Edinburgh Art Festival: Prem Sahib's Alleus

If you happened to wander past Edinburgh’s Castle Terrace Carpark on 16 August, you might have heard an unexpected symphony spilling out of a spiral stairwell – four voices, distinct yet entwining, pronunciations fluctuating between sharp and distorted, a political cacophony emerging from a place where, hopefully, you didn’t park your car.

Prem Sahib’s Alleus, originally co-commissioned by the Roberts Institute of Art and Somerset House Studios, made its Scottish premiere as part of Edinburgh Art Festival’s 20th edition this August. Staged within the carpark’s open-air spiral staircase, with audience members lining the concrete helix, Sahib’s performance dominated this familiar yet generally unnoticed location.

The work itself was sculpted from the speeches of former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, whose words were twisted and reimagined by Sahib, with these alterations further intensified through the live vocals of three performers. The result was a discordant choreography of pauses, interruptions, and sharp, punctuated bursts of sound – harsh, and at times both hurtful and hopelessly humorous. The callous delivery of Braverman’s words on anti-immigration formed a focal point of the piece, yet the twisting frequencies seemed to reflect more widely on the potential of political speech to inflict harm and how this harm echoes throughout society; hate being the overly simplistic, but most accurately abrupt word that comes to mind.

At the centre of this sunken concrete stage was a puddle, catching quick orange glimpses of the surrounding lights. I wondered if those observing from above might have been able to lean over their railings and catch a glimpse of their reflection, rippling and dispersing in the space between the three singers’ feet. A dampened centre point, wetting the grimy floor not far from the temporarily closed-off gents’ toilets.

Alleus by Prem Sahib, performed at the Castle Terrace car park for Edinburgh Art Festival. Photo: Charlotte Cullen

Tucked away, not far from the shadow of the Military Tattoo, I found myself experiencing a feeling similar to that which came over me as a small child watching the fireworks at the end of the Festival. Perhaps it was the particular coolness of the August evening, the smoke, the gathering in a seemingly random location in the streets of Edinburgh to catch a glimpse of a happening that felt like something you were part of, yet simultaneously quite far removed from. Inhabiting a public site as we did for Alleus, crowding ourselves around this noisy yet semi-secret intervention, it might have felt interactive, but the staircase rendered us utterly as spectators—peering down, looking in, a strikingly visual action for a sound-based performance. I wondered about this separation, the way Sahib had welcomed us into this part-underground setting with an open-top so that everyone else, everyone not purposely watching the performance, might observe us all as one.

In the midst of a xenophobic crisis in the UK, at a time when many streets have been occupied by nativist rioters, it was hard not to notice how the speakers of Alleus began to spew hateful words into a public space, words that rose jarringly up through a silent crowd of onlookers. I couldn’t help but wonder what people might be thinking, as the division of the moment grew between us and those outside, those above – an uneasy but powerful atmosphere, only grounded again by the occasional dog bark and car horn, reminders that we were all just people standing in a carpark.

Alleus was both moving and playful, only emphasised as I caught the flickering faces of spectators while the vocalists formed their final screeches and began to enter into the melodic. The work sat in paradoxical harmony with its unconventional setting and amounted to a uniquely memorable night, a common theme of this year’s EAF programme that saw work disseminated across all pockets of the city.

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Prem Sahib: Alleus was performed at Castle Terrace Car Park on 16 Aug, as part of the 2024 Edinburgh Art Festival

This article was commissioned as part of Edinburgh Art Festival's Emerging Writers Programme

Photos by Charlotte Cullen, courtesy of EAF