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: And I’m Nabra.
Marina: And we’re your hosts.
Nabra: 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: 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: 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 challenge norms and use their craft to further conversations about topics like identity, diaspora, homeland, and futurity.
Marina: On today’s episode, we’ll be discussing performance art on video with Khansa, who is a Lebanese multidisciplinary artist based in Beirut. A singer, dancer, songwriter, and choreographer, whose style draws on a wide range of influences, genres, and topics from the Middle East, Khansa redefines Middle Eastern avant-pop.
Marina: Khansa, it is incredible to have you here. I’m a huge fan and to be honest was just so thrilled that you agreed to be on the podcast, so thank you so much.
Khansa: Thank you so much, Marina and Nabra, for having me on your podcast. It’s a pleasure as well to me.
Marina: Let’s start by just having you describe yourself as an artist, because you do so many different things, and for those people who are tuning in who might not know the full body of your work, if you can just tell us a bit.
Khansa: Basically, I like to introduce myself as a music creator, a naturally born dancer, and also a performance artist who is still on a research journey to really get to know who I truly am. Even though all these years I’ve been doing a lot of interesting projects I’ve been really excited about, but it’s an ongoing journey where I constantly want to grow as an artist, I constantly want to learn and acquire new modes and… What do you call them? Mediums where I can explore my skills further. I’m multidisciplinary. I make Arabic music.
I’m into the pop direction, but also that directs my identity as an artist because I’m really influenced by traditional music and how I can bring it into to our modern time. I’m also known to be a belly dancer and a belly dance instructor. That’s my day job. I have my students, and I call them “my ladies,” because it’s also part of my research journey. That’s how I also practice as well, and I use that within my work. Everything I do goes into one direction. It’s the Khansa Project, which is Khansa is my family name actually as well. That persona that I just brought to the stage or on screen depends on the project. That’s who I am.
Marina: My new goal is to take your belly dancing class sometime in Beirut.
Nabra: I was thinking the exact same thing.
Khansa: Ahlan w sahlan [you are welcome]
Nabra: Can you take us back and tell us about your artistic journey? You make such unique art. We’re wondering how you got there. Where did you start, and how did you develop as an artist throughout your journey?
Khansa: For sure. It’s a very long journey. It’s a film on its own. It’s like a series, like a trilogy. It’s very tough to just summarize it all, but I’m going to try to get to the main events in my life. Obviously it started when I was young. I was always into performance. I was always the top student in my theatre classes and my music classes. It’s where my soul belonged. As a child, you know when you were super excited and this rush you feel on your skin when you are in drama class or you want to memorize a song and perform it to the teacher, I was constantly always in school excited to perform the end of the year show, which was always like a teacher comes and mentors you and gives you the chance to shine on stage.
I remember I’ve done crazy things as I was a kid. I impersonated Nancy Ajram. She’s probably the most famous pop singer in the Arab world. Actually when I was a kid, I did a theatre performance. It wasn’t really drag. I believe my teachers bought for me a small wig that looked nothing like Nancy, but still, I was lip-syncing, I was dancing, I was performing. There was really crazy activities I was doing as a kid and all my art teachers were like, “This is what this boy is going to become.” But then things changed when the serious stuff started to happen where I had to really focus on my studies and could think of what I want to do in university.
It wasn’t until I went to the first year of university when I met my vocal mentor, Layla Dabary, who everything I have in my life now, everything I do in my art, I owe to her because she is the person who changed my life. I went to university. I had no idea what I was signing up to. I didn’t understand what is this curriculum, what am I doing, who am I? Because in Lebanon and in this region, it’s really tough to study arts because it is a challenge coming from a community and a family that expects you to be a doctor or a mechanical engineer or something that just puts you up in society, as if being an artist is something that’s to be ashamed.
