In this episode, NCCAkron's Executive/Artistic Director, Christy Bolingbroke, enters the 'studio' with Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Leila and Noelle Awadallah of Body Watani. As daughters of Palestinian refugee lineage, Body Watani investigates dance rooted in Arab and SWANA movement languages. Their first evening-length work, TERRANEA, was performed at the Arab American National Museum, Hammana Artist House, Red Eye Theater, Links Halls, and Al Madina Theater.
Jennifer Edwards: Thanks for joining us Inside the Dancer’s Studio, where we bring listeners like you closer to the creative process. Inside The Dancer’s Studio is a program of the National Center for Choreography in Akron, Ohio. This podcast was recorded as an ongoing documentation practice with NCCAkron visiting artists in 2024 and 2025. In this episode, NCCAkron's Executive/Artistic Director, Christy Bolingbroke, enters the 'studio' with Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Leila and Noelle Awadallah of Body Watani. As daughters of Palestinian refugee lineage, Body Watani investigates dance rooted in Arab and SWANA movement languages. Their first evening-length work, TERRANEA, was performed at the Arab American National Museum, Hammana Artist House, Red Eye Theater, Links Halls, and Al Madina Theater.
Christy Bolingbroke: So my first question is for each of you: How or when did you know you wanted to be a choreographer?
Leila Awadallah: Leila speaking, when I was in my undergrad at the University of Minnesota, we had composition classes and I just found a deep fascination in shaping momentum and metaphor and story. And at the time I was also doing a minor in Arabic language and literature. So I got really interested in taking, you know, what I was learning in that department. Partly Arabic language as a calligraphy and choreographic shape and tool. And then partly the content of Palestinian literature and Arab American literature and taking those strong imageries and making choreography with that. And I, in my time in undergrad, found it as a really clear path to, towards expressing all the things in that were moving through my body. After I graduated, I felt pretty certain that, I wanted to keep doing that and I, at that time, didn't see a company or a project that was working with Arabic folk dances or content or politics in the way that I really wanted to embody and perform. So it was also like, okay, there, there, I don't see anyone around me doing this, so let me do this. And it started very much as a solo practice because I didn't have any resources. So I feel like I spent years choreographing solos on myself until I started to get a little more opportunities and resources. And then that's when I often was inviting in Noelle to come be a dancer in my choreography and other artists in my community. And it just grew kind of naturally,
Christy Bolingbroke: That resonates with so much of how I think about, those solo explorations, you know, the image out in the sand or during the pandemic. Certainly the carving out of the calligraphy, um, that you were showing in your body. And I appreciate too you reminding me, dancers and choreographers are not just dancers and choreographers. And so being able to consider the syntax of Arabic literature as well as the syntax of dance making, you've dropped another little, little nugget there for me to hold on to. But for you, Noelle, because this has become somewhat of a, family business, was it a foregone conclusion? Or did you have your own moment?
Noelle Awadallah: It wasn't until more recently that I kind of started claiming the title choreographer. In this college I went to, in, , Columbia College Chicago, I was really immersed in like improvisational practices and so to claim improviser felt more comfortable because I was also, I think and still am, rather than finding the right movement, more interested in like spatial, energetic, narrative space-making. So it felt like, um, an improvisation, improvisation like offered me that where there was more openness rather than in choreography where I feel like it's more shaped. So yeah, I think more recently did I start being like, Okay, I am a choreographer 'cause I am making dance and making moves (laughs).
Christy Bolingbroke: Yeah.
Noelle Awadallah: But I think improviser and choreographers sit together for me.
Christy Bolingbroke: Mm.
Noelle Awadallah: And I want to let them be like, , exchangeable, like they both have information inside of each other.
Christy Bolingbroke: Mm-hmm. They're different tools. Different…
Noelle Awadallah: Yeah.
Christy Bolingbroke: Different practices. And I love just hearing from each of you how you each bring a different perspective that maybe not always as visible in the finished product. But I, I know one of your shared perspectives is the idea of Body Watani as a research container for your movement making. Can you talk some more about that and, and how that container maybe is a starting place with an idea?
