Solo(ish) works

shuhada
alive-streamed
un-ceased
fire

A new work choreographed by Alexandre Paulikevitch in collaboration with Leila Awadallah. Commissioned through the McKnight Dancer Fellowship (2022) premiering at SOLO September 20-21, 2024.

This work is a living archive, a record, of the things that have been said, and the resonance on our bodies.

YISSH: Yalla Imshi, shway shway habibi

YISSH (Yalla Imshi, Shway Shway Habibi): 15 minute solo of an Arab American woman witnessed in multiplicity - rather than homogenized, simplified, and vilified - created and performed by LeilAwa.

This solo investigates blunt sonic and embodied juxtaposisition of clashing tension between American citizenship and Palestinian roots, examining the perspective of American media and politics with the voices of prominent activists. It complexifies orientalist imagination by pairing the violence of dehumanizing and over sexualising Arab female bodies with a reclaiming; celebrating iconic cultural music and joyful sensuality in traditional dance. It invokes life into a traditional palestinian thobe, draws on the deep rooted relationship between a body and the fruits of homeland. The piece cumulates in a dance of resistance, where the symbolic keffiyeh scarf is used in offering reverence to the March of Return taking place in Gaza.

YISSH is activism, dance, identity, media, and tradition compounded.

Performed (2019-2024):

• PAGE Theatre / Za’atar - Cedar Tree Project in Winona MN January 2019

• Pangea World Theatre / Mother Goose Bedtime Stories - Minneapolis, MN February 2019

• Kilburn Theatre / MENA Variety Show - Minneapolis MN - April 2019

• Lebanese National Theatre / International Dance Festival - Tyre Lebanon July 2019
  *received award for Best Performance

• Sharm El Sheikh Theatre Festival for Youth / SITFY - Sharm El Sheikh Egypt - November 2022
  *received award for Best Performance

• Bethlehem International Performing Arts Festival / BIPAF - Bethlehem, Palestine - September 2023

• Honoring Gaza’s Martyrs / Public Functionary, Minneapolis MN - December 2023

• Viroqua Community Theater - Viroqua WI - April 2024

TERRANEA: Hakawati of the sea

(WORK IN PROGRESS SOLO) Choreographed and performed by Leila Awadallah. This piece was created while in residence at the Arab American National Museum (Dearborn, MI) and at Amalgam (Beirut, Lebanon) along with research through the Jerome@Camargo residency program (Cassis, France).

TERRANEA: Hakawati of the Sea is an interdisciplinary dance piece about the Mediterranean Sea––a site of rupture where geo-politics, forced flight, and nationalist violences swirl with notions of dreaming, longing, loving, migration, and the kind of hope that moves bodies across waves. TERRANEA imaginines a new mythology around a hakawati (Arabic storyteller) sea spirit named Terranea, who gathers drowned souls and their stories. Through her fluid body we enter an other realm, reimagining a collective unbound Mediterranean homeland under the sea.

• Performed:
  Body Watani: soul speak (2020); a drive-in dance performance at the Arab American National Museum
  
  
  

Becoming spoons (a study)

This site specific improvisation score was the culmination of 2 weeks at the Hinge Artist Residency in Fergus Falls, MN performed live for members of the community (recording done separately). becoming spoons reflects on confinement and escape, where gravity is noticed as a force that both tethers the body to a place and also allows for one to imagine its' opposite; to experience the sensation of floating away, briefly. (2022)

becoming spoons was developed with the Palestinian prisoners in mind, who escaped Gilboa Prison by digging a tunnel with spoons. This piece is in dedication and celebration of their brief intimate reconnecting with their land.

Musical pieces are from 'Call to Prayer' an album by Ghalia Benali, Romina Lischka and Vincent Noiret.
Developed and performed by: Leila Awadallah
Recording by: Matty Bedrosian
Edited footage by: Leila Awadallah

Orange peel of the century

(WORK IN PROGRESS) Choreographed and performed by Leila Awadallah. This piece was created while in residence at the Camargo Foundation through the Jerome@Camargo residency program.

LeilAwa becomes a politician who figures out how to bring peaze to the middle eazt with the orange peel of the century. Alhamdulilah. A mess of US Media / politics / delusions manifesting in a dance theatre work that destroys its own presentation through sarcasm, absurd games, enduring dark visceral traumas, deconstructing subconscious cellular patternings and embarks on a soft and fleshy journey of departure from the red, white, and blue chaos cocoon into Mediterranean sea waves swimming towards some manifestation of sincere connectivity. A piece born inside the belly of the beast.

Performed (2020):

• Art & Resistance: Palestine and Western Sahara - Winona, MN

• Friends Of… - Minneapolis, MN

RAS ABU AMMAR IS HERE

Choreographed by Leila Awadallah // Performance by Leila and Noelle Awadallah // in collaboration with Lamia Abukhadra. This piece was created through the Daring Dances residency at the University of Michigan

RAS ABU AMMAR IS HERE: 40 minute piece choreographed by LeilAwa; a collaboration between three Palestinian-Americans - Leila Awadallah, Noelle Awadallah and Lamia Abukhadra investigating 1) impact on the body when a home is demolished 2) stolen land in Palestine and Turtle Island (USA) and 3) monster magic: sensual manifestation of grief, empowerment, and release. This work sample flickers through sections of the piece which are strung together in a fractured mosaic with an overarching intention: put pieces back together. The choreography utilizes shimmies of Raqs Sharqi and footwork of Dabke in reference of Arab folk forms while reimagining their creative context.

Created in response to home demolitions in Palestine, the title cites my families’ ancestral village Ras Abu Ammar - destroyed in 1948 along with the stone house my jiddi (grandfather) built. “IS HERE” proposes home remains in cellular embodied memories for generations to come. 

Performed (2019):

• The Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, MI (November 2019)

Available for performance

A head and a house

Choreographed by Leila Awadallah with guest artist Noelle Awadallah

Performed:

• Lebanese National Theater / Arts Festival - Tyre, Lebanon (2019)

• Bryant Lake Bowl / Break the Silence - Minneapolis, MN (2018)

• Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) Art Is - St. Paul, MN (2018)

Almost but not asfar

Performed:

• Beirut International Platform of Dance (BIPOD) - Multaqa Leymoun - Beirut, Lebanon April 2017

Available for performance

Screening pt. 1

Performed:

RAWI Arab Literature Conference - Minneapolis MN - 2016

American College Dance Festival Regionals - Steven’s Point Wisconsin 2016

• Art for Social Change - Minneapolis MN - 2016

SCREENING PT. 1 is a dark and playful work addressing Arab stereotypes in U.S. Hollywood and media. Inspired by the research of Jack Shaheen, it examines HOW Arabs / “Arabs” show up on our television screens.

Available for performance.