khalas fest مهرجان خلص
September 29 – October 4, 2026
Red Eye Theater · Minneapolis
khalas fest is a terrain where:
subversive and defiant embodied performance confronts ripples of violence spilling from rupturing systems
artists wielding performance as weapon towards creating cracks in illusions of empire, settler colonialism, and whatever else is in the way
generating echoes rebounding into dreams of future world
( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( PALESTINE IS FREE ) ) ) ) ) ) ) )
a curation born out of a group of artists who decide to put their work in conversation — rather than waiting for someone to do it for us.
Hosted by Body Watani Dance Project in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce, khalas fest will consist of 7 works, featuring both local and visiting artists. The performances range from defiant stances, to subversive dark comedy, to deeply sacred spells / prayers / visions of healing.
LEILA AWADALLAH
NOELLE AWADALLAH
METTE LOULOU VON KOHL
NICOLE BINDLER
ZAQUIA LUISA SALINAS
FARGO NISSIM TBAKHI
TAREK ABDELQADER
programming
Pick a date below to see that day’s schedule — each day is listed in the order things happen. Use the filters to show only performances or only workshops.
Tuesday, September 29
WORKSHOP: Sumud, Tarab, Tarweeda · Leila Awadallah
Tuesday, September 29 · 5:30–7PM
This workshop engages in research that is seeded by 3 concepts of embodiment. Sumud صمود | an unyielding, enduring, ongoing, sustained and steadfast rootedness. Tarab طرب | an ecstatic enchantment, or trance brought on by feelings invoked by music. Tarweeda ترويدة | a type of Palestinian resistance song that involves inserting secret codes into songs while confusing the occupier with a repetition of vowels.
We will look at ways these 3 concepts shape, guide, and disorient our movement through both improvisation research and the development of choreography.
Sliding scale $15-30 (NOTAFLOF – no one turned away for lack of funds)
Register here.
Wednesday, September 30
WORKSHOP: Objects as Storytellers · Mette Loulou
Wednesday, September 30 · 5:30–7PM
This workshop will explore storytelling with objects. Objects in theater are usually seen as props or scenery, however what if we also saw them as performers? Objects hold unaccountable stories within them waiting to be told. Through writing, collaborative-storytelling, and image-theater the workshop will invite participants to engage with objects as co-authors of their stories.
Sliding scale $15-30 (NOTAFLOF – no one turned away for lack of funds)
Thursday, October 1
PERFORMANCE: A Call to Prayer · Zaquia Luisa Salinas
Thursday, October 1 · 7PM
A Call to Prayer is a moving meditation, inviting us to honor our ancestral inheritances, and call into existence destruction, restoration and hope. Performed by Zaquia Luisa Salinas alongside Sergio Barrientos and Guillermo Castro, this dance connects us to the collective experience of diving into and journeying out of darkness. “…what they build between them compresses global histories and prayers into one liquid container – rituals coalescing into a physically demanding finale of electronic resistance, a universal meditation on the desire to hold faith against political constriction. Important hope.” – ankita (thINKingDANCE)
Lighting Design by Andrea Sala
Music arranged and edited by Zaquia Luisa Salinas
$15 – student
$20 – regular price
$30 – help support the artists’ travel
$40 – help support Body Watani
NOTAFLOF – no one turned away for lack of funds
Eligible for khalas festival pass (click here to learn more).
PERFORMANCE: An Evening With Complicity Huffman · Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
Thursday, October 1 · 8:15PM
An Evening With Complicity Huffman by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a satirical solo performance, a haunted poetry reading which excavates and foregrounds the violence of settler-colonial literary spaces. As Complicity Huffman, an Israeli-American poet, presents work from her forthcoming book, Untitled Nobel Prize Submission, strange things keep happening. The poems are different than she’d drafted them, the sound system is acting up, and occasionally blood pools on the stage from an unknown source. Eventually, the voices of the Palestinian subjects violently erased by Complicity’s settler poetics come bursting into the space in an act of shocking, violent, and gory possession. An Evening With Complicity Huffman satirizes and eviscerates the casual links between the American literary landscape, rampant imperialist capitalism, and the constant lies settler-colonial subjects tell themselves in order to live lives of comfort.