Leila Awadallah: I think it, it comes beautifully from what Noelle was even just saying and I'll come back to that, but like Body Watani, Watani means “My homeland” in Arabic. And so we started to think about how can we make dance that doesn't bind us or bound us to too much to a certain, like this is contemporary dance, this is modern dance, this is Arabic dance, whatever. Like how do we actually rewind and say, you know, my body is my homeland, and if that is true, then all of my teachers are here in this land and all of my ancestors are here. And our desire to connect with Palestine through folk dance is just as strong of a choreographic and creative presence as is my previous job as a scuba diver and Noelle’s work as a farmer. You know, like all of it can be. empowered to swirl together and hold our work and our research. And that also holds, yeah, our, our teachers and our mentors in ways where we're sifting through like, Okay, where is my, where's my body in all of this? And we, we call it a research container because for us it's very much about learning, or rather than like making movement, finding the movement and finding the form that trickles out and that reveals itself, through improvisation, through folk dance study, through, you know, conceptual and durational investigation. And when we hold that container, it is through a Palestinian diasporic lens. But we also named it Body Watani as an invitation to be like, just because, you know, this is my body watani and this is how I lead this, another collaborator can walk in the room and say, well, my body watani is saying this, and like, maybe they're not, you know a Palestinian or Arab lineage. Watani, the Arabic language does set a context, but like, are one of our previous works, um, yeah, there's like Sharitah who has roots to Uganda and Erica Jo with Mexico and Nakita with Lebanon. And we, we, you know, don't like bound people by land and nation, but those cultural stories, those lineages, come into the room and something that Body Watani really holds is like the mixed bodies, the diasporic bodies, the refugee bodies, the people who homeland, the idea of homeland is charged and I think there's something different between home and homeland.
Christy Bolingbroke: Hmm.
Leila Awadallah: Like I have heard a lot of dance talk about like, oh, body- home, and I think that's interesting, but in the Palestinian reality homeland is more about what we're thinking about, like the land itself, the people, the place. For some that might be, you know, a luxury that we have a land that's clear to us, that we know we are sourcing from and we know we are rooted to. And, but then in another way, it's like I mean even, I mean, you could open that up a lot of directions of what it means to be in relationship to Palestinian land right now. And for the past 75 years, and, and the future.
Christy Bolingbroke: So poetically and beautifully put both from your personal experience, but that invitation that you also talked about is extended, right? The idea of any sort of land ownership, displacement, these are also, I think, charged experiences that inform people's relationship to sense of place community, wealth, belonging, regardless what their own lived backstory and ancestral history is too. And, and this is one of the reasons that I think we talked about in our process, like the privilege of getting to work with artists like yourself because you are helping us process the world that we all live in. Because these are very complex issues and considerations too.
Leila Awadallah: They're complex and they're urgent, but they're also very simple because ultimately we have settler-colonialism and we have indigenous resistance. And we've seen that story play out over and over, even in the modern-day United States where you have like people doing their land acknowledgements. Like, what does it mean? What are we acknowledging really? Like, okay, we have to face and embody the settler-colonial takeover of this land, of Turtle Island and what happened to the indigenous people and what is still happening and what kind of futures we wanna be a part of. I think that Palestine, when you see it as a relative, it's different. But when you, when you see the relative in that, it becomes very simple. That is also part of Body Watani’s invitation is like this is our liberation practice. Like you can join us and you can come with us and you can weave your solidarity with us. But like, we are also disentangling and, and aiming to disrupt the settler-colonial legacies in our bodies that are also, you know, like we are also born on Turtle Island, so we have settler colonial presence here too. So nobody's body is like simple and boxed in. Like we have multiple layers of truth that we're like…
Christy Bolingbroke: Hmm.
Leila Awadallah: …Sifting through and dancing is such an amazing sight to do that because the body is the material.
Christy Bolingbroke: Yeah.
Leila Awadallah: So like we have a lot of knowledge as dancers about how to disentangle from systems of violence and create paths towards liberation and yeah, it's not as easy as it sounds, but we do have knowledge around that bodily interrogation, reclamation. All these things.
