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)
My inspirations include a myriad of women who have likewise gone through intense phases of emotional turmoil; some of which include Anaïs Nin, Virginia Woolf, and Louise Bourgeois. By reading their diaries and stories, I find a gentle guidance beyond time and space. While my essence is animated by waves of intensity, it is balanced by the mundane and repetitive events that fall on a typical Monday or Tuesday. The pages of my journals document my contradicting nature which the monotony of days 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
Following the footsteps of those authors and artists, I keep a journal - the earliest of which dates back to the year 2000. This project was born out of a latent curiosity to revisit my past journals and a desire to create something in partnership with them in the present. In a process akin to psychoanalysis and intentional confrontation, I use them as resources for self-reflection, triggers of memory, and tools for creation. The process of getting intimate with my diaries and my past led me to a practice of healing, acknowledgement, and forgiveness.
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.
This quest is inspired by the cyclical repetition of time and the transformations that unfold in the realm of the in-between. The journals allow me to go back in time to find my presence in an ever-shifting ground. I grieve many deaths and welcome many births, all my own. I expose intimate vulnerabilities and unveil layers of femininity, so I may eventually celebrate the entirety of my fragmented self.
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, collaborating with other dance artists such as Zab Maboungou, Karima Mansour, Olivier Dubois, and Meryem Alaoui as a choreographer and performer, and teaching 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 she is the recipient of the 2023 CAM+MAI joint support fellowship in dance.
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.