A brick building in Minneapolis decorated with a mural of hijabi mermaids is the space for the Soomaal House of Art, founded to bolster Somali creatives in Minnesota. Recently, a rehearsal there featured a new kind of performance.
Nadira Hussein and a cast of her siblings and friends sat on benches in the white-walled, minimalist art showroom. In front of them were two office chairs. Behind them was an entryway leading to a small green room with wardrobes and in-progress art projects.
They were rehearsing a performance that re-creates a Gaaf, a traditional Somali wedding afterparty during which participants respond to dares or challenges from a “soldier,” a role typically held by a family member.
The live performance will present a dramatized version of the event with the challenges focusing on dance, she said. For her, it’s a way to recapture a tradition she and many other members of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora have not had the opportunity to participate in.
Nadira’s brother, Diin Hussein, stood before the group holding a green plastic broom behind his shoulders. He began interrogating the cast members. “We have someone in the crowd that decided to lie to the bride today,” he said, clearly amused by his imaginary authority over his friends. “Does anyone recognize this letter?” He took out a laminated note, queuing the rest of the actors to pretend to gasp. A few audience members begin laughing. “Nah, I need my glasses,” one said.
Nadira steered them back to the script. “I think I saw the man who wrote it!” Diin continued. “…There was a man who wrote it! In fact, Khalid, your name is on the bottom!” Cheers and laughter erupted from the audience.
After more lines from Khalid Dahir, a dancer in the cast, Nadwa Hussein, the stage manager, cued a song on her iPad to begin a dance of rivals between Dahir and other performers.
Nadira, who was born in Minneapolis, said she appreciates ways of engaging with her culture, even while recognizing the distance she has from other aspects of the Somali diaspora.
“If I was just born back home [in Somalia], things would be a lot simpler,” she said. “But then sometimes I do appreciate being able to see things from the perspective I’m in, and also grow up with the people I grew up with. What did Kamala Harris say? Something about the coconut and the tree?”
The traditional meets the contemporary
Nadira and her creative partner, Maryan Yusuf, are heritage studies and public history graduate students at the University of Minnesota. They started working on projects together in 2023.
They are creating a capstone for their master’s degrees called “Ciyaaraha,” focused on Somali dance in contemporary settings, both as public performances and a facilitator for social gatherings. As part of the project, they are creating the show “GAAF” for the University of Minnesota’s Department of Theater Arts and Dance.
The two started their collaboration by developing traditional dance workshops for the Somali Museum, as well as group and solo art exhibitions at galleries such as Soomaal.
Along the way they were chosen by the Minneapolis Fringe Festival’s lottery to produce a play, “Your Hello to My Goodbye,” as part of an artist collective last August. Yusuf said this motivated her and Nadira to launch their own artist collective, Saanta, which includes other Somali artist colleagues selected for that play like Sabrin Nur and Wasima Farah.
Each member of Saanta develops their own body of work. Nadira and Yusuf have contributed acting and producing to short films made by other members of the group, but “GAAF,” the show, is the first performance in the collective with the two as lead directors.
Nadwa, one of Nadira’s two sisters in the collective, said the group considers “GAAF” an experimental take on a dance performance with scripted, narrative elements.
“If we call it a play, I feel like that’s not entirely accurate,” Nadwa said. “I’ve been comparing it to the Somali version of ballet, which I also don’t entirely want to do because I feel like Somali dance is so ‘itself’ that it shouldn’t need an equivalent.”
Nadira said the group wants the audience to participate in “GAAF,” as if they were extended family members attending a wedding after-party.
Nadwa is designing the set with that in mind. Actors and dancers will perform on even ground with the audience rather than on an elevated stage. Patrons will place their shoes at the front door as they would at an actual Somali wedding, and Nadwa is discussing with the venue the logistics of using real candles as well as putting traditional art on the walls.
Cindy García, of the university’s Theater and Dance Department, mentored Nadira and Yusuf after they took her graduate course on the ethnography of performance. She gave the group access to develop the show at Minneapolis’ Barbara Barker Center for Dance.
Dances that tell stories
“GAAF” entails three main “judgments” from Diin the soldier, reflecting the relationships among characters who partially personify the actors.