Christy Bolingbroke: You're reminding me that dance and choreography is not just movement for movement's sake, but it can actually be a means to create a movement, right? Whether that's the practice of liberation. Understanding that practice, it's one of the reasons I think, one, for me personally, one of the most unsatisfying conversations after a show might be when an audience is like, but what's it about? And you're like, Oh, the about-ness is just, you know, that's too confining a container. It's the how and the practices. And I got to witness some of that with your collaborators. It was a very spacious experience. What I observed were very dedicated ways of how you brought people into rehearsal, how you exited rehearsal a little bit. Can you talk a little bit more about like, kinda what you look for in collaborators and how you, maintain those practices of the ways of working together? Noelle, do you wanna start?
Noelle Awadallah: What I've learned as we've, from our first work together that was Terranea into After the Last Red Sky and all the in-betweens, I feel like relationship is the most important thing to either have with our collaborators, or build and sustain with our collaborators. So the rituals that take place in the entrance of the space and then the exit of the space feel like the, the holders of sustaining relationship. Also I feel like our collaborators are people that we admire, of course, inside the work they're doing with us and outside in the world, in their own work or in their own way of living or their own way of being. Most of them are dancers. Even our, like scenic designer Laichee Yang is also a dancer. And José Luis, who's our stage manager and writer, also a dancer. So I feel like there's this also point of connection that we have in the body and knowing the body and being in the body.
Leila Awadallah: I'll just add like, I mean, when we've worked with other dancers because it's something, or like to-be-dancers in the project, it's come from a lot of who shows up and, let’s us know they are interested.
Christy Bolingbroke: Hmm.
Leila Awadallah: You know, like who, who reaches out and says like, I'm interested in the work you're doing and who comes to things. And then from there we're like, this person wants to be here as much as you know, we would love to work with them. That's when (Bolingbroke: Hmm) we invite someone because we, we've never been like, Oh, you know, let's go find the, you know, the strongest dancer in this way and la la la. No, it's, it starts with the relationship. It starts with mutual interest, and we love the very different ways people move. So, and the very different ways people think. So we wanna work with collaborators who are gonna show up with an agency, you know, to be like, I don't think that we should do this. What about this? I mean, even our lighting designer, Tony, he just went off and lit everything and didn't ask. But then when we looked at it, we're like, Yes, because we've been talking for months, you know?
Christy Bolingbroke: Mmmm.
Leila Awadallah: Because we have worked with him in other contexts and trust his intuition. So I think it, the, actually, the simplest word is intuition. There's a lot of intuition when it comes to like, what is the alchemy of the group as a whole? And will we all be able to feel right doing this work together? And do the collaborators know the stakes of this work too?
Christy Bolingbroke: Mm.
Leila Awadallah: Because we are especially recently with After the Last Red Sky. I mean, it is a work being made in a real-time genocide.
Christy Bolingbroke: Mm-hmm.
Leila Awadallah: And we are holding that in our bodies, in our creative process, in our mind, in our hearts, everything. And not to say that our collaborators aren't, they are too, but they're, you know, they're, many of them aren't Palestinian and they don't have family on that land.
Christy Bolingbroke: Right.
Leila Awadallah: And so how does it, how do you also call the people into the room to meet that, that urgency and that depth with you.
Christy Bolingbroke: Mm.
Leila Awadallah: And to trust them. And we really trusted the people in that space. And we had to because it's such a time where we need to protect ourselves and our work.
Christy Bolingbroke: Yeah.
Leila Awadallah: Um, the, the small moments of violence or frustration become really big, really fast in this, in this time period, so I think we were careful, too.
Christy Bolingbroke: You're reminding me, NCCAkron, even as a distant collaborator an an added host and container for this process. Think about all the conversations that we had, right? For on a monthly basis, almost a year before we were actually in a physical space together. Hearing you reflect on that with lighting, your lighting designer and stage manager, you know, there's intuition, but the practice of having those conversations that are maybe a little less product oriented. It’s setting, a shared, fertile ground between you to be able to then when you're like, Great, we have five days in this space and we're gonna have to make some big things. And who knows what else is gonna be going on in the world, in people's personal responses, what else they're managing because we're dealing with human beings. Any creative process can benefit from also fore grounding the humans and the relationships first, so that if someone is, did have a difficult moment that they could say, Hey, this is what's going on and I'm here, but maybe I'm at 80% today because 20% of me has to be also feeling something else, and I, I feel we had some of those conversations and moments in our own dialogue as well. Speaking of intuition though. I'm curious, whenever there's a co-artistic leadership, you have your own familial shorthand as well as creative shorthand. You’re, you know, like, you know each other even more intimately. How do you open up that process or translate it to make space for other people in the creative process?
