State of Play Festival 2025: Free Dance Show on Palestinian Stories at ODC (Aug 2-3)

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Leila Awadallah’s duet with a unique, self-playing musical instrument confronts and distorts the tropes of the Arab, feminine body often perceived as a seductive other or used as a threat against the State. The music continuously builds into a drone-like soundscape that drives Awadallah’s experimental Baladi movement. While she moves, she speaks Palestinian stories and reflections on the work’s themes.

Leila Awadallah ليلى عوض الله (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, and community collaborator based in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce, and sometimes Beirut, Lebanon. Palestine roots her within an artistic compass revolving inside Arab American contexts, conjuring mixed Mediterranean ways and waves. In 2021, she founded Body Watani Dance, which she holds with her sister Noelle. Body Watani is a body-as-homeland research practice asking how dance emerges from ancestral intuition, cultural folk experimentation, land-based attunement, and SUMUD in service of PALESTINIAN ALIVENESS and cultural INTIFADA. She is a McKnight (2023), Jerome (2021), and Daring Dances (2019) fellow. Her artistic path was meaningfully impacted by her time working with Ananya Dance Theatre and Theater of the Women of the Camp (Beirut).

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