Body Watani

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 moon. Performances and community offerings explore 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 together in community, so we don’t collapse under its weight.

This new project by Body Watani Dance engages a quartet of Palestinian dancers and musicians born in the U.S. Midwest in an evening length embodied scream at the sky that demands change from below it. They transform and warp traditions of Arabic dances and music into sorrowful, joyful, rageful reclamations of life in a “Palestinian Rock Show."

Body Watani Dance is held by Leila and Noelle Awadallah, Palestinian American sisters who research dance in body-as-homeland practice in Minneapolis. 

Caretakers of the Land/Land Acknowledgement: Mni Sota Makoce is the ancestral land of the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples. 

Estimated Artist Fees: 

• 1 artist for 2 days: approximately $900 
• 1 artist for 5 days: approximately $2,000 (travel fees only paid once) 
• 4 artists for 5 days: $8,000 
• 7 artists for 5 days: $14,000