Stephanie Kayal

Stephanie Kayal (1989, Lebanon) is a choreographer and performing artist based between Beirut and Brussels. Through subtle dark humor and a cold irony, she employs in her work dance, music, and texts to reflect on contemporary human confusion and our longing for meaning and context. She relies on personal testimonies and current events local to Beirut and the region as a doorway to question, accept, forgive, fathom, understand, baby-sit, grasp, examine, investigate, dissect, decipher, navigate, contemplate, dog-walk, and console this worldwide, if not intergalactic absurdity.

She recently premiered at NEXT Festival (Belgium) her second creation Galactic Crush (2022), a dance performance plagued by themes of superpowers, anti-heroes, and naivety in times of hopelessness. It echoes the end-of-times situation in Lebanon right now, and is a loosely connected sequel to her debut work Evidence of Things Not Seen (2021), a performance about a family living with phantom limb syndrome, haunted by dance and its own past.

She launched her new installation performance The Time It Took You To Realize It Was a Dream (2023) at KIOSK in Ghent. It is the first in a series of live installations to follow.

Her dance projects have been selected for residencies and grants such as Sundance Theatre Lab, Culture Resource Production Grants, Zoukak Mentorship Program and Support Grant, Mophradat’s Art Time residency, Kunstencentrum BUDA, Frankfurt Moves & KFW Stiftung, DiR - Fabrik moves Potsdam.

For the past few years, she has been leading dance workshops in various festivals and has been collaborating as a performer with different artists and dance companies with whom she performed in Europe, South America and Mena region.