$15 – student
$20 – regular price
$30 – help support the artists’ travel
$40 – help support Body Watani
NOTAFLOF – no one turned away for lack of funds
Eligible for khalas festival pass (click here to learn more).
Friday, October 2
PERFORMANCE: There are no words, so may it be the end · Mette Loulou
Friday, October 2 · 7PM
There are no words, so may it be the end by Mette Loulou is a satirical commentary on the “counter-terror” industry of Zionist state. There are no words, so may it be the end is a multivocal, multimedia solo performance proposing Palestinian refusal to be seen and unseen as strategies in challenging and destabilizing settler colonial projects and identities.
Purchase tickets here.
$15 – student
$20 – regular price
$30 – help support the artists’ travel
$40 – help support Body Watani
NOTAFLOF – no one turned away for lack of funds
Eligible for khalas festival pass (click here to learn more).
PERFORMANCE: shuhada: alive-streamed un-ceased FIRE · Leila Awadallah
Friday, October 2 · 7PM
shuhada: alive-streamed un-ceased FIRE by Leila Awadallah is a work that examines the fragments of evidence produced during the genocide in Gaza. Illuminated, colonial hypocrisies collide with testimonial archives of those who witnessed and those who resisted genocide.
collaborator credits:
Choreographer: Alexandre Paulikevitch
Created in collaboration with the Performer: Leila Awadallah
Text: Leila Awadallah
Dramaturgical Guidance & Thought Partner: Renée Copeland
Instrument Architect: Alex Leeds
Stage Development: Emma Marlar
Lighting: Kevin Jones
Originally commissioned and premiered through the McKnight Foundation Dancer fellowship 2022-2024
Purchase tickets here.
$15 – student
$20 – regular price
$30 – help support the artists’ travel
$40 – help support Body Watani
NOTAFLOF – no one turned away for lack of funds
Eligible for khalas festival pass (click here to learn more).
PERFORMANCE: C.A.U.T.I.O.N. · Noelle Awadallah and Anniessa Antar
Friday, October 2 · 8:15PM
Creative autonomous union transmuting images of nightmare inside the ruin of yesterday. Stay awake, stay soft, stay wondering, stay awake! Practice failing, heart breaking, make meaning, make mistakes, sensemaking, making senses. History doesn’t rhyme but it does repeat itself. What’s beyond that concrete wall? Can you taste it?
BRING AN ITEM THAT YOU WANT TO BRING INTO AND LEAVE FOR A NEW WORLD.
Sound and projections by Anniessa
$15 – student
$20 – regular price
$30 – help support the artists’ travel
$40 – help support Body Watani
NOTAFLOF – no one turned away for lack of funds
Eligible for khalas festival pass (click here to learn more).
Saturday, October 3
WORKSHOP: Drop In, Spiral Out · Zaquia Luisa Salinas
Saturday, October 3 · 12–2PM
This workshop is aimed at supporting the development of dynamic and functional physicality through explorations of weight, momentum, attention, anatomy, and play. We’ll use technical exercises, improvisation, phrase-work, and partnered feedback to explore space and dance fully in community with others.
Workshop fee: sliding scale $15-30
NOTAFLOF – no one turned away for lack of funds
Open Space: Movement and Meditation
Saturday, October 3 · 4–5:30PM
Come move with “the dog,” an instrument that plays itself — or really, plays the room. Created by Alex Leeds. Persistently obstinate to production.
FREE
PERFORMANCE: intifada incantations
Saturday, October 3 · 5:30PM
intifada incantations is an experiment in wielding ripples of vibration
A group of performers are joined by a self-playing instrument that drones and shifts based on the vibrations in the floor and air. A work activated by specific bodies, tethered ancestrally to Palestine, and tethered viscerally to the ruptures ongoing. Asking; how do we enact a series of experiments and incantations; attuning to the ripples and attempting to wield them towards the shapes of intifada near and far (words inspired by June Jordan: Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.). Created and performed by Leila Awadallah, Noelle Awadallah, Mette Loulou von Kohl, and Zaquia Luisa Salinas.
انتفاضة – to shake off, tremor, uprising
$15 – student
$20 – regular price
$30 – help support the artists’ travel
$40 – help support Body Watani
NOTAFLOF – no one turned away for lack of funds
Eligible for khalas festival pass (click here to learn more).
