Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine is a crowdfunded feat of community in action and this August’s most vital programming. Over four days at Portobello Town Hall, this festival-within-the-Fringe showcases music, theatre, poetry and dance from Palestinian artists – some living in Scotland, with others travelling from the West Bank, ’48 Territories and (hopefully) Gaza, as well as America, Jordan and Beirut. Sara Shaarawi, one of many volunteer festival co-organisers, explains that it’s never been more important to platform Palestinian voices.
“When the institutions that might usually programme Palestinian work are too scared, and there’s so much censorship and harassment, it is urgent to have a strong Palestinian presence at the biggest theatre festival in the world,” she says. “Rather than a commodity you pay for and never think about again, we value Palestinian work as an act of resistance and an act of life.”
This year’s Welcome to the Fringe… grows out of a 2015 iteration, organised as a response to Israel’s bombing of civilians during the 2014 Gaza war. Ten years later, Shaarawi says she feels an even greater responsibility. “The festival is a response to the [continued] dehumanisation that occurs in the media. It’s a way to show, beyond the headlines, how varied and beautiful Palestinian culture is.”
Curated from an open call which received over 100 applications – a huge leap from 2015, which had 35 – this year’s diverse programme includes contemporary dance drawing on hip-hop and dabke, a work-in-progress new musical by Amira Al Shanti about the rituals of olive harvests, and Randa Jarrar’s play The Last Palestinian Alive, which imagines a young woman waking up alone in 2055 with only an AI version of Francesca Albanese for company. Panel discussions led by members of We Are Not Numbers sit alongside oud and buzuq music from Gazelleband, and the pointedly titled cardboard-puppetry play Performance Desperately In Need of an Audience.
“Come and spend a day with us!” Shaarawi urges. The festival offers day tickets (as well as individual ones), so that audiences can mix with artists, activists and allies in between shows, and seize the chance to take conversations down onto Portobello beach for a moment of calm reflection amidst the Fringe’s usual chaos.
Mohammed Moussa, a founder of the Gaza Poets Society, will be reading new work alongside fellow poet Dareen Tatour. Over email, Moussa stresses the pressing need for “the amplification of the voices of Gaza’s youth on a global stage” – something the Society pursues through its published anthologies – but also how his belief in the power of words has been sorely challenged in the face of ongoing genocide.
“How do you frame a genocide in Gaza as poetry?” he asks, rhetorically. “How do you weave carnage into verses? Nothing about this devastation is poetic.”
“Poetry doesn’t need to solve the horror; it needs to match its depth,” he writes. “Perhaps in this act of speaking, there’s a path to healing – not to soften the pain, but to let it breathe, to let it be witnessed. To carry the weight of suffering into the hearts of those who dare to hear.”
Institutional powers might be unwilling to listen, but Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine is filling the silence. With neighbours offering spare rooms and donating time, money and resources, it’s a collective battle against hostile conditions: the war in Iran has made travel plans uncertain, the UK Home Office is still to grant several visas, and the festival will be crowdfunding until the last minute to cover these unexpected costs. Yet Shaarawi remains brightly determined that the festival will live up to its welcoming title: “It might not be a free process to get here, but it will be a free space.”
Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine, Portobello Town Hall, 12-15 Aug, 12-9pm