DANCE WORKSHOP: Embody Palestine

Subversive Festival and the Free Palestine Initiative are pleased to invite you to Leila Awadallah’s dance workshop Embody Palestine. The workshop will take place on Saturday, May 30th at Mala dvorana at Pogon Jedinstvo from 10.00 AM to 1.00 pm. Please register here for attendance and kindly contribute with a minimum of 10 euro donation on spot.

EMBODY PALESTINE explores how we can move our bodies together inside a communal reflection and activation of our relationship/s to Palestine. Through somatic meditations, improvised movement, found gestures, and Dabke folk dance, this workshop is a space held to embody questions through physical inquiry: How do we move with the emotions stirred by injustice and hold the weight of stories, grief, and rage collectively? How do we find dances that spark energy towards ongoing protest, solidarity, and embodied liberation?

EMBODY PALESTINE is a container to grapple with how dancing can bring us closer to Palestine, both the place itself and the one embedded within (all of) us

More info:

• No previous dance experience is needed, just a willingness and curiosity to move your body.
• The workshop contains two types of dancing: 1) movement invitations, guided improvisation and theatrical prompts interpreted by participants 2) dabke disruption where we will simple footwork from this folk dance and ways to activate it as protest.
• This is a space for anyone who deeply cares about Palestine and desires to physically move through ideas, activations, and reflections in a collective space. Come to explore strategies for dancing stories and moving through emotions with community.

EMBODY PALESTINE is created and led by Leila Awadallah of Body Watani Dance Project.

Leila Awadallah is a dancer, choreographer, and community collaborator in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce and sometimes Beirut. She is the Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance project alongside her sister Noelle Awadallah. Her artistry holds Palestine at the center —rooting her embodied research in practices that disrupt settler colonial narratives while invoking/conjuring/demanding Right of Return and cultural INTIFADA. Leila has received multiple fellowships: DanceUSA, McKnight, Jerome Hill, and Daring Dances. Her artistry is meaningfully impacted by her years working with Ananya Dance Theatre, Theater of Women of the Camp (Lebanon) and El-Funoun (Palestine).