Pathways to Possibility: Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine

In a city saturated by the sensationalised Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine emerges as a resolutely anti‑spectacular offering. Portobello may be an unlikely host – its quiet sands and Georgian terraces seem far removed from Gaza’s grit or the West Bank’s checkpoints. Yet, from Tuesday 12 August at 147–149 Portobello High Street, a transnational bridge will be built through art. If the Fringe proper is a carnival of attention, Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine embodies a gentler kind of magnifying glass: inward‑looking, compassionate, intentional.

At £60 for a full‑day pass (or £15 per show), with pay‑by‑the‑performance options, the festival is priced accessibly – though that price comes freighted with a quiet charge: we step in not as consumers, but as witnesses. The organisers – a coalition of international writers, dancers, theatremakers, publishers, and producers – have poured in their own labour, drawn from years of cultural exchange. This groundswell of support goes beyond solidarity: it is a deliberate political and communal gesture, rooted in reciprocal hospitality.

The programme – assembled by co-organisers such as Sara Shaarawi, Henry Bell, Leonor Estrada, Ben Harrison, David Greig and Farah Saleh – resists a tidy artistic agenda. It mingles genres, tones, and modes of expression, and refuses both pacification and escapism. Each piece is unapologetically political, but the politics never overwhelm aesthetic curiosity. Instead, story and spectacle are braided, frictionless. The festival’s dual pact is clear: expect resistance without dogma, and art without erasure.

As choreographer Amir Sabra puts it: "I don't carry any messages. Today, anyone can see what's happening live in Gaza, Palestine, and the region, and there's no need for a message from a dancer. I don't think I, as an artist, have much to offer on a national level. Perhaps the recent experience in Gaza has shown us that hard power has the final say. This does not mean that art is not necessary. But its necessity is more humanitarian than national. Today, we see that art in general, and dance in particular, as a practice, has increased significantly in Gaza, especially among children. We see that Gazan society, which is somewhat conservative, not only accepts the idea of dance, but celebrates it in front of the world. This perhaps hints to us at the importance of artistic practice itself is at the human level. Art consoles people and allows them to create a world other than their own. A world with more harmony and rhythm. Art that focuses on national issues is unnecessary and benefits no one but its creator."

In a moment where international conversations on Palestine are policed, sanctioned, sanitised by mainstream institutions, this centre on the cultural periphery becomes revolutionary. It is, in effect, a challenge to the broader art world: if we cannot open ourselves to unfiltered Palestinian voices, are we even engaging at all?

This is not an invitation to spectacle, but to an ongoing process of collectively preserving the cultural fabric of a land whose people are estranged, and of a people whose land has been stripped and deformed. The programme promises to relearn and realign with forms of art indigenous and natural to Palestinian culture, through a bodily focus. With dance, music, and theatre, the programme places importance on our bodies to decolonise our spaces because an intellectual discussion of decolonising the mind is not enough. Saleh, who is also a Professor of Performance Studies at Glasgow University, is dedicated to this reappropriation of dance and performance. She implies that the aim here is not pity, nor performative allyship. The project unifies its creators and participants with the wider Palestinian struggle. In conversation with Muriel Besemer and Rafat Al Aydi, who make up Nafas Collective, there is a mutual understanding between both individuals that borders and gaps in language are fickle and that truly political art must firstly accept a singular core of shared values, even when the body politic possesses many heads. This is to say that the disparity in language offers more time and space of artistic exchange and understanding, without forcing a discussion of semantics. Al Aydi, who is based in Gaza, specifically notes the significance of sharing his art to liberate individuals from propaganda – the kind that classifies Palestinian music and instruments as ‘Israeli’. Gazelleband's Louis Brehony identifies the importance of rejecting falsities like this. The Manchester-born guitarist-turned-buzuq-player notes Palestine as the capital of music before Zionist occupation, and the programme’s musical acts strive to revive that position on an international scale because music – as he says – does not require lyric to be political. Palestine’s cultural history is ongoing, and every form of engagement with Palestinian art reinvigorates it, like the children that Reem Anbar – the duo act’s founder – worked with in April 2025.

