New performance work by Leyya Mona Tawil in collaboration with Zari Lionudakis and John MacDougall Parker

Friday, Saturday, Sunday
August 14-16, 2026
Friday at 7pm
Saturday and Sunday at 2pm

ASL Interpretation Saturday, August 15 only.
Haptic Tour and Audio Description Sunday, August 16 only. Haptic Tour begins at 1pm.

EastSide Cultural Center
2277 International Boulevard, Oakland
Eastside Arts Alliance is ADA accessible.

Tickets: https://bit.ly/LAIR-LeyyaTawil
$20 general; $10 students/seniors (NOTAFLOF)

What does happiness mean in a time of genocide and collapse? Entering each day anew, what is our capacity for joy, grief, resistance, chance? In a world of relentless horrors, and borders constructed by violence, we stand at a crossroads, questioning what is ending and what is beginning. DANCE ELIXIR's Happy Days Finale is an invitation to explore these questions, in body and time.

Choreographer and sound artist Leyya Mona Tawil brings a thought-provoking energy to the stage; daring us to rethink what we know about resilience, mourning, and the power of collective action. She is joined onstage by dancer Zari Lionudakis, Tawil’s collaborator of over 20 years; and musician John MacDougall Parker, who performs an original and interactive sound score.

At the heart of Happy Days Finale is Tawil’s pioneering “choice-based choreography,” where each performance unfolds uniquely. The dance composition is driven by decisions that transform the work into an ever-evolving conversation between movement, space, and sound. Tawil calls it “an act of agility and adaptability,” - a dance that contains multiple truths with every iteration.

Happy Days Finale is an invitation to think critically and collaboratively, to explore how we, as a community, can face the challenges of today’s world. Tawil has created a space for performers and audiences to not only witness but actively participate in the process of worldbuilding —modeling new ways of being in an unpredictable world. Happy Days Finale proposes artists as visionaries and their work as potent tools for liberation, urging us to question, to mourn, and to labor.

Leyya Mona Tawil - Concept, Choreography, and Performance
Director of DANCE ELIXIR, Leyya Mona Tawil is an artist, performer, and cultural activist working in hybrid performance practices. Tawil is Palestinian and Syrian; engaged in the world as such. Her choreographies and sound projects have been commissioned and presented extensively throughout the states, Europe, and the Arab world. Highlights include engagements with The Lab (SF), YBCA (SF), Abrons Arts Center (NYC), Sibelius Museum (Turku), KONE Foundation (Helsinki), Wysing Arts/British Council (UK), Walk with Amal (Washington D.C.), Arab American National Museum (Dearborn) and she was nominated for a 2019 “Bessies” Award in Music (NYC). Tawil has stewarded TAC Temescal Art Center in Oakland since 1997, and is the founding director of Arab.AMP - a platform for worldbuilding artists from the Arab/SWANA diaspora and our allied communities.

Zari Lionudakis - Dance Collaborator and Performer
Zari Lionudakis is an artist and educator who challenges perceptions of either/or. A lone wolf in lineage, heritage and praxis, Zari's work in liminal space bleeds into her performance, technique classes, scholarship and healing modalities. The late historian Hayden White called Zari a "radical visionary," as every mode of Zari's work challenges existing notions of what "is." Whether ballet or vernacular, slang or scholarship, Zari uses languages that work towards liberation. She has performed extensively with DANCE ELIXIR since its founding in 2023, and has toured with Tawil throughout the states.

John MacDougall Parker - Music Collaborator and Performer
John MacDougall Parker creates improvisational future-folk compositions where sound is amalgamated and congealed into a resolution of crossed signals. He has devised instruments focused on the interface between humans and machines, which are arranged to make music in the moment. Parker, of American and Korean origin, floats between NYC, Seattle, and São Paulo. In the spirit of Charles Ives, Parker always made music alongside being a coach and former Olympic athlete. He began collaborating with Tawil in 2023.

Costumes by Scott Tallenger

DANCE ELIXIR's Happy Days Finale has received commissioning support from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation NEW Program and the East Bay Fund for Artists 2 at the East Bay Community Foundation. Photography by Isaac Kopecky