Loading ...“I Listen to the Land Beneath Me”: 40 Minutes with Leyya Mona Tawil
By: Layan Srour / Arab America Contributing Writer
Leyya’s artistry is a world of movement, sound, and resilience. A Syrian and Palestinian born in Detroit and now rooted in Oakland, California, her creative journey spans music, dance, and experimental performance. She founded Arab.AMP—a platform for experimental live art from the SWANA diaspora and beyond. Her work, whether through her projects and persona Lime Rickey International, challenges audiences to witness, reflect, and engage.
How did you begin Arab.AMP?
In 2016, I founded Arab.AMP and created a performance character named Lime Rickey International. I was placing Lime Rickey in the context of Arabic experimentalism and Arab futurism. People kept asking what that was. At that point, I had produced an “essay” about Arabic experimentalism. But realized there needs to be a portal for us all to find each other. We need to find the people who are pushing into forms of our culture, our media, music, and performance.
Arab.AMP is a platform for experimental music, live art, and ideas from the SWANA diaspora, the region, and our allied communities. I try to specifically platform live art forms—dance, performance art, music, sound art, or time-based anything.
What about your upbringing influenced your journey into the arts?
I played piano and cello growing up. Music has always been part of any study of dance. They’re inextricably linked. Studying dance was my way of learning about music and the world. It’s my way of synthesizing the world. I synthesize things through my body. I went to the University of Michigan Ann Arbor for dance and then moved to California and launched my independent artist career as a choreographer. I earned my Master of Fine Arts in Choreography at Mills College.
During that time, I was also working with composers. My choreographic process includes hearing the dance. I would make the dance, I knew what it sounded like, and then I would need the music made. I did this verses the traditional way people think about dances: music comes first and then dance. So, I always looked for composers that could understand what I was talking about. It was basically co-composing with my collaborators. I was really learning about how musicians think about composition. There was like no leap in my brain when my dancing started looking like musicianship.
I had a project called Destroy// All Places which is built with a dance and music score, in conversation with location. I’d show up in a city and work with local musicians and local dancers to build a dance in a day. I would build the dance and work with the musicians on the composition. In the evening, we performed the ‘destruction of the dance’. The musicians and the dancers would follow the score which would lead them to ‘destroy’ the performance through various tactics.
In 2016, I started singing in the studio. I consider singing a variation of crying. “Lime Rickey” is a refugee story and 2016 was a really hard year, much like the current ones we are in. I was trying to transform weeping into singing and then singing into music. My connection to contact mics and sonifying objects was a process of necessity. I need to talk to the land and the land is underneath my feet. How am I going to get the land to speak to me? I used mics to have a conversation with the floor underneath me. My process was driven by metaphor versus composition.
How has Detroit shaped your identity as a performer? As an Arab?
Music, in all its forms, is part and parcel to being a Metro-Detroiter. Music was always part of the fabric. It is part of the air. Detroit is always doing its thing. Dance, music, gatherings, underground gatherings, overground gatherings, and just making it happen, even if there are zero resources. That was part of being in Detroit, not only for music but also being a Detroiter. We just make it happen.
That’s also part of being part of an immigrant community. Whether we have or don’t have resources, language barriers, access points, or cultural recognition, we’re just going to make things happen. We have to, this is our new home. This is our reality. That attitude is not unique to Detroit, but it’s very, very strong in Detroit. That’s part of what makes me and why I do sixteen hundred things all the time!
As for being Arab, I took a lot for granted growing up, quite honestly. There was always Arabic food and the Arabic language around. But there was the dichotomy of “are they Arab or are they American?” I grew up in a generation of assimilators. We were trying to be American. In being American, it wasn’t about hiding. It was just more about survival or success. It was about being safe.
It’s like that David Foster Wallace phrase when a fish asks, “What is water?” Another fish answers, “This is water.” You don’t know you’re in water, til you leave the water (Metro Arab Detroit). Basically, I realized that I had such a beautiful, full, Arab upbringing that was all around me. It was everywhere. We had Dearborn for food, groceries, and services. I didn’t think of how special it was until I was living in cities where I had to seek everything out – and it took me a long time to find my community (The Bay and New York).
