Film by Leila Awadallah // Dancing Artists Leila Awadallah, Noelle Awadallah, Alexandrea Eady, Sharitah Nalule // Music Jamal Awadallah // Poetry Leila Awadallah // Videography Leila Awadallah, Jamal Awadallah, Mat Lochner // Graphic Design Zaynab Mourad //Translation Zaynab Mourad
A dream-like meditation on CLEARING SPACE, CLEARING THE BODY from invasive toxic greens, and breathing into the greens of healing. Emerging from the historic and present vines weaving Palestinian and Black solidarity, we channel rage, ancestors, and peace; through dance we deepen our witnessing and listening to one another.
The military and state violences we / our relatives face on Occupied Turtle Island and Occupied Palestine are persistent in our daily lives. This dance is born out of listening and learning from histories and our surroundings. We learn again and again… We learn from MPD150, a grassroots evaluation of policing in Minneapolis that documents 150 years of police brutality, what a police-free Minneapolis could look like. We learn that Minneapolis police participate in training on stolen Palestinian land that equates innocent civilians to terrorists. We learn that the state has an agenda against our bodies. We learn that this administration / American empire will continue funding and supporting the illegal apartheid on indigenous Palestinian land and produce propaganda about the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ where Palestinians are murdered and imprisoned daily. We learn that this administration / American empire will continue failing to enact justice against the police who murder without consequence and that Black bodies face 500 years of discrimination, mass incarceration, and racially motivated violence. We learn that with no justice there is no peace. We learn, we learn, we learn…
To clear space. Witness. Listen.
We learn that our collective resistance is facing a harsher backlash, and this teaches us that it is working. A threat, growing like a vine, crawling out and up and all over, all at once.
So let us go into green, healing, dreaming, screaming, breathing. Release, re-root, reconnect, and continue to dismantle the beast from underneath. All of us, ancestors of past and future. We.
MN BASED JUSTICE / ACTIVISM / ARTS
MPD150: Enough is Enough ; read or listen to the audio book on the 150 year report on MPD
Minneapolis Sanctuary Movement
MIZNA: Arab / SWANA Arts in MN
Dance & Social Justice: Ananya Dance Theatre
ON PALESTINE: INFORMATION / ACTIVISM / HUMAN RIGHTS
Palestine Grassroots News Source: The Electronic Intifada
Ethically Visit Palestine & Engage: To Be Here
Move American: Screening + Discussion: 8 p.m. EDT Thursday, Oct. 22, 2020
Presented as part of AANM’s Arab Film Series Online, Leila Awadallah, Palestinian American choreographer and current AANM artist-in-residence, co-hosts an online dance screening event as one of 7 filmmakers presenting in DISCO RIOT’s Move American series, followed by a discussion with Leila Awadallah, DISCO RIOT Artistic Director and Co-Founder Zaquia Mahler Salinas and AANM Director Dr. Diana Abouali.
Leila Awadallah | LeilAwa is a Palestinian, Arab American choreographer, performer, and film maker whose work unfolds at the intersections of re-rooting into ancestral lineages and awakening embodied memories, critiquing and subverting stereotypes and orientalist tropes, sensual empowerment, contemplations of loss, and utilizing performance as a space to examine politics, foreign policy, settler-colonialism, and address global human rights injustice. LeilAwa received a BFA in Dance + minor in Arabic Language and Literature from the University of Minnesota (2017) and was a performer with Ananya Dance Theatre (ADT) for the 5 season: ‘Work Women Do’ series (2014-2019). Under the mentorship of Ananya Chatterjea and alongside the community of ADT, LeilAwa’s artistry grew within this intersectional women of color space where social justice, cultural activism and performance merge. LeilAwa studies folk dances, performs, and teaches / choreographs in Beirut, Lebanon and Bethlehem, Palestine. She has presented work across multiple venues in the Twin Cities and was a founding member of the Kelvin Wailey dance trio. LeilAwa was a Springboard 20/20 fellow (2018), a Daring Dances fellow (2019), and a recipient of the Jerome@Camargo Residency (France 2020) and the Arab American National Museum Artist Residency (Michigan 2020).
Website: leilaawadallah.com // Instagram: leilawa.aa