ODC Theater: Leila Awadallah: shuhada alive-streamed un-ceased FIRE

Leila Awadallah: shuhada alive-streamed un-ceased FIRE
Saturday, August 2nd, 2025 at 7:00pm
Sunday, August 3rd, 2025 at 7:00pm, ASL Interpretation
25-30 minutes
West Coast Premiere

ODC is offering a group discount of 10% off orders of 6+ tickets. Use code ODC10 at checkout. For groups of 8+ use code SOPGROUP8 for $15 tickets.

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.

The witness becomes evidence. The dance becomes an archive of what has happened, engraved inside a body that will not forget. The voice becomes a weapon. Hear: The noise, the thingspeoplesay. Hear: The silence, the things that cannot be said. The absurd scroll on the phone. See: The hypocrisy on the tongue of leaders, rotting inside the belly of the beast. See: The bodies ripped in pieces, each day more shuhada.
shuhada’ شهداء martyrs
What dance can be made and performed during a genocide?
PALESTINE EXPOSED EVERYONE.

A work choreographed by Alexandre Paulikevitch in collaboration with the performer Leila Awadallah.

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).