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Uprising Theater & Body Watani Dance

  • Links Hall 3111 North Western Avenue Chicago, IL, 60618 United States (map)

An offering for community: Invited-Workshop and interdisciplinary performance lab on Palestine, weaving solidarities and political perspectives through storytelling.

We call together artists, dancers, actors, writers, activists, and storytellers to meet within the question of Palestine and performance. To explore ways of taking politics and theatrical texts into verbal & nonverbal embodiments of resistance, belonging, and personal political presence. This is an invitation for Palestinians, Arab Americans, BIPOC, immigrant & diasporic folks, refugees, and our allied communities to gather and contemplate solidarities held in our bodies and shared space.

During this workshop / creative lab, participants will encounter Palestinian scholar, academic, and artist Iymen Chehade’s work through lectures and human rights discourse that invokes discussions on the topic of Palestine. Led by Uprising Theatre’s Maren Rosenberg and the Body Watani Dance Artistic Directors Leila & Noelle Awadallah, we will ask how to transform these texts into artistic research through movement, voice, and writing.

The question is to explore how the specifics of politics and measured, recorded violences can be humanized through performance; asking; How do numbers in reports become stories of the verbal and nonverbal realm that can invoke empathy and conversation with audiences? What does it mean for our bodies to hold the stories of another, and what is that responsibility? How to find the resonance between bodies who experience different yet entangled histories/presences of oppression?

During the workshop, we will pair together small groups of participants across disciplines to bring these discussions into a performance research; performance understood as anything from the stage, to the street, to the gestures of the everyday. Where we contemplate our own body in relation to Palestine, to each other, and to the interconnected struggles our communities face.

WORKSHOP (rough) OUTLINE

6:30 - 6:45 Welcome
Introductions
6:45 - 7:15 Iymen lecture
(Maren, Leila & Noelle: firsthand stories in Palestine)
7:15 - 7:30 Group discussion
Q & A time
7:30 - 7:40 Break
7:40 - 8:00 Tools & Strategies: Shaping Text w/Maren
8:00 - 8:20 Embodied research
Movement Making w/Noelle & Leila
8:20 - 9:00 Groups: Creative Lab
9:00 - 9:30 Share