Events

Event details

As part of programming associated with the installation Bear Witness: Honoring Gaza’s Martyrs, Leila Awadallah will perform a solo dance performance titled YISSH (Yalla Imshi, Shway Shway Habibi). Leila will give a brief talk following the performance.

When: December 19, 2023 at 7pm
Where: Public Functionary, Northrup King #247, 1500 Jackson Street NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413
Accessibility: The gallery is ADA accessible

YISSH (Yalla Imshi, Shway Shway Habibi) is a portrait of a time traveling woman who experiences different fragments of Palestinian realities. Flowing through a terrain of imagery, as well as sonic and embodied pairings, YISSH investigates the tension of having both American citizenship and Palestinian roots. The performance reaches across diaspora to learn to love a homeland from far away and deep within the body. YISSH culminates in reverence to the Great March of Return which took place in Gaza in 2018, when this piece was originally created.

Bear Witness: Honoring Gaza’s Martyrs and its programs are presented by Mizna, UMN Students for Justice in Palestine, UMN Palestine Studies Working Group (soon to become Faculty for Justice in Palestine), and Public Functionary and supported by the Headwaters Foundation.

This installation is on view through December 31, 2023

Find more events and resources for Gaza at our page, Toward a Free Palestine

About the artist

Leila Awadallah is (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, and film wanderer based between Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce and Beirut, Lebanon. Her research in dance centers movement that activates relationships to land / place / peoples, rooted in the context of her own skin as a body and soul that holds indigenous Palestinian, Arab-American, SWANA, Sicilian and mixed Mediterranean worlds and ways. She is the Co-Artistic Director of Body Watani (body-as-homeland) Dance project and practice in collaboration with Noelle Awadallah.