Leila Awadallah: Noelle, do you have thoughts that come up for you on that?
Noelle Awadallah: Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's interesting because our first work, Terranea had a cast of, including us four other….
Leila Awadallah: Six.
Noelle Awadallah: …including us six performers, dancers. And then we went into, After the Last Red Sky, which was just Leilla and I as the dancers. So I feel like we kind of did this thing backwards where we started with choreographing and sharing on other people, and then we were like, Oh, what we learned from that moment. Although it was like beautiful and, and like thick and full. We need to go back and like just make a dance for Leila and I (Bolingbroke: Hmmm), so that we can practice what it means to choreograph on each other and with each other and for each other. Leila and I do have similar dance histories and also different dance histories, but it just, the way it, and maybe it's familial, maybe it's sister, maybe, I don't know. It's our shared lineages. Like…
Christy Bolingbroke: Community. Yeah.
Noelle Awadallah: Community. Like the way we…
Leila Awadallah: Culture.
Christy Bolingbroke: Culture.
Leila Awadallah: Yeah. Ananya, Ananya Dance Theater.
Christy Bolingbroke: Mm.
Noelle Awadallah: Yeah.
Christy Bolingbroke: Shout out you both had performed with Ananya Dance Theater, which is a whole other form. Yeah.
Noelle Awadallah: The way we can like transfer and transfer knowledge from our brains to our bodies, to our own bodies and to the other person's bodies. There's like, for some, for all those reasons, it's easier.
Christy Bolingbroke: Hmm.
Leila Awadallah: We are learning to spend time in the studio, just the two of us, both in process and in planning and in making so that when we do walk into the room, we're kind of in tune with each other and our visions. And then when we're actually in the room, I feel like that's when the most visible, different strengths (Bolingbroke: Hmmm) arrive. We just set a work on Wayne State University students, which was awesome. There were days when I was like walking in like, Okay, we're gonna do this phrase and then we'd get, I’d get stuck and I'd do something weird, and Noelle would look and be like, No, don't do that. Like, that's wrong. And then she'd kind of go in the corner and then come out like this, and then we'd be like, Yeah, that's it. You know? So I think we lean into different strengths and then, you know, I’ll like, like Noelle will lead an improv improvisation task and give them notes and shape it, and then I'll kind of sit and watch and be like, That person should spin. We thrive with other collaborators in the room, like in our process. 'cause I think it helps us get out of our sister-sister…
Christy Bolingbroke: Mm-hmm.
Leila Awadallah: …dynamic where we also live together and we also have a lot of the same friends and we do a lot.
Christy Bolingbroke: Yeah.
Leila Awadallah: So like it kind of shakes up the, the default energy that we can lean into.
Christy Bolingbroke: Mm.
Leila Awadallah: And I love also, like when our musician Tarek comes, like, he changes the whole vibe 'cause he brings another rhythm and we're both bouncing off that.
Noelle Awadallah: We liked the vibe to change. We're open to that. (Leila Awadallah: We want it to change.) We want everyone to come in and shift the energy in the room, which is helpful.
Christy Bolingbroke: What I heard was a lot of ebb and flow and this idea that one maybe moving and the other one may be still and noticing, and that's receiving information differently and only gonna metabolize and turn it back out in a different way. And that I would imagine is a kind of instinctual choreography, of who needs to step up when, to work with that.
Leila Awadallah: Yeah. And then, I mean, and then that's hard when we're making a duet. And we are the performers.
Christy Bolingbroke: Right.
Leila Awadallah: So that's when we bring in our friend Emma Marler, who, um, is a brilliant, like collaborator, close friend, long-term friend, and also works dramaturgically with us.
