Edinburgh Fringe celebrates Palestinian art and culture

CHE: not A Ballet by Nur Garabli

How should artists respond to Israel’s barbaric genocide in Gaza? That question is posed sharply as the various programmes of the Edinburgh Festival – the world’s biggest cultural showcase – open this week.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) and their sibling festivals for books, films and TV attract artists and audiences from across the world.

This year, many eyes will be on Palestinian artists as they present works that resist Israel’s brutal attempts to erase Palestine and its culture. The Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine programme (which runs at Portobello Town Hall, 12-15 August) is an initiative by Scotland-based artists, including Egyptian dramatist Sara Shaarawi and Scottish playwright David Greig.

Across four days, audiences are invited to experience Palestinian theatre, dance, comedy, storytelling, music, poetry and food. Performance artist Fadi Murad’s piece Flux in This Forgotten Farm (12 August), for example, promises to be a powerful reflection upon Israel’s relentless oppression of Palestine, and the magnificent resilience of the Palestinian people and their culture.

On 14 August audiences will be offered a Palestinian dance double bill. As Palestinians continue to be represented in the Western mainstream media as a nameless mass, Amir Sabra’s Within This Party – which draws upon hip hop and traditional dabkeh dance – strives for the expression of the self.

By contrast, CHE: not A Ballet by Nur Garabli seeks to connect with the history of Palestinian women. Reflecting the double burden of Zionist oppression and misogyny, the piece offers a defiant and uplifting expression of Palestinian women’s voices.

Elsewhere on the Fringe, at the Summerhall venue, Palestinian dancer and choreographer Farah Saleh will give her performance lecture Balfour Reparations on 13-25 August. The piece is set in a fictional future in which the UK finally agrees to give reparations to the Palestinian people.

The performance will consider the despicable role the Scottish Tory Arthur Balfour, then UK foreign secretary, played in laying the foundations for the Nakba, the violent mass expulsion of the Palestinians by Zionist forces in 1948, and the subsequent creation of the racist Israeli state.  

With so much going on in Edinburgh during August, it can be hard to decide what to see.

However, James Graham’s new play Make It Happen, which is staged at the Festival Theatre as part of the EIF programme, running from 31 July to 9 August, looks set to be a cracker.

The drama stars the great Scottish actors Brian Cox, as the ghost of the “founder of modern capitalism”, Adam Smith, and Sandy Grierson, as the disgraced banker Fred ‘the Shred’ Goodwin. The piece is a satirical consideration of the rise, fall and collapse of the world’s biggest bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland.

More often than not the outstanding play in the Fringe programme of the famous Traverse Theatre comes from the pen of an Irish writer. This year the dark comedy Consumed, 31 July to 24 August, by award-winning playwright Karis Kelly, may well continue that trend.

Set in the North of Ireland, the drama reunites women from four generations. Audiences can expect “a house full of hungry ghosts, with more than one skeleton in the closet.”

Lovers of experimental theatre might like to try Painkillers can be caught at Summerhall from 31 July to 25 August. The piece is the latest work by Scots-Japanese artist Mamoru Iriguchi, who is a brilliantly original, contemplative and humorous performance artist.

Painkillers explores ideas of emotional and physical pain by way of a, no doubt satirical, consideration of the old, archetypal entertainment of the male magician and his female assistant.

 Finally, for those seeking some respite from the hectic pace of the Edinburgh Festival, I recommend the EIF programme’s wonderful Queen’s Hall series of 11am chamber concerts, 2-23 August. The concert by the Fibonacci Quartet on 9 August – which includes works by the great Czech composers Janáček and Smetana – is typical of a series that offers a tremendous haven for lovers of classical music.