PERFORMANCE: Sand in My Soda Pop · Nicole Bindler and Chelsea Thaler
Saturday, October 3 · 7PM
Sand in My Soda Pop
A critical dark comedy and a reverse strip tease about the U.S. exports of pop-culture and bombs. The work draws from dance-theater, Butoh, contact improvisation, and clown. Images of beach-going, leisure, pop music, and beauty conventions collide with the grotesque: sounds of bombs infiltrating the music, and the dark undercurrent of horror that haunts our society.
Created by Nicole Bindler in collaboration with Chelsea Thaler
Performed by Nicole Bindler and Chelsea Thaler
Original music composed by Dustin Slaughter and Andy Hayleck
Borrowed music from Dntel and Diane Ray
Sound design by Bhob Rainey
$15 – student
$20 – regular price
$30 – help support the artists’ travel
$40 – help support Body Watani
NOTAFLOF – no one turned away for lack of funds
Eligible for khalas festival pass (click here to learn more).
PERFORMANCE: Tarek Abdelqader
Saturday, October 3 · 8:15PM
Tarek will play a solo set with drums and electronics.
$15 – student
$20 – regular price
$30 – help support the artists’ travel
$40 – help support Body Watani
NOTAFLOF – no one turned away for lack of funds
Eligible for khalas festival pass (click here to learn more).
Sunday, October 4
WORKSHOP: How We Move Together: Fortifying our Contact Improvisation practice with Feldenkrais and Body-Mind Centering Methods · Nicole Bindler and Chelsea Thaler
Sunday, October 4 · 12–2PM @ Threads Dance Studio (across the hallway from Red Eye Theater)
In this workshop Nicole Bindler and Chelsea Thaler will offer foundational Body-Mind Centering and Feldenkrais practices as scaffolds for our contact improvisation improvisation (CI) dances. We will look at a few common challenges in our CI dances and break down the mechanics of these sticky moments. We will use these somatic methods as roadmaps for moving in and out of the floor, through levels of weight sharing, and into more meaningful connection with each other.
Sliding scale $15-30
NOTAFLOF – no one turned away for lack of funds
WORKSHOP: Body Watani Improvisation Research · Noelle Awadallah and Anniessa Antar
Sunday, October 4 · 2:30–4PM
A durational, lightly led improvisational journey (featuring music by Anniessa aka bousayha) that invites participants into personal research on questions of homeland in the body, while in a collective space. This workshop is an invitation into the Body Watani philosophy of researching dance with specific ideas and questions from Anniessa Antar and Noelle Awadallah’s performance research: in the face of ongoing destruction, war, genocide, , what does it feel like to resensitize yourself to wonder, awe, bewilderment? How can you practice failing as you seek to build new worlds as spaces of refuge from the current one?
Sliding scale $15-30
NOTAFLOF – no one turned away for lack of funds
artist bios
tickets
9/29 5:30pm WORKSHOP: Sumud, Tarab, Tarweeda with Leila Awadallah
9/30 5:30pm WORKSHOP: Objects as Storytellers with Mette Loulou
10/1 7pm PERFORMANCE: A Call to Prayer · Zaquia Luisa Salinas
10/1 8:15pm PERFORMANCE: An Evening With Complicity Huffman · Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
10/2 7pm PERFORMANCE: There are no words, so may it be the end & shuhada
10/2 8:15pm PERFORMANCE: C.A.U.T.I.O.N. · Noelle Awadallah and Anniessa Antar
10/3 12pm WORKSHOP: Drop In, Spiral Out with Zaquia Luisa Salinas
10/3 5:30pm PERFORMANCE: intifada incantations
10/3 7pm PERFORMANCE: Sand in My Soda Pop · Nicole Bindler and Chelsea Thaler
10/3 8:15pm PERFORMANCE: Tarek Abdelqader
10/4 12pm WORKSHOP: How We Move Together with Nicole Bindler and Chelsea Thaler
10/4 2:30pm WORKSHOP: Improvisation Research with Noelle Awadallah and Anniessa Antar
khalas pass
We are excited to offer a festival pass that gets you access to all 7 performances for a discounted, sliding-scale price of $60-100.
Logo created by Jamal Awadallah
Leila Awadallah is a fiscal year 2026 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
Body Watani Dance Project is an awardee of the inaugural MENA Theater Makers Fund (2026-2028).
