Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Balfour Reparations
Fareh Saleh
Genre: Dance, Dance and Movement Theatre, Interactive, Political
Venue: Summerhall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Framed as a performance lecture where we are given the apology letter from 2045 and then it is read out between us, our performance then unfolds before we are engaged in a discussion of how we may make what was contained in the letter real from 2025 onwards.
Review
This is audience participation, film, dance, discussion and suggestion – from the audience – rolled into a polemic. It is a deconstruction of theatre, and like the deconstruction of a beautifully crafted piece of comfort food, the question we have to ask is – why deconstruct something at all.
We begin with the audience reading out parts of this imaginary letter which is spoken out with Saleh dancing in response. This is the repeated onstage whereas the first reading was from the seats in the auditorium. There is then a request made for the audience to suggest ways in which reparations could be made before we end with a short discussion. Between the first and second part and also the second and third part are short films juxtaposing Balfour’s support for Israel interspersed with future support for Palestine by the British establishment.
Salah is Palestinian and has a clear engagement with the topic. She manages to gracefully bring that experience on stage with her, encouraging debate to at least begin, if not flow. This is a performance using choreography, film, discussion and presentation to start a discussion over how we may deal with the current conflict in Gaza and within Palestine itself. Calling for the conflict to end with a one-state solution which would be for all within the Palestinian area, this request debate within a clear context.
Saleh is an interesting performer, though her dance during the time that the letter is read out, not once but twice, fascinates, but because of the way in which we are reading and concentrating on the letter itself, we’ve become a little distant from that artistry.
At one point the discussion becomes a little emotional as some don’t get the concept of it being a performance in the context of a festival of art. On one occasion a question was asked, and it was not dealt with particularly well.
I was however particularly impressed by our BSL interpreter who included some “live” streaming the debate responses that ended in a cacophony of recorded parts of people’s contributions replayed back almost instantly. That was impressive.
Emotions run high within this topic and so it proved so in the context of the suggestions made here. The idea of a truth and reconciliation commission is something I would absolutely agree with. Perhaps contact with Multimedia in Kosovo and how drama work with Serbian Groups was delivered would be one way of exploring art bringing communities together.
There is a strong link to a terrible colonial past, and I am ashamed as many ought to be of what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank. This brought the topic der to the hearts of this audience into play and they emerged emboldened by the opportunity to share. What can be better than a performance that worked for its audience? Politically, a show that built bridges with another audience, the one that was absent from this might be the answer to that quandary. But this audience has been shunned for so long so has the right, not to bear arms, but to conduct discussions, irrespective of how one sided their critics may see them.
I am unconvinced however that this deconstruction worked as well as it could, and Saleh’s work has always been an absolute celebration of the transformative nature of art. Here it perhaps needed more thought of how to steer contributions form the floor into artistic responses to be shared.