The first judgment, where Nadira herself performs a spinning dance called Jaandheer with her sister, Muna Hussein, is primed by an argument about a stolen sambusa.
The second, incorporating a dance called Saylici, involves Dahir being encouraged to confess his romantic interest in another wedding-goer after accidentally dropping a note he was too nervous to give to her.
The third judgment involves a more conflict-driven plotline in which a heckler issues a challenge to prove his standing in the family. The challenge is issued via dance — specifically a Harimaade, a traditional war song and dance from northern Somali culture.
Nadwa said the performance is distinct for its incorporation of Somali dance forms as part of a narrative, rather than only using them as elements of ceremony.
“I think it’s actually really cool to see a [Somali] dance be so narrative-heavy, because typically it’s not like that,” she said. “Most of the time traditional dance really relies on just the vibes and the feelings of the song.”
Beyond other dances throughout the show, there is an underlying narrative that the performance is actually the dream of dancer Bahsan Mohamed, who falls asleep at the start and “wakes up” after the performance ends. Yusuf said this approach communicates the experience of many Somali-Americans who long to connect with their culture.
“You dream of this experience that you’ve never had, or that you crave, which is, unfortunately, the running theme of the diaspora,” Yusuf said.
Yusuf’s family moved from Somalia to San Diego, Calif., when she was 4.
“We have our traditional weddings and our other ceremonies that we’ve adapted into our lives as us Somali immigrants here, but [Gaaf] was not one of them,” she said.
Bahsan said that growing up, she engaged in Somali cultural practices at home and in local mosques. She ate Somali food, was not allowed to speak English in her household until later in her childhood, and has vivid memories of watching or hearing Somali Riwaayad storytelling performances on YouTube and on older CDs her aunts brought from Somalia. These included notable works such as “Qabyo,” from Somali playwright Maxmuud Sangub.
Riwaayad, a Somali word for a drama or performance, is a dominant form of theater in Somalia. Its narratives are performed in front of standing microphones, with an emphasis on audience participation. Theatergoers are encouraged to speak out and request an encore of a dance or song while the play is ongoing, and the actors will comply.
Riwaayads do not typically use exhaustive scripts, instead relying on improvisation, with notes from a director on key narrative moments. Its practices are thoroughly incorporated into how “GAAF” is produced.
“We can add humor, we can improvise, and that’s totally OK,” Yusuf said.
According to Somali language researcher B.W. Andrzejewski, there are no written chronicles of most Somali performances and dramatic literature.
Yusuf said a significant part of Nadira’s and her research project is to digitally archive events such as “GAAF,” as well as to make Somali literature more accessible. “There are greats like Sangub, and some of his stuff was filmed, but the rest of it, you had to be there,” Yusuf said.
A new generation of creators
During brainstorming sessions for choreography, the group huddled around Nadwa’s phone, playing a scene from the show “Bridgerton” in which the character Hyacinth, portrayed by Florence Hunt, dances to a string quartet cover of Charli XCX’s “360.” The group talked excitedly about how they could incorporate that into Seylici, the second dance in the show “… but make it Somali!” Yusuf said, to cheers from the group.
Riwaayads, unlike British pantomime or Greek tragedy, traditionally omit unreality, supernatural elements or even fantastical wardrobe choices such as masks. Its performances often serve as moral lessons set in the context of everyday Somali life.
But Yusuf, who considers herself a fantasy writer, said “GAAF”’s use of a dream context, as well as surreal lighting choices, attempts to capture a much more otherworldly atmosphere.
Yusuf said that when she was developing workshops for the Somali Museum, its directors valued traditional Somali authorship over less familiar creative decisions.
That led Nadira and Yusuf to look elsewhere when creating works that reflect their experiences as Somali individuals in America.
Yusuf said Kaamil Haider, the director at Soomaal House, provided a space for Somali artists to create works, without needing to incorporate a recognizable image of Somali traditions.
“I would like for an access point for creatives that are Somali [to] experiment as they please,” Yusuf said. “Not to meet any expectation of what it means to be Somali, to be able to create fully, and to have people who nurture that, or [are] accepting with that, who will take their idea and make it into something that can come alive.”
Clarification: This story has been updated to better describe the founding of the Saanta Collective.
