Arab Experimentalism and Futurism with Leyya Mona Tawil

Nabra Nelson: Salam Alaikum. Welcome to Kunafa and Shay, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. Kunafa and Shay discusses and analyzes contemporary and historical Middle Eastern and North African, or MENA, and Southwest Asian and North African, or SWANA, theatre from across the region.

Marina Johnson: I’m Marina.

Nabra Nelson: And I’m Nabra.

Marina Johnson: And we are your hosts.

Nabra Nelson: Our name, Kunafa and Shay, invites you into the discussion in the best way we know how with complex and delicious sweets like kunafa and perfectly warm tea or, in Arabic, shay.

Marina Johnson: Kunafa and Shay is a place to share experiences, ideas, and sometimes to engage with our differences. In each country in the MENA or SWANA world, you’ll find kunafa made differently. In that way, we also lean into the diversity, complexity and robust flavors of MENA and SWANA Theatre. We bring our own perspectives, research and special guests in order to start a dialogue and encourage further learning and discussion.

Nabra Nelson: Welcome to the fifth season of Kunafa and Shay, where we delve into the dynamic world of performance art across the region. We’re highlighting the creative, innovative, and artistic disruption of performance artists exploring how their art serves as a powerful medium for expression and social change. This season features interviews with performance artists who challenged norms and use their craft to further conversations about topics like identity diaspora, homeland, and futurity.

Marina Johnson: Yalla. Grab your tea. The shay is just right. In this episode, we interview Leyya Mona Tawil, an artist whose work transcends traditional boundaries working in the realm of Arab Experimentalism. Tawil is renowned for her unique ability to blend artistic mediums, creating performances at the intersection of dance, theatre, music, and visual art, reflecting a deep engagement with themes of identity, migrationm and culture and engaging in Arab futurist visioning.

Nabra Nelson: Leyya Mona Tawil, also known as Lime Rickey International, is an artist working with sound, dance, and performance practices. Leyya is a Syrian Palestinian American engaged in the world as such. Her twenty-three-year record of performance scores have toured throughout the states, Europe, and the Arab world. Tawil was a 2018 Saari Residence Fellow in Finland and has 2020 support from Gibney DiP Residency in New York City, Pieter Performance in Los Angeles, and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation in Oakland. Lime Rickey International’s Future Faith, commissioned by Abrons Arts Center, AIRspace program, and the Kohn Foundation has been nominated for a 2019 Bessie Award in music. Festival appearances of Future Faith include Today Is Our Tomorrow in Helsinki, New Performance Turku in Turku and ZVRK Festival in Sarajevo. Tawil is the founding director of Dance Elixir and Arab.AMP, a US-based platform supporting experimental music and live art from the SWANA diaspora and allied communities.

Marina Johnson: We are so excited to have you with us today, and we want to start off by asking you, how do you describe yourself as an artist?

Leyya Mona Tawil: Oh, well, thank you for having me. I’m excited, always excited to talk about my work. I also free associate quite a bit when talking about my work, especially even with that first question. So I started out in my career as a choreographer, but decades and decades later, I now describe myself as a sound artist, performance artist, and choreographer. Yeah, just bridging a lot of different practices now. I’ve been usually referring to the things I make as “hybrid performance,” but that’s not really a title—like “hybrid performance maker” sort of maybe.

It’s all hybridized. So the dance creates sound, the sound creates the dance, the character creates the concept. Everything’s narrating itself, all the elements are narrating each other.

Nabra Nelson: Well, especially this season, we’ve been hearing about a lot of different ways that different performance artists and multidisciplinary artists are creating new terms to encompass these very interesting hybrid art forms. Maybe you can talk to us or give us an example through what you’re currently working on. Can you talk about what’s in the works right now and what does that look like to give our audiences a sense of what this hybrid performance looks like?

Leyya Mona Tawil: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So best way to talk about my work right now is to talk about Lime Rickey International. So that’s a body of work that is performed by me. It’s solo work, and my moniker is Lime Rickey International. And her genesis is that she’s shipwrecked here from the future and she sings future folk songs and does future folk dances from the homeland that is yet to exist. And in that mythology of Lime Rickey, I create sound art environments using objects and effects and microphones. I also compose songs using Arabic and English lyrics. A lot of the sounds and songs that I sing are technically illegible. You can’t really understand the words. The compositions seem improvised that they’re not, but they seem just noise, fields of noise and distortions. And then I dance, I do these basically fake folk dances to the fake folk songs that I’m singing.

