MRAC’s Grantee Spotlight showcases the impact of MRAC’s funding across communities.
This September, we’re highlighting the work of Noelle Awadallah, Co-artistic Director of Body Watani Dance.
Disciplines: Dance/Choreography/Farming
MRAC Grant Program: Next Step Fund, 2024
About This Grantee
نوال عوض الله Noelle Awadallah (she/her) is a Palestinian American dancer, improviser, choreographer, and farmer residing in Mni Sóta Makoce (Minnesota). Currently the Co-artistic Director of Body Watani Dance with her sister Leila, Awadallah has been dancing with Ananya Dance Theatre for more than 5 years. She maintains a daily pursuit of a “land-based life.” This idea comes from the Arabic word صمود (sumud), a Palestinian ideology guiding steadfast perseverance and rootedness in land.
For Awadallah, sumud drives her commitment and artistic approach to multidirectional attention, storytelling, resistance and liberation practices, strategies of futuristic imagination, and reciprocal relationships with land and nonhuman beings.
Farming recently appeared in Awadallah’s life through dance. For the past two years she has been farming at the Women’s Environmental Institute (WEI), a queer women–owned organic, sustainable farm in North Branch, located near the Hogan Wanke Kin River (St. Croix). Through many years of spending time in the dancing body as memory, homeland, and an access point for building a relationship to place in diaspora, her work is currently reaching towards the physicality of caretaking land.
Touch to touch, skin to soil. She has found herself in the wonderment of ways farming and dancing—two laborious body-centered practices of relating and tending—talk to each other.
Awadallah is a recipient of the Diyar Theatre مسرح ديار Residency in Bethlehem, Palestine (2019), Hinge Arts Residency of Career Development (2020), and MSAB Creative Individuals (2023). She has presented work at Performathon Pique Art Space, the Great Northern Festival + Mizna at First Avenue, Pancake House Gallery, The Southern, Red Eye Theater, Arab American National Museum, and Links Hall. She recently premiered her first solo work, Returned Arrived, at Red Eye Theater’s NW4W Festival. She also holds a BFA from Columbia College Chicago (2018).
Awadallah is a 2024 Next Step Fund recipient. MRAC’s Next Step Fund is made possible thanks in part to generous support from the McKnight Foundation.
Impact Statement
Since moving to Mni Sóta Makoce in 2019, I’ve been eager to witness how the growing communities I’ve found myself held in interact and build spaces together, for each other. MRAC is a vital part of the community that supports the imagining and experimentation for new ways of being together, building, living, and sustaining our artistic voices here in Mni Sóta Makoce. As I see it happening around me, I hope to continue to be a part of a dance community that connects across disciplines, supporting Arab/SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) artistic voices and spaces, and imagining new ways of relating through community and art in the Twin Cities.
Thanks to the Next Step Fund, I plan to travel to Palestine to learn more about farming in my ancestral homeland and to continue my improvisational dance explorations, allowing time for both practices to meet each other in a way that I haven’t yet experienced. I’ve been in embodied practice here in Mni Sóta Makoce for 5 years now, learning lessons of this land under my dancing feet.
I’m curious to learn how the stories of this land relate to the stories of the land I come from. What are the similarities and differences of how we approach, tend to, love, and be in relationship to land? How can those lessons be applied to the dancing body? Part of my love for farming is slowly showing up in the small, intimate moments of being able to pass on my knowledge of caring for the land, growing food, and the lessons that plants can teach us when we listen. This support from MRAC feels like the beginning of personal research that I hope I can pass on to my community, especially other Palestinian folks in diaspora, remembering that there’s space for connecting to the lands we come from, through the generosity of the land that we stand on now.
A lesson from the plants I’ve learned is that we must commit to keeping our culture, stories, and practices alive by engaging in them and passing them on, even in the midst of our erasure. I feel grateful to be here and for this support towards remembrance and affirmation of Palestine as a place, people, and culture with a right to the future.
Our liberation is absolutely intertwined with each other and with the land. I feel grounded by the words of Palestinian American poet George Abraham, quoted in a Time magazine article published earlier this year:
Poetry can’t stop a bullet. Poetry won’t free a prisoner. And that’s why we need to do the political organizing work as well… But if we can’t imagine a free liberated world in language, how can we build one?
—Noelle Awadallah, Dancer, Choreographer, Farmer, and Co-artistic Director of Body Wantani Dance
Stay Connected
MRAC’s Grantee Spotlight is a series to showcase the impact of MRAC’s funding across communities. Stay connected with this month’s grantee:
نوال عوض الله Noelle Awadallah
Body Watani
@bodywatani on Instagram
Upcoming Events
After the Last Red Sky
A new work from Body Watani
Premiere: November 1–3, 2024
The Southern Theater
1420 S. Washington Ave.
Minneapolis, MN