MONDAY OR TUESDAY
CONTEMPORARY DANCE, PERFORMANCE
WORK IN PROGRESS // 2021 - ONGOING
> Collaborators:
Dramaturgical Consultant: Francesca Pedullà
Outside Eye: Karima Mansour
Musician: Zizi Ibrahim
> Supported by:
Canada Council for the Arts, LOJIQ
> Residencies:
Circuit-Est (2022), Cairo Contemporary Dance Center (CCDC, 2022 - 2023), ArtsUnite UnMute Residency (2021)
> Exhibitions & Events:
upRising Up Festival (Puglia, Italy, 2022), Bancs d’essai (Circuit-Est, Montréal, 2022), Cairo Contemporary Dance Center (CCDC, 2023)
Monday or Tuesday is an honest revelation of my inner world. It is a memoir told through my body. At once a celebration and recognition of my female figure, this dance sheds a light on critical phases of transition such as coming of age in 90’s Cairo and growing into womanhood in 2010’s Montreal, and somehow existing in a liminal space that is neither fully here nor quite there.
In a choreographed rite of passage, I re-live those moments of transition that have cradled and centered me from girlhood to womanhood. On this quest, I summon an ancient grandmotherly wisdom to guide and ground me. Reflecting on my relationship to home, my body being the steadiest one, I seek a truth that encompasses polarities, borders, and divisions, a center that exists between my two limbs. There, I find a pelvis.
Following the footsteps of many authors and artists, I keep a journal - the earliest of which dates back to the year 2000. In a process akin to psychoanalysis and intentional confrontation, I use my 52 journals from the past two decades as sources of self-reflection, triggers of memory, and tools for reliving, understanding, and forgiving my past. I go back in time to find my presence on an ever-shifting ground. I befriend the contrasts within me and attempt to balance them. I grieve many deaths and welcome many births, including parts of my own self. Encountering a rhythm that opens and closes, I expose intimate vulnerabilities and unveil layers of femininity, so I may eventually celebrate the entirety of my fragmented self. While animated by waves of intensity, the impalpability of the past, memory, and dreams, this solo is also concerned with the rituals of the everyday and the events that fall on a given “Monday or Tuesday”. The pages of my journals document my unyielding child-like search for magic which the monotony of a Monday followed by a Tuesday fails to muffle.
“Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there...”
- Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction
Monday or Tuesday was presented as a work in progress at Bancs d’essai, Circuit-Est in Montreal, upRising Up Festival in Puglia, and more recently at the Cairo Contemporary Dance Center following a residency in collaboration with live musician Zizi Ibrahim.
credits
PHOTOS BY: Roxanne Ross, Sima Ajlyakin, Adriano / VIDEO 001 BY: Hazem Madbouly & MUSIC BY: Youssef Abouzeid / VIDEO 002 & MUSIC BY: Youssef Abouzeid / ILLUSTRATION BY: Laila Ait B.
GALLERY
projects
PROJECTS
ABOUT
about me
Mona El Husseini is a dancer and visual artist, based between Montreal and Cairo. She completed her dance education at the Cairo Contemporary Dance Center (CCDC) in Egypt and studied International Business and Contemporary Dance at Concordia University.
Since 2018, Mona has been choreographing and performing her own projects and dancing for other choreographers. Most recently she danced for Zab Maboungou / Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata as part of Mozongi Traces et Memoires Boite Chorégraphique in collaboration with La Fondation Jean-Pierre Perrault, and performed Mozongi in Yellowknife. She has also danced for MAAT dance company by Karima Mansour in Cairo and has collaborated with other choreographers such as Camille Lacelle Wisley, Meryem Alaoui, Libertad Pozo Rodriguez, and Olivier Dubois in Cairo and Montreal. She teaches contemporary dance, barre, and pilates in professional training programs and open-level workshops. Her pieces have been performed in Egypt, Germany, Italy, and Canada and in 2023 she was the recipient of the CAM+MAI joint support fellowship in dance. Her dance vocabulary is influenced by a decade-long training in Shaolin Kung Fu and Aikido as well as traditional Congolese and West African dance and
In 2023, Mona premiered Creatrix, a dance duet with her mother, and published Family Portraits, a graphic memoir and visual art series at the MAI (Montréal, Arts Interculturels), and presented them at the IFE (Institut Français d’Egypte) in Alexandria and Cairo the following year. She is currently developing Monday or Tuesday, a dance solo, and Rabbet Manzel // House Goddess, a visual art series.
In 2018, Mona had a performing role in When Arabs Danced, a TIFF- and FIFA-featured documentary film by Jawad Rhalib, and in 2024, she was the lead actress in Clermont-Ferrand featured short film ‘Mango’ by director Randa Ali. She was the choreographer of ‘Mama,’ a theatre piece by Nathalie Doummar, which was presented in 2022 at Théâtre Duceppe and at Festival Juste Pour Rire in Montreal.
Artistic Approach
In her artistic process, Mona goes beyond dance and traces the thread that connects the different art forms she practices including visual arts and writing. She is fascinated by the tangible and intangible layers that move a body and is interested in how stories are transmitted, shared, and told through the body across generations. She finds magic in the mundane and fosters intergenerational collaborations with artists and non-artists alike. She continues to search for dance in the encounter between the intimate and the collective, the traditional and the contemporary, and in the space where the inner and outer meet.