There wasn’t really a program where I felt like I can work on what I enjoy doing or enhance myself or to understand who I want to become. She taught me to build my own curriculum, so she kind of adopted me. She told me, “Come perform in my choir. I like your presence. I like how you use your characterization for the songs that we work on.” We were doing Porgy and Bess. We were doing Gershwin. We were doing Gilbert and Sullivan. We were doing really classical music theatre and also classical music projects. And she was like, “I want you to be part of that and I will be your mentor. You come to me every morning. I will train you. I will teach you theory. I will teach you sight reading. I will teach you piano.”
So I’m like, “Yallah, let’s do that.” It was that same year when we did the Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan, and it really required movement. It was natural in me that I loved to dance. I didn’t have the technique. I was eighteen. And she was like, “Listen, I think now that we’re going into that level of the arts, let’s go to ballet. You better find yourself good ballet classes.” So I’m like, “Okay.” I asked around here and there. I started looking into contemporary classes. I met this teacher, that teacher, and I started really going into classes. And then I found my two ballet teachers.
One of them is Patricia Mantura, who studied ballet teaching at the Royal Dance Academy in London, and George Angelus was the principal ballet instructor at Karakalla Dance Theatre in Lebanon. They built their own school. So I went there and same relationship, welcome. I was the only boy in class, and I was so committed to this class that I found myself in. I was like, “No way, no way. It’s so painful that I love it because it feels so right. It just feels so right to move.” I was just there, and I was so inspired, and it was so challenging. It was like, where am I? What’s this world? All these girls standing. Met so many friends, we’re so close now.
All these girls who changed my life because every single person, they were so caring and had comments to share. They all cemented my process, me, throughout my journey with the ballet classes. I was really, really practicing and practicing and pushed further and pushed further and further, and I was grasping so much. But I knew that I didn’t want to become a ballet dancer, and I had to use that to be on stage. So over time, I was just dancing and singing and doing all these performances, and it was once that I took a class with Rima Khcheich, who happens to be the student of my vocal teacher, and Rima’s famous for the traditional Arabic singing and how she performs it.
It was a survey of Middle Eastern music, and that was the turning point in my life where I realized, “Oh, so I don’t want to go to the States. I don’t want to go to London. I don’t want to go to the West to be part of what already exists, even if I can work so hard to be the best at it. I really like my identity. I like my heritage. I like my tradition. I like my culture.” And I really went into that research, and I realized I want to train in that. And there was clashes with me and my teacher. She was so by the book, “No, no, no, no, this is not how you sing it. You stick to classical. This is the technique. Arabic is going to destroy your voice.” We had always this argument. And then I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no. Let me go through my journey.”
So, I dropped out of university, and I was just jumping here and there, workshops here and there, training in this, training in that, doing aerial classes. I just took everything. I also was acting during that time. I worked with so many different directors. I was just working on my language. Everything I would take, I knew that I was going somewhere. And then I decided to debut my project, Khansa, as me, as Khansa, going on stage with my band, with my team, with everyone, using elements, building some sort of an eclectic performance and persona that’s based on everything I’ve learned, every single detail. I can go throughout my show and tell you where this came from and who inspired me for that, which play I participated in that inspired me for that.
For example, one of the plays that changed my life was the one I did with Sahar Assaf, Rituals of Signs and Transformations, where I was introduced to Sufi. Ever since that play, I always open the show with a monologue from that play and me Sufi whirling. Everything I do ever since that transition in my life became part of who I’m as an artist, and everything I learned goes within that framework. Basically, yeah, it is a long journey. There’s a lot of details, but I tried as much as I can to get you really close to it because it was a lot of hard work, a lot of commitment, a lot of sacrifices, a lot of tears, a lot of sweat and a lot of joy. But looking back, as much as I’m my crazy perfectionist, I’m very grateful and content and I’m very grateful and thankful for the people who were there by my side and who inspired me to also be where I am today.
When you go into the Russian theatre, you learn method acting, you learn Chekhovian technique, you learn all these techniques, but then you use it in your own language.
Nabra: And we will absolutely wait for the movie trilogy to get all the details, because I’m hooked. I have to see that trilogy.