And I don’t want to say fake actually. They’re fictional, but they’re real. They’re like my non-fiction, fiction future history. Anyway, these solo performances combine a lot of conceptual elements that are embedded in her narrative of why she does what she does, her being Lime Rickey, and involve sound art and homemade instruments and traditional instruments just like microphone and effects, and also involve choreography, just straight up choreographies that all interweave. So the movement triggers sound or the sound requires certain choreographies to take place in order to enact the sound. So I sonify the floor and different things that I move through. So in this way, it’s all hybridized. So the dance creates sound, the sound creates the dance, the character creates the concept. Everything’s narrating itself, all the elements are narrating each other. So I guess that’s the best way to describe my hybrid performance.

Marina Johnson: That’s a beautiful description. And I also love when you were talking about the music just being technically illegible, but I feel like there’s something about these terms that we use to describe ourselves in when we’re between terms or when we’re between things or when it seems like you’re creating a new technique. So it might be illegible in these other ways, but that you’re creating a different kind of legibility, which I love that, especially because it seems like Lime Rickey is looking to be seen in different ways. And yeah, I don’t know. I just find the descriptions here fascinating.

How did Lime Rickey come to be? Can you tell us a little bit about that origin?

Leyya Mona Tawil: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I place her in this realm of Arab futurism, or rather, a bigger descriptor would be diasporic arts, art that through form or content describes a diasporic experience. So in that way, it’s like that legibility, it’s like that distortion field of diaspora. So I have my clarity, but then what the audience is hearing is regulated by their own reality. So what’s legible to me isn’t legible to the audience. And so that’s where that in-between space is of legibility and narration, which I consider a very dysphoric experience. So I would say I started working on the concept of Lime Rickey in 2016. So that’s stretch ago, seven plus years ago. And I basically, after years of making dances and collaborating with musicians and creating conceptual scores for musicians based on my dance ideas, I felt the need to start scoring my own ideas, sonically scoring my own ideas.

And that also came from this need to sing. So I never used my voice in my earlier decades of work. By default I would if somebody required me to, but for the most part, my works were nonverbal and non-textual. So in 2016, I found myself needing to sing, and this was ‘16. We’re in the depth of the fall of cities in Syria. We are in the depth of the slow-motion genocide in Palestine that’s been going on for almost let’s call it a hundred years. And I started singing in the studio the words “go home,” and I just would sing those two words over and over and “go home, go home, go home.” And because there was such a flood of refugees leaving the Arab world from Sudan, from Syria, from Palestine, but primarily in that year was from Syria. And that the idea of not being able to return home because your home is destroyed, that concept, that all coalesced in this character that if she’s stuck in the present from a future and she’s singing about a homeland doesn’t exist, but she’s not there.

So there’s diaspora, but there’s also a future reference point versus a past that you can’t return to, but a future that you have already experienced. And so I like the twist of time involved in that. And as a dedicated experimentalist and futurist, I want to always be pushing for more complexity versus narrating things that have already happened. So I like to conceive of narrating things that haven’t happened yet. So anyway, she just formed in the light of all of that. That’s a lot of stuff I just said, but Lime Rickey formed in light of all of that. And I talk about her reference points as being non-tangible things like stars and wind and light.

Marina Johnson: That’s really beautiful. Yeah, I mean these things that, the reference points being things that stretch across space and time in different ways and that are recognizable even as the world is changing. Thank you for sharing the creation.

Nabra Nelson: Well, I also wanted to ask more about futurism in this conversation about that which is intangible and the illegibility of the music. I think of that as if you’re thinking about or trying to create what music or dance or culture looks like in the far future, maybe making it so different from our really material experience feels very authentic or an interesting way to approach visioning the future. And I’m super interested in Arab futurism and futurism in general, probably because I’m an endless optimist, and so I’m always like, “let’s do futurism so we can talk about today, but also conceive of tomorrow or the far future.” I’m wondering if I’m on the right track when it comes to how you connect futurism to this intangibility or what you draw from in order to conceive of this future.

Leyya Mona Tawil: Yeah, beautiful question. I think of it in its intangibility, but I think about futurism as a way of generating… I say futurism, but I’m actually going to also invoke experimentalism, experimentation as a digging at the unknown. So there is something intangible in the experiment of anything, you’re digging into a new territory and in that digging into new territory, digging into an unknown future, you’re basically generating a territory, you’re creating a new territory of symbols and language and sound and action, and that defines its own self as it’s unfolding.

And so in a way, it comes out of a practice of improvisation, which is a big part of my process, but also it comes out of a need to release yourself from what is already known, release yourself from the mainstream narratives or the mainstream forms that are already taught, that are already colonized, that are already embedded, that are already burdening our voices, and instead try to elbow our way into a new language or elbow our way into something that has not been defined as territory yet. So it’s a post… I hate this term as a Palestinian, I hate this term “post-border,” but it’s post-border in an artistic sense of the word.

