Gesturing Refugees @ Fruitmarket, Edinburgh
An interactive video dance performance by Farah Saleh, Gesturing Refugees aims to archive untold refugee stories, using the artists and the audience
Identification – hand it over. Belongings – make sure they're bound in plastic, and only keep what you can carry. The colour of your first bedsheet? The people you have been in love with? Prepare to answer these questions, and more. Take one last sip of fresh water, and then the journey begins.
This is the experience of audience members heading into the Fruitmarket's studio to witness Gesturing Refugees. It leaves the participant in a state of vulnerability that is uncommon in an artistic space. Choreographer Farah Saleh informs us that while embarking on this journey, undergoing the experiences of refugees past and present, we are also attempting to understand the prospects for future refugees.
The audience are then divided into two groups, to separately watch projected video recordings from refugees and contributors Fadi Waked and Hamza Damra. Participants are encouraged to watch the recordings and learn the movements themselves, before both groups are brought together again to create a collaborative performance from memory. Saleh’s aim is to experiment with the ways we archive stories of refugeehood – she uses the bodies of audience members, as well as her own body and the bodies of Waked and Damra, as living archives.
Saleh’s concept is interesting, and the choreography succeeds in imparting the vastness of experience through movement and dance, ebbing from flickers of playfulness to moments of dread. However, there is almost too much packed into the performance’s 45 minutes, and the different aspects of the piece don't quite seamlessly align. The audience are encouraged to transform themselves from bag-carrying, anxiously shuffling observers into biological archives, and then shift back into the performance space to engage directly with Saleh and videographer Pedro Vaz Simoes, in the space of less than an hour. The show could have perhaps been even more powerful had it given the sensation of vulnerability the time and the space to really settle in.