About
Stephanie Kayal is a Lebanese choreographer, dancer, and theatre maker based between Beirut and Brussels. Her work blurs reality and fiction, using low-tech aesthetics to craft absurd, darkly humorous performances. Through dance, music, and text, she explores themes of political despair, hope, and survival.
Her works include Evidence of Things Not Seen (2021), a performance about a family living with phantom limb syndrome, haunted by dance and its own past; Galactic Crush (2022), a dance performance plagued by themes of superpowers, antiheroes, and naivety in times of hopelessness; The Time It Took You to Realize It Was a Dream (2023), where tension between body, space, and spectator unfolds in a balance of intricate patterns and near-stillness, evoking both lightness and tragedy; and Galactic Crush II, premiering in Brussels in 2025.
She recently joined Hiros for her upcoming projects and will kick off her collaboration with Platform Parallèle in 2025. A Sundance Theatre Lab and Common Lab fellow, her work has taken form in venues such as Kunstencentrum Buda, Fabrik Potsdam, Frankfurt Lab, Zoukak Theatre, and Kaaistudios/workspacebrussels. Her upcoming explorations will take place at La Friche Belle de Mai in Marseille, Théâtre National, and Théâtre de la Vie in Brussels (2025).
Over the past few years, she has curated dance workshops and classes in various festivals and spaces. As a performer, she has collaborated with different artists and dance companies, performing across Europe, South America, and the SWANA region.
Kayal holds a master’s degree in theater studies from the Lebanese University of Arts and a master’s degree in choreography and arts from the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles.
Based in Beirut, Abed Kobeissy has been creating music using various tools and exploring multiple genres. His work spans solo projects, collaborations, and compositions for film, theater, and especially dance, having scored over 12 dance and theater productions.
Using the Levantine buzuq as his primary instrument, his music carries a strong local identity while unapologetically embracing the confusion of the present, shaped by urban soundscapes and tackling themes of family and home.
He has received commissions from The Berlin Biennale & The Berlin International Film Festival (2018), UNESCO’s Haneen Exhibition (2018), CTM Music Festival Berlin (2020), Irtijal/Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (2021), and others.
In 2020, Kobeissy became a fellow at The Sundance Institute’s Theater Lab as a music composer for contemporary dance. He has also conducted commissioned research in musicology and served as a juror on Ettijahat’s 2020 Academic Grants Program AJYAL.
In 2016, he co-founded the electro-acoustic duo Two or The Dragon with Beirut-based percussionist Ali Hout, releasing two albums: Prelude for the Triumphant Man (2017) and Dance Grooves for the Weary (2021). He also co-founded the Lebanese-German beat-noise quartet Stellar Banger alongside Ali Hout, Joss Turnbull, and Pablo Giw, with whom he released Data Is (2021).
Recently, Kobeissy has been collaborating with electronic musician Sary Moussa, resulting in works like A Simple Song of Weather and Murder and Christmas in Mourning, exploring new possibilities for contemporary Arabic music.
He has performed his solo and collaborative works, as well as live compositions for performance arts, at international festivals such as The Berlin International Film Festival, CTM Music Festival, Supersonic Int’l Music Festival, Donaueschingen Musiktage, Festival d’Avignon, Le Guess Who? Music Festival, and others.
Kobeissy holds a Master’s degree in Advanced Studies on the semiotics of music in Arabic cinema and has lectured at the Lebanese American University.