Marina Johnson: That’s given me a lot to think about here. And I just really appreciate, I mean, just even the imagery of elbowing our way into something new, it’s really gorgeous. I’m curious, so we got to hear a little bit about Lime Rickey International and the starting of that, but I’m also curious just with any, because we’ll talk about some of your pieces specifically soon, but what is your creation process for a new piece? You’re drawing on so many elements, and I’m curious, is there a particular place that you start from? Is it music? Is it movement? Or is there a spark of an idea in a different way? And how do you create these elements as you move toward a performance? And maybe it’s not the same every time. So it’s a hard question to answer in that regard, but I’m just curious.

I’m never really singing in order to be telling a story. I’m more singing in order to invoke a scene or a mood that then it’s translated through how my voice is manipulated in the space.

Leyya Mona Tawil: Yeah, no, it is a little different depending on the project. But because at my core practices, it always comes down to dance on some level, so the spark or the direction or the birth of a new piece or birth of the process usually comes from movement. So either that’s like a vision, like a lay on the studio floor here and stare at the ceiling, and then all of a sudden I’ll see… I see dances a lot, and it’s not real people in real space doing a thing, but it’s like I see a force. And so I’m like, oh, what was that? I want to make that happen.

And so eventually I’ll stand up and do something with my body that invokes something that I see or feel or need to see or feel, or it’ll come out of just me moving around and then hitting on something extremely interesting kinesthetically, and that makes my heart shift to a new place or makes my brain shift to a new place, or makes me stop thinking and just stop cognitively analyzing what’s happening and just go into a more curious state. And so then I’m like, “Ooh, that’s something. What is that? Oh.” And then I’ll just follow that down a path that’ll start to take shape into either a little piece of choreography, which will then have a sound to it, or it’ll be like a piece of choreography that actually ends up not being a piece of choreography at all, but actually just lead me to new lyrics or new words.

Sometimes I’ll be dancing and then, all of a sudden I’ll just have to stop and new words will just come out of me. And so I’m like, “Oh.” So all of that dancing was just to generate that one sentence. And so then I’ll take that sentence and turn it into song, and then that song will turn into noise, because think is this one of the harsher ones? Or I’ll play with it. I’ll play with the energy of the words that I’m using to see whether it’s… how to hold them in sonic space. Because I’m never really saying anything that needs to be narrated in that we go back to legibility. I’m never really singing in order to be telling a story. I’m more singing in order to invoke a scene or a mood that then it’s translated through how my voice is manipulated in the space.

Nabra Nelson: And when do other collaborators come into the process?

Leyya Mona Tawil: That’s a really good question. Because of late, since Lime Rickey was birthed, I’ve been working primarily solo. So I mean, I have costume designers, which are a big part of Lime Rickey’s reality. So, I do bring in costume designers, and whenever I’m invited to do bigger shows and bigger theatres with lighting grids, I’ll always seek out a light design collaborator, a lighting artist that isn’t doing designs but is actually performing lights with Lime because of the interactivity that I think she needs. And so I’ve had a lot of fun working with light artists in theatre spaces, but a lot of times Lime is presented in music spaces or gallery spaces without real lighting options. And so then I’m designing my own lights. So she ends up being pretty solo-driven, but I have a whole other body of work that is working with dancers, working with musicians, working on location with rotating casts of characters and people.

And then I have a whole other body of work that is in duo with a violinist named Mike Corey, who I know who’s on record for his thoughts about era of experimentalism as well. We have a lot of fun working together. We’ve been working together over ten years. Oh my God. We’ve been working together almost twenty years’ time. There’s that time thing again. So my collaborative works are always birthed with the collaborator. I don’t bring in collaborators late in the game. They’re always generated from the ground up, or I arrive to a space with an idea and a concept, and then the local collaborators are just gathered and we throw it together and make it happen in span of a day or a month or a week.

Marina Johnson: I was going to ask you about this later, but I think, so there’s a piece that you and Mike worked on called Atlas, and the description of that piece talks about, in addition to the sound and movement practices, you’re both community leaders in Arab experimentalism, which you’ve already talked about some, but I’m curious if you could talk to us about that piece and maybe how it fits into Arab experimentalism. But it would also just be great to hear about your collaboration together in general. Collaborating for twenty years together is no joke. That’s a pretty epic collaboration.

