dancing the evidence of Palestine

Foreward by Maurya Kerr
I first met and was in process with Leila over ten years ago when she was an undergrad at the University of Minnesota, where I was a visiting guest artist creating a work. She was full of a singular and irrefutable blazing vitality that has only illumined and entrenched in the last decade. While I’ve been aware of her presence in the world, we didn’t see each other in person again until this last September when we were both in MN for the McKnight commissioned SOLO performances, she as a 2022 McKnight Dancer Fellow performing a solo by Beirut-based Lebanese Baladi dancer/choreographer Alexandre Paulikevitch, and I as a choreographer for 2023 Fellow Demetrius (ImagineJoy) McClendon. I was blown away by her solo, Shuhada: a-live-streamed un-ceased Fire. B l o w n a w a y. Leila and the solo / Leila in the solo—brave as fuck, vulnerable, unflinching, stunning, devastating, imperative. Leila’s work on the following pages truly lives as an alternatively embodied companion to her live performance. In my role as ODC Theater’s 2024/25 Resident Curator, I am honored and humbled to bring Leila and Shuhada to ODC’s late-summer State of Play Festival 2025. I hope to see you there.

This article appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of In Dance.

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).