My Grandmother’s Threads is a multidisciplinary choreographic project by Alida Esmail, a Canadian dance and theatre artist whose work explores the body as a carrier of memory, history, and lived experience. Grounded in her Indo-African ancestry, the project traces a family lineage from Muslim India through South and East Africa to Canada, heavily shaped by apartheid in South Africa and the 1972 expulsion of Asians from Uganda-events that forced repeated acts of migration and adaptation.
At the centre of the work are spools of thread from Esmail’s maternal grandmother’s sewing room. These objects hold personal, cultural, and historical weight, becoming tools for connecting bodies, places, and generations. Through movement, sound, and object-based research, the project explores how inherited memories settle in the body, how identity is shaped through movement and rupture, and how ancestral traces continue to surface in the present.
Following generative residencies with Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative and Unmute Dance Company in South Africa in October/November 2025, Esmail returns to the studio carrying new questions, embodied knowledge, and deepened ties to the land of her ancestors. These experiences will inform the next phase of creation as she continues threading together memory, movement, and material.