Marina: Yeah. I was like, oh, I didn’t think Gershwin and Porgy and Bess and ballet were going to come up in this conversation. I also love what you said, “Okay, great, I like these classic things. I can be really good at all of these. I am good at these things, but actually my heritage and all of the other aspects are things I’m interested in fusing together.” It feels, when I see your work, it’s fusing.
Khansa: Literally, because when I used to be on stage, I was singing stuff like “on a tree by a river, a little taunted singing willow”—That was my world. And then I’m like, “What am I doing? I’m an Arab. Thank you, that’s great technique.” But I learned something that’s important. Because all these incredible artists that we study from the West, they’ve created curriculums and techniques that… It’s like acting. When you go into the Russian theatre, you learn method acting, you learn Chekhovian technique, you learn all these techniques, but then you use it in your own language.
That’s what I’m doing. I’m learning all of that. And I want to learn the production. I want to learn the lyrical writing that Berkeley teaches and the American system for American songs to see how I can use that for my language. And then you have a new language that’s there. It’s really fascinating what cross-culture, really, when you just start learning from here and there without having to really committing to the practice and forgetting about your background. To me, my background comes first, and then the technique serves that background. That’s who I am as an artist, and that’s what shapes my work. Every time new things come up, it’s literally a new dance and new language and new persona.
Marina: I love that so much. And it ties into the next question that I wanted to ask. I first watched one of your music videos in my Arabic class, shout out to Ustaz Ramzi at Stanford, and I was blown away. “Khayef,” it’s an amazing video. For people who are listening, we’ll link it in our transcript. But I believe it’s based on a rendition of a classical Egyptian song by Mohammed Abdel Wahab. That feels like a great example of what you’re talking about, and we see your amazing dancing in it.
Can you describe a bit of the video to those who are listening? And also, what inspired you to make this particular video?
Khansa: First, there was class where I was learning to sing classical Arabic, and one of my assignments was to memorize the song by Mohammed Abdel Wahab. And the way I was taught the song was very traditional with nasal, and you really need to enunciate the words and do this and that. But then I’m like, “Okay, but how would Khansa do that?” I’m like, “Let’s talk about identity.” Which means let’s go and understand how can we… I don’t want to do a cover and just sing. To me, the voice is not enough. Everything. I want to use everything. I want to use my story, I want to use my emotions, my body, my voice, my aesthetics. I envision something specific. It was that time where I worked with Mohammed Sabah, the director. We were working on his film. He asked me to come and dance in his film.
I was like, “I will do that, but do you want to collaborate?” It’s give and take situation. Like, “Listen, I’ll do that with you, but I want to collaborate also. I like your work. I think you’re so sensitive, and I think we both went through something that I think you are the person who, as a director, you can really channel that idea.” So we were like, “Yeah.” We finished his film and then we met. I was like, “Yallah, let’s meet. Let’s talk.” I gave him the song, and he was touched by it, and he was like, “It makes a lot of sense because it doesn’t sound like the classic, but it feels like there’s something with the sound, with the way it just went into this dark space and the way it was performed with this.” Because when you listen to Abdul Wahab and the classical Arabic, there’s a man singing here.
Here’s there’s something in between, there’s something more sensitive, and we emulated that in the sound. He was like, “Let’s think about the words and think about the story. And then I’m like, “Listen, I want to tell you, what I see for this video is just my story that I was allowed… When I was a kid, it was okay for everyone to watch me dance and it was so entertaining for our guests.” And he was like, “Yeah.” He went through this as well. I’m like, “Yes.” And then we opened this conversation with other friends. We’re like, “Yes, yes, this is something that we’ve all lived.” I’m like, “Then let’s talk about this.” I’m like, “Listen… It used to be okay for me to come and dress and show my makeup in front of the guests,” but I do remember having a conversation I had with my dad.