Christy Bolingbroke: Mm-hmm.
Leila Awadallah: And because she knows our work so well that she can sit on the outside and be like, and bring up things that Noelle and I couldn't notice as much as we wanted to. So I think it's also like knowing when you, you really need help um with that, with that witness and that metabolizing like what is going on here? Because we really value knowing it in our own embodied, you know, (Bolingbroke: Yeah) sense of the work. But we still do want to care for the craft of what it means to put that on stage and what it means for people to sit and watch in their internal rhythm, which won't match ours. There's an interesting thing with dance where like the, the dance internal rhythm and idea of how long something should be and the outside, which, I mean, everyone's on a different page anyway.
Christy Bolingbroke: Sure. Yes.
Leila Awadallah: Like trying to work more on the craft of, 'cause sometimes we get into a somatic, more of a somatic textural…
Christy Bolingbroke: Almost meditative and.
Leila Awadallah: Yeah. Yeah. So then, so then how, how deep, how far do you go with the consciousness of an audience in the room? And, and that is where we also, yeah, ask for help. Having a dramaturg in the room is so valuable for dance making, and I have. Not experienced it as much as I wish.
Christy Bolingbroke: Yeah, it's still very nascent as an idea too, and any of the dramaturgs that I've met work vastly different. For better or worse. It's like there's no one way of doing it, but we still have to figure it out. I do wanna focus on the, on the physical movement, the steps, the choreography for a second, because we've talked about certainly relating to folk dancing and then your own experience inside different contemporary forms as well as improvisation. That, to me, is something that is very 21st century. How do you both navigate the idea of like when to go to something known like a dabke, to when to give yourself the, the space to find something that you might not even be able to put a name on yet as far as a step in the choreography itself?
Leila Awadallah: What's really important about Body Watani’s work is a certain amount of clarity of where are we speaking about and why? Putting dabke in our work, both as a folk dance practice that, you know, we're still learning, 'cause we didn't grow up there doing dabke (Bolingbroke: Hmm) and we haven't had access to that dance as much. So I feel like when I'm doing dabke, it's like I'm both finding, you know, I feel like we're finding our body memories, culturally and ancestrally, but also we're relearning and trying to understand what dabke is to us. And a lot of the previous year was using dabke as a way to connect with Gaza and to send vibration to Gaza.
Christy Bolingbroke: Mm-hmm.
Leila Awadallah: And so we feel it's also very sacred, very sacred, very much about learning and craft and rhythm. And so, that like roots us…
Christy Bolingbroke: Mm-hmm.
Leila Awadallah: …to place and people. But then at the same time, we are fascinated by the spacious and undefinable terrain of what the body reveals. We were making a piece about trying to heal the sky.
Christy Bolingbroke: Mm-hmm.
Leila Awadallah: And making gestures to like, how would we heal the sky from everything that's happened. And that brought up a lot of like playful and strange. Like I felt like I was like. Shine. Like they're like screwing in a light bulb and cleaning off this light bulb of a star…
Christy Bolingbroke: For the sky. Yeah. I love the idea of you screwing in a star in like a light bulb (Leila Awadallah: Yeah) in the sky. That's amazing.
Leila Awadallah: And it just like happened when we were, improvising about how could we heal the sky and like all these funny gestures came up and became something else. And then we, I mean, we'd even dis- totally disorient from the content and be like, Okay, let's just play the yes-no game where I do a move and you say yes or no, and you have to keep just going on impulse.
Christy Bolingbroke: Hmmm.
Leila Awadallah: Like, okay, okay, so it's not this move, is it this move? Because I think we're also trying to like, keep ourselves, I don’t know, like keep the possibility wide open. And then the dance, Noelle talks about this really well, like the dance tells us what it is, rather than us always telling the dance what it should be.
Christy Bolingbroke: Hmm. Maybe that's some of the improviser listening. What would you want to add, Noelle, about movement generation?