Tell me about your piece “Atlas”. How do you incorporate your Arab identity within your performance pieces?
Mike Khoury (Palestinian composer and violin player) and I began working together in 2006 – almost 20 years ago. Our conversations on dance, music, space, and time really influenced how I think about composition and improvisation.
Our duo work “Atlas” is about burden. It’s about placing a burden on the audience. Mike does that sonically through sounds and silences. I do that physically through this endurance ritual of rolling. I use a lot of endurance themes and concepts in my work; endurance as a way of dealing with resilience and looking at resilience in our bodies. For Atlas, I was looking at the relationship of resilience in relationship with an audience.
The first part of my dance score is to roll across the floor as fast as I can, for as long as I can. Sometimes it lasts 11 minutes, sometimes it lasts 17 minutes. It just depends on the floor and my health. That’s a lot to witness as an audience member. I’m basically demanding that they stay in the room and that they witness this aggressive act over and over and over again. It’s an aggressive act until I can take no more, which is usually way past when the audience can’t take anymore. People often get nauseous and nervous watching it. From there, I stand up and I try to do the “choreography” or the normal activities of humanness after enduring this long stretch.
At the time, when it premiered in 2014, it was in the wake of a different series of massacres in Gaza. Atlas attempted to place a burden on the audience and in essence, demand or interrogate empathy. The question is, “Are you just going to watch? Is all you can do watch? Is there anything you can do to help?” I consider this narrative to be very ‘Arab’. It’s very much in our culture. It’s how I live my life. You wake up, you look at the news, and you see what the people that you identify as yourself are going through. Then, you have to go on with your day. You don’t know if anyone that you run into that day is going to care the way you care. Or if they would do what you would do. What’s not Arab about that? That’s all of us—every day.
What challenges have you faced as an Arab American artist in the art industry?
Honestly, the most hardship and censorship I’ve faced was in academia. It’s a problematic space for Arabs. I think it’s also a problematic space for experimental discourse in opposition to the white cannon. I’ve had a lot of doors shut for those reasons. In the end, I see that I was trying to knock down doors. I stopped when I started to build my own queendom.
Some tangential challenges have been in funding, access, and legibility. Mike Khoury and I used to talk about “legibility” a lot because we self-identified our work as part of an Arab discourse. People would say. “What’s so Arab about that? That’s not Arab, that’s not our version of Arab.”
I feel like we (Arab experimentalists) have finally broken free of that in the last five years. I don’t think about legibility as much anymore because I’ve created these other portals and conversations through Arab.AMP. I know who my allies are. I know who my partnerships are in the world, nationally and internationally.
My challenge is not a challenge anymore. I’ve had roadblock after roadblock. I don’t need those roads. You take your own roads; I’m going to make my own roads.
What messages or emotions do you strive to convey through your work?
Perseverance and resilience. These are really important these days, of course, but they always have been. I’ve always been really into representing and leading by example. We are indestructible! It sounds egomaniacal, but this is what I want to carry into the world. We can make our own rooms. We can make our own roads. We can make our own and rebuild our own houses. That goes into the work.
Lime Rickey International uses voice, noise, and sound to create these conversations – conversations with herself or conversations with the future. That’s what I’m trying to do with all of my work. In her narrative, she sends and receives messages from her homeland. That’s why noise is important. I love shaping noise, cutting through noise, thickening it, and deploying it.
What advice would you give to Arab Americans aspiring to enter the art world?
Go hard on defining your own version of Arabicness, that’s it. Go hard on that. No one owns that but you.
About the Article and Author: Layan Srour, a Lebanese musician based in Detroit, Michigan, is passionate about blending her culture through music, research, and education in the United States. 40 Minutes With is a weekly feature where Layan interviews an Arab American musician, exploring their journey through music and culture in America. Connect with Layan on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or via email.
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