He was like, “Remember this person who once visited us when you were a kid, and we called him when he saw you first dance?” I’m like, “Yes.” “Remember when three years later or four years later, he came back and we asked you to come and dance again? He wasn’t happy and he felt like I’m not becoming the man they expect me to become.” I remembered that story my dad told me. And I’m like, “Let’s talk about this in this video because the song says خايف اقول اللي فقلبي ‘I’m afraid to speak what’s in my heart,’ تتقل وتعاند ويايا ‘that you will reject me.’” There’s a lot of sensitivity that the story itself speaks about. My friend, Mohammed Sabah, the director, decided to create that story. Because as a director, he was also a storyteller. He was studying the story of us as kids. Not just me or him, it’s all of us. That’s why I spoke to a lot of people.
Where it was okay for you to be who you are when you were a kid, but then when you grow older and your body changes and your voice changes and your features change, for some reason it becomes not okay, and it becomes rejected. But then we break it near the end by the importance of celebrating that difference and celebrating and embracing who you are and accepting. We just don’t want to stick to that issue. You know what I mean? We don’t want to stay there. That’s the only way you can evolve and you can transcend and you can become great at what you do, is by really just taking all that trauma and pain and turning it into a celebration. And it was just a very modest celebration with the makeup, with the outfits, with everything near the end. It was just so simple. That’s the video.
Nabra: Thank you so much for that description. And yes, everyone needs to check out the video, of course. Also listening to the classic song and seeing those comparisons and hearing from you is really interesting. As you said, you blend all these different elements—music, lyrics, choreography, visuals—and a lot of your work comes out through music videos as well as you talked about live performance, but of course, we’ve seen a lot of the music videos and the videos themselves are a piece of art on their own, along with the music, along with the choreography, there’s so many elements there.
Can you talk about the process of bringing together those elements? Do they all come to you simultaneously, or do you have one of them that comes first and then you build upon that? How do you make these multidisciplinary pieces?
Khansa: I like this process question. It’s very rare that someone asked me this question. Because I always like to talk about the process, but I’m going to try to make it brief. There’s so many different ways. It’s like when you say you want to produce a song and music production, there’s always, you either start with a beat, you either start with the melody, you either start with an idea, you either record the melody on your phone, you hum it. Or you either have a chord progression. There’s so many ways. Same thing with my work because it’s very multidisciplinary. There’s a lot of different mediums coming in together. Like Aristotle says, “prosody.” I think that everything has to come together and unite as a one work so that it can just be that one final project. And that’s where my direction goes. Sometimes I’m inspired by a visual or a story. The last music video I did with the chains, it was when I was practicing on aerial and I learned aerial chain.
I learned how to climb and use my body and use that within the work, not just as an acrobatic circus performance, but rather how can I use that within this context, within the story. And I slept on it. I was like, “That’s it.” But then I wrote a song five years ago. It was one of the first few songs I’ve written, on a keyboard. And then we produced it, and then when we finished it we’re like, “I do see this, and I do see a chandelier, and I feel like there’s something that can come in between.” And then with the words, I started to connect the words with the idea of the chandelier, and then I started to develop the idea further, and I would sleep on it. And then when I was touring for our film “Warsha,” I went to Korea, and there I was introduced to a lot of the crazy artists and I was advised to watch some of their works. I came across Bibi, she’s a pop artist, and I watched her very interesting music video for “Animal Farm,” and there was a very violent scene.
And then I’m like, “Wait, I know blood might be aggressive and too much for the audience to handle.” But I’m like, “Yeah, but our country, but our land, but our past, we’ve lived through wars, we’ve seen blood, it’s all around us. So it makes sense for it to be there. Here and there, and here and there, and here, there. Does it make sense? Does it work? Does it tell the story right? Does it fit? Does it feel genuine? Does it feel authentic? It’s just like one of those things where you know when something’s too much, when you need to scratch and stop. It’s the same thing. But yet it’s never perfect because it could always be something else. It’s this constant process. But again, that’s just an example of the different methods that I personally like. For example, now I know there are some videos I want to create, there are some scenarios I want to write or some ideas want to explore and to video work and to music, and I want to really put the whole work out.
