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).
Original instrument construction: Alex Leeds
Thought partner in text development: Renée Copeland.
Thought partner in staging the work: Emma Marlar.
Created through a commission by the McKnight Dancer Fellowship (2022-2024).
Accessibility at ODC
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Land Acknowledgement
ODC is on the ancestral lands of the Ramaytush People in Yelamu. We pay respects to elders past and present, who are still here and part of our community. We recognize that regenerative land management is not new, but is a continuation of practices from Native cultures and from our own ancestors. It is our responsibility to steward the land with care, as our elders did before us.
Arts Access Tickets
ODC offers a limited number of free and/or lower-cost Art Access tickets to every ODC presented performance. For most performances in B. Way Theater, twenty tickets are allocated to the Arts Access tiers. These additionally subsidized tickets, available on a first-come, first-serve basis, are reserved for those for whom price is a barrier. Please contact boxoffice@odc.dance if you or your organization is interested in underwriting the cost of additional Arts Access tickets.
About the Theater
ODC Theater exists to empower and develop innovative artists. It participates in the creation of new works through commissioning, presenting, mentorship and space access; it develops informed, engaged and committed audiences; and advocates for the performing arts as an essential component to the economic and cultural development of our community. This 170-seat venue is the site of over 150 performances a year involving nearly 1,000 local, regional, national and international artists.
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