One Body, One Soul
Performance at Last Frontier NYC, Friday 23 Jan at 7pm
One Body, One Soul is an experimental interdisciplinary performance work that disrupts traditional ballet narrative by investigating the legendary partnership of Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. It blends choreography, poetry and projections by Leila Lois. Rather than creating conventional tribute or documentary work, this project subverts classical ballet’s historical reverence by using her contemporary body as a site of investigation—fragmenting, embodying, and reimagining the archive through collision of non-fiction poetry, live choreography, archival projection, and collaborative soundscape. Leila’s work disrupts the orthodoxy and Westernised balletic tradition with narrative more vital to her experience, and Fonteyn and Nureyev’s truths.
This work asks: How do displaced artists find home? What does partnership look like when the world around you is unstable? Behind Fonteyn and Nureyev’s glittering performances lay two displaced souls—Nureyev fleeing Soviet oppression, Fonteyn carrying expectations as a Brazilian-Celtic woman navigating international ballet culture. Leila’s poetry collection investigates their partnership through displacement, artistic obsession, and the search for home in another body. As Kurdish diasporic/hybrid identity dancer, Leila has been exploring this milieu, with her body and her writing.
Using archival material from NYPL archives and original music by Anita Haack.
Leila Lois is a writer and dancer of Kurdish-Celtic origin based in Melbourne, Australia. She has poetry, essays and short stories published internationally for publications including LA Review of Books, Honey Literary Journal and Cordite. She is also published in several anthologies, most recently “Sleeping in the Courtyard: Kurdish Writers in Diaspora”, edited by Holly Mason Badra and published by University of Arkansas Press.
@leilaloisdances_ on Instagram