Think of it as a dream and a vision that you get, and you know that this is how you see it. And everything that you come across through your research, through just a conversation with a friend, through a film scene, your mind starts to put that image, that sound, and then you work so hard to make sure that you want to aim high. You want everything that you are working on to get to that point. But when you work with the best artists around you and you really aim high through the team that you surround yourself with, and everyone is so passionate, they take it to a next level and then they show you things you did not expect. And then this is when you take a different route, and this is when you develop and develop, so the work becomes more complex and more layered, yet refined, yet simple, but united. But you as an artist, your job here is to really direct and to really unite this work. You are creating that process where all the elements come together to serve that one single vision that you have.
That’s what I believe, and that’s a standard in my work, and everyone who works with me knows how I think about that. So they give me the full trust. They’re like, “Oh, okay, once Khansa’s doing this, we know what he’s doing.” But I do listen, because I have this thing—okay, fine, I work on myself. I like to study, I like to learn—but I also listen. I need to listen. I need to grow. I’ve learned music and about the arts and about fashion, about everything in the industry and film, through my friends, through my teamwork, through the directors I worked with. I give my stuff. I try to avoid this, “Oh, but I know.” Know nothing. I’m learning from everyone. That’s the beauty of the journey. Every single time, every single project.
I hope I’m not talking too much because I’m enjoying the questions so much because it’s very rare that I get these questions. They always ask about other things and I’m like khalas can we not?
Really creating that fantasy where I was even dancing on the chandelier, I transformed into a different time, into a different space. It wasn’t used here as circus skill. It was used as an emotion, and that’s how I use it throughout the show.
Nabra: No, this is amazing. It’s a podcast to hear about you, so you should talk a lot. But it’s exciting to hear what you were saying because it is very clear that there’s this clear vision within all of these complex elements that are coming together, so hearing you talk about that makes perfect sense as to why it comes together in this very cohesive piece, although they’re integrating so many of these elements. And I’m so also glad that you talked about the chandelier, because when I saw that image, I was like, “How does a person think about doing aerial on a chandelier?” I’ve never seen that before. And it’s just the most beautiful and incredible visual, and I was just blown away by that. I love that you talked about your journey around that a little bit.
Khansa: The thing about the aerial chandelier, because when I was studying aerial, when I was training, we had Seanna Sharpe. She used to teach and work in New York City. She came to Beirut and she built her own program. It was Urban Circus, and she was teaching us how to perform for immersive experience in clubs. That was a thing that I enrolled in her program, and we became partners where I would go perform with her at clubs. Actually, that’s how I funded my first music video. I was performing at one of the biggest clubs in Beirut as her partner on aerial. We were doing a duo act on chains, and they paid us. And then five hours later, I hit the venue with the set where we were filming, and I gave the producer money. I was like, “Please, let’s finish the work.” It was a very nice time back then.
I really wanted to focus on the chains and the aerial, not just from the perspective of, “Oh, look at my lines. Oh, look that I can do this.” The acrobats. Just like ballet, which when I took ballet, I didn’t want become a ballet dancer. I focus on belly dance because that style really connects you to your roots and really connects you to that feeling where it’s really about the emotions and it’s really about the movement. How can you tell a story without having to show too much, without having to try so hard and split and do all these acrobatic acts. Great, that’s great, physique, but there’s something that’s more in depth. Same perspective to aerial where I felt like I’m interested. The idea of aerial in my show is the transcendence.
It’s like the fantasy I create to my audience. Oh, we’re now going up to the sky; I will literally go up to the sky. I want to feel the pain; I’m feeling the pain, I’m literally feeling the pain on the chains. Because it has to make sense with what I’m saying it. It’s not just like, “Oh, look at what I’m doing.” It always has to be on point as in, that’s enough. The point is there. Same thing with the chandelier. It’s basically in the video, it’s a dinner. It’s a dinner between me and a person, and this character is celebrating this crazy crime that they committed. It’s just an idea of toxicity, how toxic can we be. It gives us really venting out kind of experience. To me, I really wanted, how toxic can you be? How can you really push that into a dramatic performance? So, nothing but really creating that fantasy where I was even dancing on the chandelier, I transformed into a different time, into a different space. It wasn’t used here as circus skill. It was used as an emotion, and that’s how I use it throughout the show.