March 27th and March 28th, 2026
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
After the Last Red Sky is a dance performance and ritual gathering to hold the weight of—and imagine healing for—the Palestinian sky. A sky where violence hovers and falls on Palestinian bodies. A sky carrying a folk belief of a whale eating the lunar-eclipsing moon. A blood-red sky. In this work we ask what it means to dig down into the rubble of decades of attacks on Palestinian Aliveness to re-member our sky. To move through grief and rage together in community, so we don’t collapse under its weight.
This new work by Body Watani Dance project is created by a trio of Palestinian dancers and musicians: Leila Awadallah, Noelle Awadallah, and Tarek Abdelqadar. They engage in an evening-length embodied scream at the sky that demands change from below it; calling on community to gather; falling through a work that is transforming and warping traditions of Arabic dances and music into sorrowful, joyful, rageful reclamations of life.
Bios:
Leila Awadallah is a dancer, choreographer, and community collaborator residing in Minneapolis and sometimes Beirut, Lebanon. Her artistry holds Palestine at the center —rooting her dancing body amongst the movements resisting settler colonial occupation and engaging in visions/actions that invoke/demand CULTURAL INTIFADA. Awadallah is the Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance in collaboration with her sister Noelle Awadallah. Body Watani is the name of their project, but also their practice. An artistic research methodology looking at creating movement from a Palestinian diasporic lens that reflects on how homeland lives in the body. Awadallah is a DanceUSA (2025), McKnight (2022), Jerome Hill (2021), and Daring Dances (2019) fellow. Body Watani’s original works: TERRANEA (2023) and After the Last Red Sky (2024) have toured and performed around the US, in Palestine (Dar Jacir, 2024) and Lebanon (Hammana Artist House, 2022).
Noelle Awadallah نوال (she/her) is a Palestinian-American choreographer, improviser, and farmer residing in Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis). She is the Co-Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance alongside her sister, Leila Awadallah. She has been dancing with Ananya Dance Theatre for 6 years and holds a BFA from Columbia College Chicago. Awadallah’s daily pursuit of a “land-based life” emerges from sumud—a Palestinian ideology guiding steadfast perseverance and rooted relationality to homeland. Her artistic approach in upholding these ideologies extend from her commitment to multi-directional attention, embodied storytelling, resistance and liberation practices, grief and rage, futuristic imagination as strategy, and tending to her reciprocal relationships with land and non-human beings. She has presented work at Red Eye Theater, MOVO, Mixed Blood Theatre, Pancake House Gallery, Links Hall, The Arab American National Museum, and The Southern Theater. She is currently a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow (2025-2028). She also farms at Cimarron Community Farm and lovingly co-tends the Grief and Rage Circle for Palestine.
