BAHARA: a live sound/drawing performance with Tracy Chahwan & Elsa Saadé

Bahara is a live performance that first blossomed at Studio 34: a collaboration between cousins Elsa Saadé (singer/songwriter) and Tracy Chahwan (visual artist). In Bahara, Tracy and Elsa join their talents to express grief, joy, history and the present in correlation with their ancestries rooted in the Levant. Bahara will be the final performance to accompany Tracy Chahwan's current show, Alien of Extraordinary Abilities.

Doors to Baharaopen at 7:00 PM. Tracy's prints, posters and comics will be available for sale to, and this is the last opportunity to get them before Tracy leaves Philly for the summer!

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Elsa Saade is an artist, birth/death doula, and mobilizer. Over the last decade, she has been a musician, puppeteer and street performer with several political theaters including Bread and Puppet Theater and Redwing Blackbird Theater. She has also been a grant maker, fundraiser and program strategist for feminist funds and grassroots movements such as Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. She bridges her practice with her lived experience in Lebanon where she was born and as an immigrant in New York City. When performing, obsessed with grief and turmoil embedded in folk songs and traditions of Bilad Al Sham and beyond, Elsa wants her art to serve as a doula of moments around metaphorical birth and death.

Tracy Chahwan’s work first appeared on the walls of Beirut as street art and posters for local independent music venues like the Beirut Groove Collective, Yukunkun Club, and Metro al Madina. She joined the Lebanese experimental comics collectives Samandal and Zeez to publish anthologies, magazines, and her first graphic novel, Beirut Bloody Beirut (Hachette, 2018). During the 2019 uprisings, she took to the streets with friends and colleagues to occupy public spaces, offering free screen printing workstations to create posters, T-shirts, and protest signs.  In 2020, Chahwan relocated to the United States. She did a fellowship with the YallaPunk collective in 2021 and began working on journalistic comics in projects like Guantanamo Voices (Abrams), Where to Marie? Stories of Feminisms in Lebanon, and media platforms including The Nib. In 2023, she took part in La La Lil Jidar: 20 Years Behind the Apartheid Wall, which had a two-month residency at Studio 34. That same year, Tracy created an installation work of seven woven tapestries for Do Arabs Dream of Electric Sheep? a 2023 group exhibition in Dubai and, in 2024, co-created the play The Suicide with theatre artists Lianne Souki and Lynn Hodeib. Tracy Chahwan's illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Wetransfer, Middle East Eye. and Vice Arabia. She continues to travel between the U.S. and the Levant, thinking, drawing, and doing her best to bear witness to the many strange madnesses unfolding all around us. See more at tracychahwan.com.

Together, Tracy and Elsa they have featured several guest performers and friends in their past performances, including Farah Barqawi (poet), Layale Chaker (violin), Huda Asfour (oud), Barrack Zaylaa Rima (illustrator/visual artist) and Kamelya Omayma Youssef (poet) in a spin off from Bahhara, called This Time’s Quartet, which showed in different parts of New York City in an effort to shed light on the genocide in Palestine.