How do we decolonize our bodies with Palestine as our guide? 

In this 2 part workshop BWD invites you to move through an offering that holds space for anticolonial grief and rage (Palestine and beyond), and to explore strategies of physicalizing solidarity and healing that can weave our sacred roots and stories in nonverbal ways. We will guide you through finding gestures, improvisation, and simple movements. All bodies* who want to PHYSICALIZE SOLIDARITY with Palestine and to invite your body-homeland to weave solidarity with the Palestinian struggle are welcome and encouraged to attend! No dance, or performance experience necessary and although we will engage in moving the body there are no specific physical expectations. 

This two part workshop focuses on movement research sessions based on the memories, presence, and futures of homeland in our bodies. We especially focus on diasporic, refugee, and mixed people realities - with a specific lens towards Palestine. 

* Dance inherently engages the body, but this workshop is spacious for you to approach it as you need. If you have accessibility questions please email bodywatani@gmail.com 

* The workshop is cumulative, so if you come please arrive on time and plan to stay for the entire duration of the work. 

* This is a sacred, anti-zionist space. 

Coming September/October 2024 Body Watani Dance (BWD) is a project that first and foremost engages bodies in movement pathways and practices that build relationships to ancestral rooting across land and sea, decolonial unravelings and rebellions, and cultivating resistance through physical embodiments that range from poetic~metaphoric~dreamscapes to protest~resistance~liberation. Our work is Palestinian, engaging the traditional, experimental, magical and urgency of Palestinian realities. The space we cultivate is a container with soft edges with intent towards mixed bodies, refugee, immigrant, and diasporic stories, and anti-zionist allies to the Palestinian cause. 

Leila Awadallah is a dancer, choreographer and film wanderer based between Minneapolis, Mni Sota and Beirut, Lebanon. She is the Co-Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance, reflecting the relationship between her dancing body with her occupied Palestinian homeland in both name and practice. Leila is a McKnight Dancer (2022), Jerome Hill (2021), Daring Dances (2019) and Springboard for the Arts (2018) Fellow. Her solo YISSH, originally commissioned for the Cedar Tree Project (Winona 2019) has also been performed at festivals in Lebanon, Egypt and Palestine. Leila has a BFA in Dance and a minor in Arabic Language & Literature from the U of M.

Noelle Awadallah نوال (she/her) is a Palestinian American improviser, choreographer, and farmer residing in Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis). She is the Co-Artistic director of Body Watani Dance and is in her 5th year of dancing with Social Justice based dance company Ananya Dance Theatre. Her practice explores her mixed Palestinian body and relationship to the land of Palestine through multidirectional attention/intention, radical imagination of the senses, land based practices, and embodied storytelling through an improvisational framework.