"My idea to go and work in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon was a dream and an idea, realised after a long time of preparation… children who suffer the same suffering as the children of Gaza: wars, travel bans and being denied good education and treatment. They live in very narrow houses and streets, they cannot play and do not have a space to express themselves. When I spoke to organisers in Borj al-Barajneh and Mar Elias refugee camps, I asked for ten children for each workshop and I was surprised to find that there were more than 30 children in each session!... They had many questions and curiosity about Palestine and music. I conveyed to them messages I had collected from the children of Gaza, and the children from the Beirut camps in turn gave me messages to the children of Gaza in love and solidarity. We worked on many musical activities and sang the song My Grandmother Has a Dress and a Shawl. They loved the song because it is from inside Gaza and tells about our customs and heritage. This song was written in Gaza by the poet Khaled Juma and many children have sung it. The children in the camps told me that they had never attended such music workshops before and that it was new to them. They enjoyed it a lot and took longer than my usual workshop time. I promised them that I would be back in Lebanon to work with them again shortly."

We take for granted our access to spaces wherein we may practise and express our creativity. Humanity is at the core of everything, but let us not confuse this with the notion that Palestinians need to be humanised. This term has infiltrated rhetoric surrounding Gaza’s endurance of genocide, and Welcome to the Fringe offers a space wherein participants may assess the issue with width as well as depth. In a July besieged by images of Gaza’s ruins – civilians queuing for aid, collapsing infrastructure, civilian mortality rising – Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine responds with art that is unafraid to peer back. It invites not neutrality, but reflection. It asks whether we can consciously enter a space and recognise that the right to story, to laughter, to melody and grief, is itself a terrain of contest. When I first encountered the festival’s announcement, I felt both unease and solace – unease because I was wary of the programme being awkwardly overshadowed by the Fringe Festival, yet solace because it trusts the viewer with complexity. This is not a series in which Palestine auditions for the world’s sympathy, but it is art as politics – from lived experience, rigorous craft, and both lyrical and wordless rebellion.

Implied too is the rejection of the commercial: crowdfunded, independent, unaligned with major festivals. It is local energy, global purpose. In offering Palestinian artists their own stage – uncut, unmediated, unlicensed – the organisers render the festival itself an act of embedded resistance.

Amir Sabra’s choreography lifts, turns, and fractures bodies that know erasure. Nur Garabli’s ballet becomes a reclamation of grace in exile. Mahmoud Al‑Hourani’s puppetry smuggles silence between shouts. Sisters of Gaza become songwriters. A rapper from Jabalia wields beat as bridge.

It feels urgent, yes – but not frantic. It is measured by dignity; tender, yet unstoppable. There are no neat arcs. There are glimmers. There are ruptures. There is room to breathe, to ask, to err, to hold.

As the Fringe proper swells with commercial fervour – frantic marketing, tourist overload, ticket saturation – this small-scale festival offers a radically different pulse. You might still crave big productions, but what you’ll remember, long after the noise has faded, is the taste of solidarity, the hush after spoken word, the closeness of those ten or twenty carrying un‑erased stories.

This August, the pathway to Portobello Town Hall is also a pathway to possibility – not in the abstract, but in the concrete: four days, hundreds of lives intersecting. To attend is to choose another kind of festival. Not neutral. Not easy. But richly humane. A heartfelt contraction within the Fringe’s expanding, echoing amphitheatre.

In a time of brutal global fracture, cultural forms that shape resonance over spectacle have a rare potency. Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine is not just a fringe event – it’s a kind of moral threshold. I ask, when did we start equating volume with value? This festival says: turn down the volume, lean in, listen.

In Portobello this August, Palestine’s artists are drawing a new line: against erasure, against indifference, gently but firmly insisting that art must matter – politically, collectively, spiritually. Let’s step through the threshold.

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Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine, Portobello Town Hall, 12-15 Aug