Leyya Mona Tawil: Yeah. Yeah. It is pretty epic. We’ve had a lot of adventures together in sound and dance. So when we started working together… well, I’ll talk a little bit how we started working together, and we’ll lead to Atlas. When we started working together, I was working purely in dance, and Mike was working purely in violin, and we were using improvisation both as research and as performance. So research into what is inherent in us. And as we’re both Arab Americans, we’re both Palestinian, I’m also Syrian, and what are we carrying with us that can be articulated inherently through improvisation was our initial question. So that could be gestural, it could be for violin, it could be tonal, but it can also be something a little larger than that. It could be about pacing or it could be about patience or other cultural factors.

I’m going to use words, it’s not a word that we use, but you could think about culture as being your degree of vanity on stage, your degree of modesty on stage, or your degree of nonverbal communication. You know what I mean? There’s all these things that describe culture through our bodies that we can look at when you work improvisationally, especially in that one-to-one relationship. The one-to-one relationship of dance to music and the one-to-one conversation was very interesting to us. And so this was 2006, we started working together. Fast-forward 2014, we were in the wake of one of the other massacre genocides in Gaza, and 2014 was one of the larger ones. And so we were in the wake of the Arab American experience with that, the Palestinian American experience with that, and working professionally in our fields. And we came together to just do our process. But I had been in this studio that I’m in right now talking to you from Temescal Arts Center in Oakland. And I could not move. I couldn’t move. The only thing I could do is think about, the death toll.

And so I started rolling on the ground just as a way of getting out of myself a way, getting out of myself. And if you can’t do anything else, what are you going to do? Well, I guess you could just roll down a hill. You have gravity. So I pretend on a flat surface, I was rolling down a hill. This turned into a pretty, I was into durational scores at the time with other projects, and so the score for Atlas started to take shape to do this rolling across the space until you can’t anymore. And so that’s the first section of the dance. And so I talk about it as a score. So that’s the first section of the score.

And what Mike is doing in that space is also playing with durational. He has a very limited palette of sound. So he’s working with silence, repetitive emergency repeated note in the higher pitched, and then these long drawn out dream scope scapes. So he has a pretty limited palette. My palette is roll across the floor and back as fast as you can for as long as you can. When you hit that wall of cannot do it any longer, you then try to do the dance. So there’s a dance, there’s a choreography that I try to attempt in that fractured state of being disoriented and exhausted. And so the dance then is deconstructed through my, I want to call it compromised state. And then he also is responding to my necessary stillnesses and my necessary bursts of clarity with his own, again, silence, tiny movements, big drawn-out movements on the violin. And it became this very connected, very serious piece that we ended up touring to Beirut and Berlin. And we’ve done it in New York. We’ve only done it a few times. It’s very, very hard to do physically, and it’s really intense on the audience too.

And so Atlas is the weight of the world. And so we’re proposing, not that we are carrying the way to the world as the performers, we’re rather proposing that we’re bearing weight upon the audience with this non-pleasurable piece of work that we’re putting upon you. So it’s about burden and us actually burdening the audience and about sharing burden. How are you going to share this burden? Or are you just going to watch? Are you just going to watch this happen? Which is very, actually, I haven’t thought about that piece in so long. So talking about it right now, it feels quite, I don’t know, sensitive.

Marina Johnson: I mean, I was just thinking people are making active choices right now as the genocide continues to watch and feel that burden or to just watch, and then they don’t feel any of the burden. And I’m actually unsure how it’s possible, but yeah, I hear you describe it right now. I was like, oh, this takes on a different meaning. But always, I mean, interesting that it was you watching what was happening in Gaza at the time, too.

Leyya Mona Tawil: Yeah. It’s interesting ten years later that we were having the same conversation. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s its own mountain that we’re all trying to climb.

Marina Johnson: Yeah. I mean, I was going to say while we’re talking about Palestinian pieces, but of course your pieces are always part of this.

Leyya Mona Tawil: By default, they’re Palestinian.

Marina Johnson: By default. There’s a little on your website, and I was scrolling and I said, “Just stop.” I said, “Zombie Frequencies of the Palestinian Diaspora. Probably the best name for a piece I’ve ever heard.” I don’t even fully know what it means, but I love it. I’m curious if you can describe a little bit of that piece. And I mean also just I’m very selfishly, there are some videos on your website, and we’ll link so people can find them—

Leyya Mona Tawil: Oh, great.

Marina Johnson: …and go for it to look for them. But you do such beautiful descriptions too. I feel like I’m getting to watch them as you’re talking too.

