Can performance be a political act in and of itself? For Khalid Abdalla, the answer is clear. At its most “scintillating,” he tells Fest, it engages in “acts of rupture.”
“That’s very political,” he explains. “You’re allowed to see the world in a different way, and experience it and think about it, and engage in narratives in ways that allow you to go on emotional journeys.” It’s these acts of rupture that he seeks to evoke through his debut ‘anti-biography’ play, Nowhere, which arrives on the Scottish stage for the first time this Fringe presented as part of the Here & Now Showcase. Abdalla, who was born in Scotland, explains: “The idea of coming back with what is my first play is very meaningful on multiple levels.”
Nowhere sits amidst an array of performers in the showcase experimenting with new forms of personal storytelling which reflect contemporary social, economic and political issues. Abdalla’s multi-layered solo show covers much ground, spanning from his involvement in the 2011 Egyptian revolution and experience of counterrevolution, to histories of colonialism and decolonisation, to growing up in a post 9/11 context and the current political context of Israel’s genocide in Palestine.
“All of that travels through me in ways that make me more than I make it,” Abdalla says. “The play is more through me than about me.” Politics and performance have been in conversation with one another throughout Abdalla’s life and career to date. His father and grandfather were both prominent anti-regime activists and political prisoners in Egypt, and he notes that their histories and experiences exist within him intimately to the present day. “I think we’re all like that,” he reflects. “Whether it’s forms of personal or cultural trauma, it has this shape that is natural to it, which breaks a sense of time and place through the individual experience.”
The challenge for Abdalla, then, was to create something which could hold personal experience with this same placelessness. “We live in a world of intersecting crises right now. And those crises exist inside us,” Abdalla says. “There’s a part of that that we want to liberate ourselves from, and we want to liberate ourselves from it in community. We can never do so alone. Theatre is uniquely placed as a space in which you can do that together.”
Abdalla’s “nowhere” is thus reimagined as a paradoxical space of belonging. “There are forms of political orphaning, really. That means not only are you always in between places, but you don’t really have a space of belonging. And there are ways in which the culture around you threatens you and denies certain stories that are foundational; threatens your safety if you express them”, he explains.
Early this year, Abdalla was one of a range of people interviewed by the Metropolitan Police following his attendance at a pro-Palestine rally in January. The Met’s policing of the rally was widely condemned, with legal experts calling it “disproportionate, unwarranted, and a dangerous assault on the right to assembly and protest,” and a few days after Abdalla and I speak, police confirm that no further action will be taken. He writes on Instagram that this is “a relief, and vindication.”
Perhaps it is the agency to act which performance – like politics – invokes, where the two most clearly converge. “It’s a vulnerable act to step out in front of people and try and share. But I share things we often don’t put out there in the hope that it might unlock something for us both,” Abdalla reflects. “If you can create that space inside a theatre, then why can’t you have more of it outside?”
Nowhere – Here & Now Showcase, Traverse, 12-24 Aug (not 11, 18), various times