Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba.

Ashtar Muallem’s Awalem/Cosmos is a one-woman performance infused with text, music, and aerial arts performance, co-written by Ashtar Muallem, and co-written and directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Muallem, who has toured the production around the world, performs the work in Arabic, English, and French. I attended this production in Portland, Oregon, at the AWOL Dance Collective, produced by BOOM Arts on Saturday, March 1^st, 2025, after attending a movement workshop with Muallem earlier that day.

A self-described Jerusalemite artist who navigates life between Palestine and France, Muallem bills Awalem/Cosmos as “a one-woman theatrical performance” (Cosmos English). In the press materials, she describes the show thus,

Ashtar practices yoga, and meditation, and explores tarot reading and hypnosis on the internet. Her elastic body mirrors her dual life, between two countries, cultures, and languages, between solitude and togetherness. In a satirical manner, she presents her beliefs, inviting us to participate in a ceremony where poetry blends with humour and subjectivity merges with the universal. Through Ashtar’s art, we embark on a journey of balance, contradictions, and the beauty of interconnectedness. (Cosmos English)

The audience enters to Muallem sitting in the lotus position wearing a white blouse tied at the waist and black yoga pants on a large white cloth pooled on the stage, which also ascends high above her to the rafters. She performs several actor vocal exercises and speaks casually to the audience as they take their seats, asking if they are comfortable and whether anyone has practiced yoga or meditation. She then asks everyone to inhale and exhale together, “to get into the group’s atmosphere” (YouTube). This metaphor of “inhale, exhale” becomes central to the piece as it progresses. Muallem begins the actual performance with a Tibetan singing bowl, which she rings and circles with a mallet while laying on her side.

                  She tells the audience she is neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim, nor from the East or West. “I abdicated duality and saw that the two worlds aren’t but one. Everything is one,” she states. She then begins a series of exercises with a yoga stretching strap while she speaks about the primacy of the body and the need for harmony between the body, soul, and spirit. She tells the audience of her grandmother, a religious woman who wanted Muallem to be like her, a “prayer addict” living in Jerusalem, a city of peace with a market filled with the smells of za’atar, sumac, sesame, and curry. However, despite the beauty of the city, there was a tension that convinced her at the age of eighteen to leave her country to study circus in France. She spends months in the new country, unable to speak the language until she attends a pro-Palestine rally where she hears the shouts “Free Palestine! Victory to Palestine!” There, she is asked about the history of her country and explains the 1948 War, the 1967 War, the division of Jerusalem into quarters, and the occupation zones that dictate where Palestinians are allowed to live or travel under occupation. When asked by foreigners what the solution is to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she says: “The solution is simple. It is within us.” (YouTube)

                  Although never mentioned, her tenure in France seemed to coincide with the COVID-19 lockdown, leaving her with a hopeless feeling that she would never be allowed to perform theatre again. She flirted with the idea of becoming a YouTube influencer but found little success. With her vanishing hope, she came to study Zen and its koan “You cannot control external circumstances. Pain is a part of life” (YouTube). She learns that everything happens for a reason and that there is a predestiny at work.

                  Music begins, and she performs a beautifully choreographed aerial sequence as she ascends the silk and performs gravity-defying maneuvers. Suddenly, she stops, pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and smokes high above the stage floor. “Are you surprised that I’m smoking?” she asks. “I have plenty of time to burn” (YouTube). She says that her true lover, solitude, complements her as she cooks, reads, dances, and repeats affirmations in her lockdown. She realizes she is a vortex of creativity and creates rituals where she hugs and kisses herself, sometimes cradling and speaking baby talk to her own leg as she would an actual baby. She watches a tarot reader named Estelle online who always predicts correctly. She also learns to read the aura surrounding people by crossing her eyes and looking directly at them; a technique she employs on the actual audience watching the production.

She then tells us that she finds that some people have blockages, and that men are told not to cry and they, in turn, tell their children not to cry either. To remedy this, she pulls a male audience member from the audience and leads them upstage right to a table with a chopping block and a chef knife, where they sit on a chair facing the audience. She produces a basket of onions and tells the participant to cut them until they are done. “You will cry freely and I will move freely” she says. As a mournful Arabic song plays, she dances, returns to the aerial silk, ascends, and performs a balletic dance high above the stage with unbelievable accuracy and speed. When she descends and escorts the man from the stage, she tells us how we, like the onion, are constituted of many layers, with each layer representing an identity we have assigned ourselves. “For us to access our truths,” she states, “we need to peel off these layers.” (YouTube)^[1]

She repeats a mantra, “Those who never cry are full of tears” (YouTube). She says she has seen too many men carrying weapons, but too few who cry. “I wonder if men let their tears fall then perhaps our world would be washed from all the wars?” she asks. She then breaks into a humorous infomercial voice as “Ashtar the Influencer,” urging audiences to purchase onions in the lobby. Her last words are “May peace be upon you. Namaste.”

Muallem’s embodied performance of physical and vocal mastery, her congenial tone, her direct address, and her spiritual quandaries combine to make Cosmos/Awalem an enjoyable and thoughtful evening of performance. It is clear that she is exploring her role as an artist in the world and her life as a woman, as a Palestinian, and as a spiritual seeker in the hopes of unravelling her complicated emotions regarding the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, war, and occupation. Perhaps, instead of an onion, a more apt metaphor might be the artichoke. One may not cry while peeling an artichoke, but each layer peeled leads not to tears, but to the heart. After all is said and done, isn’t that the journey Muallem has asked us to take during this poignant evening of performance?