Leyya Mona Tawil: Oh, thank you. It’s hard to describe dance and collaboration and stage action in this way. Zombie Frequencies is also very intense piece. Mike Khoury and I tend to create very intense works together, and they tend to be very raw. And although the early ones were improvised, they’ve become more and more scored. So we have a series of landmarks and a map, let’s say, of the performance piece so that they are repeatable and discussable and all those things. But Zombie Frequencies of the Palestinian Diaspora is another duo by Mike and I. The material we’re dealing with in that piece is the nervous system. So we started working on that piece I think in 2018. It didn’t premiere until ’22, I want to say, but a language of movement and a language of silence that was starting to come out in our work is this uncontrollable nervous state, nervous systems state in reaction to what we called back then a “quarter-time genocide,” basically like this slow motion genocide that just was just creeping over history and happening in prolonged fashion.

And what the fraying of your nervous system that that creates and the fraying of your identity, self, sense of home, that whole diasporic conversation about just the fraying of the edges as something quarter time genocide of our people. Again, thinking about that now, when we are in an accelerated four-times time, genocide is almost inconceivable except that it’s happening. So we’re conceiving of it right now. But this piece was about what to do when you… For me physically, what is the language of movement when you can’t complete anything. So all of the movement initiation was cut short and redirected, and then that second one, that redirect was also cut short. So then it creates this language in and of itself, of incompleteness or what seems like an attack of you to you.

And so that’s the zombie of it. It’s like the internal eating itself, like the body that eats itself or the nervous system that eats itself. So there’s a frequency in that. There’s a sonic frequency in that Mike is playing with. He actually, for the first time, I think, in our duo—he does electronics in other projects—but for the first time in our duo, he played electronics and violin. So he was working with also different layers of frequencies outside of what he could add to the frequency of the acoustic instrument. And then I was working with this very almost self-destructive language of incompleteness. So there’s a lot of repetition and there’s a lot of whatever. There’s a jerky quality to it of most like possession, zombie possession.

And around that time too, and I’m not so deep into this whole narrative, but there was this trend in performance art and some experimental art zones of “zombie,” like the return of martyrs. The return of the martyrs would be like a zombie, like a rising uprising, but zombie in the way we don’t die in a way. And so there was, I remember just thinking after we had started this whole concept of zombie frequencies, there was a zombie trend that then came out in during the pandemic, I guess, of people talking about just zombie as being almost like a pop art, I don’t know, “can’t kill us” sort of thing. So we’re not really digging down into that type of zombie narrative or more looking at the internal disorientation. That was a long zombie journey. Sorry.

Nabra Nelson: I’m glad. Yes. More long zombie journeys. Well, also, the piece is long. It’s about forty-five minutes. I know. Again, durational and experiential, and there’s this really interesting climax at near the end that’s very impactful. I’m wondering, how much do you contextualize for the audience? How much do you trust the audience to be on this journey with you? How much do you feel like you need to tell them beyond the title perhaps, especially in these durational pieces where they’re really on this very long, intimate journey that can be very emotional. Do you ever help them place those emotions, or do you allow them to create their own narratives?

Leyya Mona Tawil: Oh, wow. I wouldn’t say that I trust the audience ever. That’s just not something that I do. But I do like to traumatize them, and so kind of a pastime. I’m being funny about it, but I don’t like to explain too much. I like them to be forced to have their own thoughts about the strange things that are happening to them and in front of them. And so I tend to not contextualize occasionally. I mean, the title does a thing, of course, it sets at least a little pin in the map, and maybe there’s some framing because the venue or the presenting agency, the production house, needs to put a blurb out, and so that blurb is floating around in space somewhere.

We tend to not have too much contextual notes in If there’s a program for the show. We tend to not do too much right there. We tend to just leave it as title and experience, because I do think that part of the test or of even just do not test, that sounds like you can pass or fail, but part of the act of attending to art or even caring about having an experience is to actually have your own response to it and not a prescribed outcome. Please walk away with these new thoughts. That’s not really the point in my intentions. So I know that of course, there’s different art. There’s different forms of art and different artworks that can actually propose new ways of thinking in a very narrative and specific way. But I like to just have them have this, like you said, intimate. I think that’s a really strong word for the work that Mike and I do. And most of my works tend to have this intimacy to them because everyone’s having their almost one-to-one relationship with me while I’m performing.

Nabra Nelson: And then also a question that came up for me as you were talking about Zombie Frequencies, and Atlas actually, is how or whether pieces come back. It feels like Lime Rickey International is this character that responds to the present moment or changes and shifts, but then you have these pieces that have been performed in various places in the past, but as you’ve been saying, resonate in new ways now. How do you think about bringing back pieces or adapting or transforming previous pieces, especially in response to current events and ongoing genocide or new moments of conflict in the world or in your homelands?