Noelle Awadallah: Yeah. I think like Leila said, working in the context and the stories of what we're working in, which is a very real place with Palestine, with real people and real stories and real violence happening. We're also working from a diasporic, a diasporic place of like, yes, the land and the people and the culture looks really clear and feels clear, but then there's also like the ancestral, the body, the memories, the unclear spaces that feel fragmented and floaty and obscured and yes and no. And I don't know. And maybe, and I think that that's where the, the improvisation part really comes in. 'Cause like ancestral memories and finding things in your body and knowledge that isn't clear with words and doesn't feel useful with words, really, like it does live in the body. So the only way to, I think, be with that unknown, with that fragmented part is to generate from a place of unknown, of improvisational with maybe a score or maybe an idea or a hope of discovery.
Christy Bolingbroke: I'm curious if you have ever received a piece of advice or an elder, an ancestor said something to you that kind of keeps you grounded to continue doing this work, or if you would have advice to offer yourself in your own words, to anyone who's listening, who's also navigating a creative life.
Noelle Awadallah: With the imagination that we have access to, like, we can make our own spaces and make our own performances that aren't funded by something. And we can say yes to ourselves and yes, yes to ourselves, and yes to our own ideas and make it happen. And we don't always need someone else to say yes to us in order for us to do the thing. Although it's maybe more labor or maybe it's not. Maybe you can, I mean, there's so many ways of doing things and I think. Just say yes to yourself first before waiting for someone to say yes to you is important.
Christy Bolingbroke: Huge. I love that. And so poignant. I think always, but especially right now. Yeah. Leila, do you wanna co-sign or offer a piece of advice yourself? (Laughs)
Leila Awadallah: Oh yeah. Totally co-signing. We, there's been multiple times where we were like, let's just make our own show in our backyard. Let's just go perform by the lake Bde Maka Ska. Like, we need to do something now. Like, so I, those are really foundational to like even getting our momentum flowing, um, when we didn't have output. There is, um, a very clear piece of advice that I received from a very special human, Georgiana Pickett, who was, who passed (Bolingbroke: Yes) this last year and who was assigned to me as a mentor through the Jerome Hill Fellowship, Fellowship.
Christy Bolingbroke: Oh my gosh, what a gift.
Leila Awadallah: I know. Such an amazing person. And like every time I got on those calls, it was like a flood of um, of, of so much. And, and one of the things she told me that I'll never forget and that I always repeat is that, um, I was, I was sharing with her how stressed I was like, I have to teach and I always plan, you know, for like five hours to teach a one hour class and it doesn't make sense, but I'm so nervous. And she said like, what's your favorite fruit? And I said, A fig. She's like, Okay, a fig doesn't, you know, plan or prepare to taste good. It just grows that way. And because it's, you know, because it's growing like that, it's always delicious. Like it's always gonna be delicious and it knows what it is and it's, you know. I don't know, like the logic, she said it so much better, but she said, you already are (Bolingbroke: Mm-hmm) all the things, you already have all the information you need. Just be a fig, just go there and be a fig. You're already a fig. And when she said that, I was like, you're right. I'm a fig. So every time, yeah, even before I teach, when I'm getting nervous, I just say like, I'm a fig. And, um, she left me with that like, (Bolingbroke: Ah), that gift of soothing my soul that I call on every time I feel nervous.
Jennifer Edwards: Inside the Dancer’s Studio Conversation Series is produced by NCCAkron and supported in part by the University of Akron, the University of Akron Foundation, the Mary Schiller Myers Lecture Series in the Arts, and Audio-Technica, a global audio manufacturer with U.S. headquarters in Northeast Ohio. Our podcast program is produced by Lisa Niedermeyer of Handmade Future Studio. Rahsaan Cruz is our audio engineer, with transcription by Arushi Singh, theme music by Floco Torres, and cover art by Micah Kraus. Special thanks to Laura Ellacott, Sarah Durham, Christi Welter, Nakiasha Moore-Dunson, and Dante Fields. To learn more about NCCAkron, please visit us online at nccakron.org. And follow us on Instagram or Facebook at NCCAkron. We hope you enjoyed this episode, and we encourage you to subscribe on your favorite podcast streaming platform by searching for Inside the Dancer’s Studio. Thanks for listening, and stay curious.