Body Watani

Makers Series Artists Body Watani present:
Film Screening of After the Last Red Sky: performance procession at Dar Jacir

Friday, June 17, 2026 | Doors at 6 PM | Film at 7 PM
Pillsbury House + Theatre | Minneapolis, MN

A Film Screening + Community Conversation

Join us for a screening of After the Last Red Sky: performance procession at Dar Jacir, a film documenting Body Watani Dance’s 2025 performance procession and residency at Dar Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem, Palestine.

Presented as part of Pillsbury House + Theatre’s 2026 Makers Series, this gathering brings together film, ritual, movement, and conversation to reflect on grief, survival, land, memory, and Palestinian aliveness.

Doors open at 6 PM with coffee, snacks, and community gathering before the screening. Following the film, artists Leila & Noelle Awadallah will join a post-film conversation facilitated by Anniessa Antar.

About the Film

After the Last Red Sky is a dance performance and ritual gathering created 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 folk stories, memory, grief, and resistance.

In summer 2025, sister duo Leila & Noelle Awadallah of Body Watani Dance were artists-in-residence at Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem, Palestine, researching the relationship between stolen land, farming, and the dancing body.

During their residency, they reimagined After the Last Red Sky as a performance procession through the grounds of the historic Dar Jacir home. The work moved through stone terraces, spiral staircases, rooftop horizon lines, and gathering spaces—shaped by the living environment around it.

A performance dedicated to the Palestinian sky was finally performed beneath that very sky.

This film serves as an archive of that gathering: the dance, the land, the plants, the stones, the home, and the people who came together to witness the sunset in community.

Schedule

6:00 PM – Doors Open + Coffee, Snacks, Community Gathering

7:00 PM – Screening of After the Last Red Sky: performance procession at Dar Jacir

Post-Screening – Community Conversation with Leila & Noelle Awadallah
Facilitated by Anniessa Antar

Leila Awadallah

Leila Awadallah is a dancer, choreographer, and community collaborator in Minneapolis and sometimes Beirut. She is the Co-Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance project along with her sister, Noelle. Her artistry holds Palestine at the center—rooting her dancing body in artistry shaped toward resisting settler-colonial occupation while invoking/conjuring/demanding the right of return and the return of the land (LANDBACK). Leila has received multiple fellowships: DanceUSA, McKnight, Jerome Hill, and Daring Dances. Her artistry is meaningfully impacted by her years working with Ananya Dance Theatre, Theater of Women of the Camp (Lebanon), and El-Funoun (Palestine). She holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Minnesota.

Noelle Awadallah نوال

Noelle Awadallah نوال is a Palestinian-American choreographer, improviser, and farmer residing in Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis). She is the Co-Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance project alongside sister, Leila Awadallah. Awadallah’s daily pursuit of a “land-based life” emerges from sumud—a Palestinian ideology guiding steadfast perseverance and rooted relationality to homeland. Her artistic approach in upholding these ideologies extend from her commitment to multi-directional attention, embodied storytelling, resistance and liberation practices, grief and rage, futuristic imagination as strategy, and tending to her reciprocal relationships with land and more than human beings. She is currently a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow (2025-2028). Her artistic lifeforce is greatly influenced by her time as a company member with Ananya Dance Theatre (2019-2026) and practicing, playing, and learning with El-Funoun Dance Troupe. She farms at Cimarron Community Farm and lovingly co-holds the Grief and Rage Circle for Palestine. She received a BFA from Columbia College Chicago.

Facilitator

Anniessa Antar

Anniessa Antar is a filmmaker, educator, software engineer, and performance artist. Her pedagogical and creative practices center the power of sensory work to make liberation irresistible. She has worked with the Grief and Rage Circle for Palestine, Springboard for the Arts, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Mizna, the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, the School for Poetic Computation, Backwoodz Studioz, and Body Watani. She is a recipient of Forecast Public Art’s Artists as Witness grant for an upcoming film project. Anniessa currently teaches in the MFA program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Part of the 2026 Makers Series

Body Watani Dance is part of Pillsbury House + Theatre’s 2026 Makers Series, a residency program supporting boundary-pushing performances at the intersection of arts and social justice.

PH+T’s Makers Series invites visionary activist-artists to create while in residence within our space and community, developing original work that opens pathways for stories that decolonize, democratize, and liberate.

Makers Series Artists Body Watani present: Film Screening of After the Last Red Sky: performance procession at Dar Jacir