Artist Bio

Dance Elixir

THIEVES (Work in Progress)
Presented by Dance Elixir, Iraqi Bodies, & SFIAF

THIEVES is an international collaboration between Artistic Director/Choreographer of DANCE ELIXIR, Leyya Mona Tawil, and Iraqi Composer Muhanad Rasheed with his band the Lazy Sleepers. THIEVES paints a raw, alternatively grotesque and tender picture of a shadowy humanity. The piece asks: "How does one prepare to die?" Dance Elixir dancers Jeremiah Crank and Roche Janken are joined onstage by three Iraqi musicians: Zaid Hassan (guitar), Majed Rasheed (bass), and Mustafa Essami (Percussion).

Based on the premise that grief and violence are realities experienced by every human, Tawil and Rasheed consider THIEVES to be a shared journey where they measure their personal narratives against three embodied manifestations of inflicted grief and violence: The Bandit, The Wolf, and The Killer.

As a product of society, the thief is simultaneously a victim, while a deeper evil roams freely. The Killer is the dying. The Bandit has nothing. And so too, the Artist must not only create, but destroy. In the creation of THIEVES, the artists refuse the illusions of hope and beauty. Instead they choose to conjure harsher questions for each other: Must we prepare to die in order to have faith in life? What have I stolen? What is mine? What is contained in the skin--my darkest story?

Rasheed and The Lazy Sleepers’ musicians were born and educated in Baghdad before leaving in 2007 to find asylum in the Netherlands. Tawil is a first-generation Palestinian-Syrian-American born in Detroit, Michigan. These artists found each other through the Arab contemporary dance scene, which is flourishing worldwide. Their source material for THIEVES includes prose by 20th Century American poet Kenneth Patchen, who was publishing work as his country prepared for World War II. Patchen’s reflections on the role of the artist within a society fixated on power provide the platform for Tawil and Rasheed to share their thoughts on art, war and necessity. Patchen wrote, "In a world of murder the artist must be the first to die. He must lead. Otherwise no one’s death will have meaning."

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Quieting Heart: Attempt #29
Presented by Dance Elixir & SFIAF

The Quieting Heart project is a series of situation-based works that began in 2010 at a residency in an Austrian farmhouse. Quieting Heart has since enjoyed presentations in Amsterdam, New York City, New Orleans and Detroit. Each work in the series is a container: a space to research silence and visibility from the witness perspective. Each work is referred to as “an attempt”, and is ordered using only prime numbers (divisible by 1 and itself.) Each attempt is an immediate response to location and situation, taking the form of live performance, film and/or documented research. QH: Attempt #5, a fixed perspective dance film, received the 501ARTS.com Intersection Exhibition- Best of Oakland Award in 2010.

Quieting Heart: Attempt #29 for the San Francisco International Arts Festival 2011 is a duet for Tawil and experimental guitarist Ava Mendoza. They will play out questions of cultural significance versus signifier, while also regarding the relationship of witness/location within the context of this multi-national artistic forum.

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Leyya Mona Tawil, Artistic Director of DANCE ELIXIR, Choreographer, Performer
Tawil was born in Detroit, MI to parents of Syrian and Palestinian descent. She received her BDA in Dance from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, School of Music,, and her MFA in Choreography from Mills College-Oakland. Ms. Tawil has received numerous grants and awards including the prestigious University of Michigan Emerging Artist Award in 2008 and the 510 Arts - Best of Oakland award for her film "Quieting Heart: Attempt #5". Tawil has held teaching appointments at universities and colleges throughout the United States. She also co-directs the Temescal Arts Center, a venue for experimental performance in Oakland, California.

DANCE ELIXIR is a non-profit organization founded in 2003 in order to pursue a collaboration-based vision of contemporary dance creation and performance. Tawil's choreography for DANCE ELIXIR has been presented in 9 countries throughout Europe and the Arab World, and 17 cities in the United States, including engagements in Beirut, Damascus, Ramallah, Cairo, Amsterdam, Montreal and New Orleans. They have an extensive record of production in New York City, Detroit and San Francisco/Oakland, as well as academic residencies nationwide.

Muhanad Rasheed, Composer, Performer
Muhanad Rasheed recently won the 2010 Dutch Dance Days Promising Choreographer award, granted to one artist each year in Holland. His recent work, Mourning, commissioned by Internationaal Danstheater Netherlands (IDT), also received the Swan Award for Best Dance Production in Holland 2010.

Mr. Rasheed currently lives in the Netherlands, where in 2008 he was offered political asylum. Born in Baghdad, he studied theatre at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad. His company, Iraqi Bodies, won the Jury Prize at the 2007 Theatre Festival in Jordan. Their first production, Crying of My Mother, had its European premiere in the 2007 Dancing on the Edge Festival (NL), followed by tours throughout Europe and the Middle East. In 2008, Mr. Rasheed was interviewed by Deborah Amos for a feature on NPR’s "All Things Considered" radio broadcast.

Ava Mendoza, Guitarist, Composer
Mendoza plays in a wide variety of groups-- heavy rock/free jazz/improvised music/contemporary classical. Her solo work draws from early country and blues tunes, reinterpreted in her own unique manner. Mendoza treads a wobbly line between melodicism, atonality and sonic abstraction. She develops specific tunes/riffs/compositional ideas, and then throws musical monkey wrenches into them live, forcing them to self-destruct and collide with free improvisation. She has performed with scores of ensembles and artists, including SF Sound, Moe! Staiano, Mike Watt, Philip Greenlief, Liz Albee, and Theater of Yugen to name a few. Mendoza currently resides in Oakland, California.