeiyaA makes music that excavates, discovers, and excavates again, all in the service of exploring life’s most beautiful and daunting questions: What do we owe to ourselves and others? How do the things we desire hint at the shape of our souls? What does it take to achieve peace of mind, especially when the world is intent on denying you of it? Why won’t you love me when I’m so damn easy to love?
Her debut album, Forever Ya Girl, was genre-defying work of simultaneous self discovery and self determination. The production, which pulled from R&B, jazz, electronic music, and soul, was as limitless as the lyrics. As keiyaA grappled with these questions, she wove together genres and crafted a sound all her own: Her gossamer vocals cascaded and floated across slippery funk bass lines, pools of synth and reverb, and samples of Black cultural touchstones like Nina Simone interviews and snippets from Beyoncé tracks.
This rich, complex music resonated deeply with fans and critics alike, landing keiyaA Pitchfork’s “Best New Music” designation, spots on year-end best-of lists from The New York Times, NPR, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian, and praise from artists including Solange, Jay-Z, Earl Sweatshirt, Blood Orange, Kimberly Drew, and Moses Sumney.
The success that Forever, Ya Girl brought keiyaA was thrilling yet confusing. As she experienced this newfound recognition, keiyaA felt a sense of cognitive dissonance between the excitement of becoming a celebrated, rising artist and the reality that she had yet to fully process the traumatic life phase she had experienced preceding its release. “In that intense decade, I dropped out of school in Chicago, and moved to New Jersey with an ex,” she says. “We had a toxic dynamic and broke up, but it was the kind of significant relationship of your early twenties that changes your whole personality. Off the heels of that I lost my job and the pandemic happened. Then my music comes out and my career goes up and suddenly it’s like, ‘Oh you guys think I’m important? You care what I have to say?’ I was trying my best to perform this version of what I thought people wanted from me: lowercase k, capital a keiyaA.”
When the excitement of touring and playing the record died down, keiyaA’s depression symptoms came back “in a way they hadn’t since I was a small child.” In the coming months, she wanted to be active and productive, but found herself watching TikToks and playing video games to experience a sense of the world outside. “I really wanted to go back to being that girl that’s like ‘I’m at Metrograph and I’m on Criterion Collection. I’m putting books on hold at the library and I’m reading all my holds,’” she says. “But I would just be scrolling and playing video games and watching easy YouTube essays where people presented information in an accessible way. So much of that album is about me being numb and void while another part of me is like, ‘Yo, are you not seeing and witnessing this?’ I realized life is a constant cleaning and dirtying and cleaning and dirty. There’s no destination and there’s no group of people that are hashtag healed.”
It was in this environment that keiyaA crafted the music on hooke’s law, her highly anticipated, years-in-the-making sophomore album. Sonically, you can hear the video game influence in the synths and drums, which sometimes approximate traditional chip tune sounds. The arrangements are also meandering, heady, and kaleidoscopic, the sound of life documented as it unfurls, not as you preordain it to be. Emotionally, the influence of this period of time spent at war with herself is evident in keiyaA’s willingness to acknowledge discomfort, and in her embrace of multivalence, of allowing all of her selves to sit together in harmony, friction, or confusion. In a world fixated on singularity, resolution, and efficiency, self acceptance of this nature requires work. It takes reframing, learning how to view yourself not as a project to be fixed or optimized, but a person who is complete in all of your contradictions.
This work of interrogation and radical imagination is what keiyaA does best, not just with hooke’s law, but with its prelude, milk thot. The experimental play, which she performed at The Abrons Art Center in Manhattan, finds her confronting and battling her shadow self. Bathed in a hazy purple glow and cloaked in a cascading white gown, keiyaA transforms her bedroom into a hallowed site of ritual, discovery, and mourning. The play is beautifully designed, dense with meaning, and poignantly enacted. But the most compelling part is not just the skill of the actors nor the potency of their world-building. What keeps you enthralled is the potential of the whole conceit’s undoing.
milk thot is a play that is constantly deconstructing and remaking itself. It begins with keiyaA asleep in her room. In a typical play, the backing band provides unacknowledged diegetic sound. But keiyaA immediately brings them to the foreground by asking them to stop playing so she can go back to sleep. She then breaks the fourth wall again by asking the audience what we are doing there. She spends the rest of the play battling with her shadow self, a carefree and emboldened persona who encourages her to quit her job and stand up for herself more. It’s a suggestion that is so startling to non-shadow-self-keiyaA that she ends up trying to K*ll her shadow, until the whole play resets and a new day dawns. As you watch her fight herself, the idea of a static, wholly knowable character disintegrates altogether. The audience watched in the play keenly aware that anything could happen next. The boundary between actor and audience is permeable, time is nonlinear, and you cannot assume the idioms and conceits of plays you have seen before will apply here.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Gallery5, 200 West Marshall Street, Richmond, United States
USD 23.18
