On a fateful day last June, Mohamad Rabah, director of the Palestinian Circus, sat frozen with indecision. A month prior, the circus had been invited to perform at Glastonbury, setting in motion weeks of visa applications, rejections, and fragmented rehearsals. Then, on the 13th of June, Israel bombed Iran. Flights out of Jordan, where Rabah and the artists would have departed for the UK, were cancelled. Chances of getting to the festival – let alone rehearsing on stage – were slim.
Then, days before Glastonbury, a travel agent called. “He said, ‘We found flight tickets, but you have to leave tomorrow morning, and it’s $2,000 per ticket’,” Rabah says, dialling in from a theatre in Ramallah. With 13 artists needing to travel, this was utterly beyond their budget. They had 20 minutes before the tickets were snapped up. Rabah looked at the faces of the artists around him, waiting.
“I said, ‘Fuck the money, we go.’ And the first show in Glastonbury was the first full rehearsal,” he says. “We had a five-minute standing ovation. It was a very, very emotional moment for us that we made it. That’s what pushed us to come back.”
This was the birth of Step and a Half – a dazzling blend of contemporary circus and traditional Palestinian dance. The show’s namesake is the foundational ‘step and a half’ in Dabke: a dance that is the cultural lifeblood of Palestine, in defiance of 79 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing, and the past three years of the genocide in Gaza. “We want to be at the Fringe celebrating who we are. That will give us the resilience to keep going, until we are all free,” Rabah says. “We believe a lot of people are suffering, even in the UK. If people see us Palestinians showing love of life through resistance to very clear oppression, they have this strength coming from us to face their challenges.”
Dabke is life-affirming to witness. It is a dance that summons a collective, carrying generations of people stamping their feet into the land, refusing erasure. “This collectiveness protects us,” Rabah says. “Palestinians, we suffered a lot. But one way we resist is that we stay together.”
Of the eight artists performing at the Fringe, some came up through the Palestinian Circus’ youth pathway; some are parkour athletes; some grew up in Jerusalem, helping the Circus organise training behind Israeli checkpoints. “We work almost everywhere in Palestine using these mechanisms of partnerships. This is also a political message,” Rabah says. “The occupation tries to geographically fragment us. We want Palestinian youth to come together, and we want to break our isolation from the world.”
When the Palestinian Circus was established, its founders were often met with the question, ‘Circus? Is that really what Palestine needs?’ But circus is about seeing the impossible made possible: about how it feels to see artists breaking past the constraints of real life, bringing a different world within reach. This reach towards the not-yet-possible is also the work of liberation. “You plant this vision in the way you perform,” Rabah says. “Our idea with this show is that, yes, we are suffering: but the life we want to live is full of love and beautiful things.”
When asked how difficult it is to protect this love from a world intent on its destruction, Rabah laughs quietly: “It’s insane.” He talks about a colleague who lost 58 kilograms after being tortured in an Israeli prison. He talks about Hamed, an artist who will be performing on the Cyr wheel at the Fringe. Hamed was practicing at the circus when his 17-year-old brother was shot in their village. Rabah goes silent, tears caught in his throat. “And yeah,” he says. “Every time Hamed performs, it’s his way to communicate with his brother.”
Especially through its youth programme, the Palestinian Circus proves how essential art is, not in spite of, but because of, such unthinkable violence. “Think about a young person living with these conflicts inside, about what it’s worth to keep going, and why the world is not giving us justice – and then [they] decide, I will show love, I want to show celebration of life on stage, I want to show trust in humanity again. This is a very difficult transformation of emotions,” Rabah says. “This is the core of what we try to do with the kids. You come to this circus space, and you do dangerous things, but you feel emotionally safe. And in this place, not like the world outside, we try to practise love.”
The story of Step and a Half demonstrates how art can knit together a network of survival and hope, a material infrastructure of solidarity across borders. “Without the people who helped us in Glastonbury, the Incandescence people in Cornwall, and Leila from Showponies, coming together,” Rabah says, reflecting on the show’s journey. “It was like magic. If we were alone, we couldn’t do it.”
He hopes Edinburgh audiences will take part in this magic, the kind that’s necessary to keep fighting for freedom. “It’ll be a big party, with music, dance, the energy of the artists,” he says. “We hope everyone will celebrate with us that we made it so far, all of us safe. We hope everyone will be full of energy and love,” he says, smiling. “And that’s our expectation. No more, no less.”
The Palestinian Circus: Step and a Half, Underbelly’s Circus Hub on the Meadows, 8-29 Aug (not 17, 24), 2.05pm