DAY 14: Silenced Voices, Echo Across Oceans and Borders

What happens when what started on the “fringe” takes centrestage?

It becomes a global celebration of everything art. For 78 years, the cobblestones of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe have witnessed the move of the margin to the mainstream. …And this year, it will also give volume to the 50 curated climate narratives that refuse to stay silent.

Storyteller and Arts Enthusiast Himali Kothari reports from Edinburgh.

Day 14:

Today, winds from a different direction beckon. The bus meanders away from the historic Old Town and its younger sibling, New Town, towards a suburb by the coast. Edinburgh gets its coast not from the sea, but from the Firth of Forth, an inlet of the North Sea. The suburb is called Portobello. Maybe they have large mushroom fields, I wonder, as beachcombers board at every bus stop. No, the name has nothing to do with my favourite fungi. It is named after Porto Bello in Panama. A sailor who had served in the capture of Panama’s Porto Bello built one of the first cottages in the region and named it Portobello Hut to honour that victory.

I disembark on the Main Street, and it feels like a step into sepia-toned times. The brick-and-stone Town Hall, with its clock tower and gabled windows, looms protectively over the neighbourhood — not because of its height (it is only about three storeys high) but because of the squat stature of the nearby structures. A few cafés, a grocery, an ice-cream shop, and even a barber shop are some of the establishments that line the Main Street. The waft of the sea breeze indicates that the coast is not too far from here.

But I am not here for the sun and the sand.

Voices from Somewhere in the East, Somewhere in the Middle

For four days, the Portobello Town Hall is playing host to a festival within the festival — Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine. For artists from many parts of the world, including Palestine, it is often impossible to bring their art and voice to the United Kingdom to share on a global platform like the Edinburgh Fringe. The programme for this festival was created through an open call for Palestinian performers from across the world to make their way to Edinburgh.

We want to platform their voices and celebrate Palestinian art and culture, with freedom and without censorship, states the festival website.
The result: a four-day programme featuring Palestinian theatre, dance, art, poetry, music, and even a culinary-cum-storytelling presentation.

The show featured today, Welcome to Gaza, is a culmination of activities by the Hands Up Project. A charity trust, Hands Up Project works to forge connections between children from around the world and young people from Gaza and the West Bank. The initiative channels creativity through online interactions, drama, and storytelling towards this purpose.

Nineteen short plays, written by children in Gaza and the West Bank under the mentorship of volunteers and teachers of the Hands Up Project, have been woven into one continuous staged performance. Six young women take to the stage and transition from genies to animals to mothers-in-law to ghouls as they seamlessly play out the stories from the anthology. These stories were written before October 2013, which means they reflect a time vastly different from the situation today. And, as Nick Bilbrough, the founder of the project, says, “a time which will never, never return.”
The plays are interspersed with audio and video messages from ground zero. Unscripted and unfiltered, they speak of the bombings and the destruction around them. Some voices sound panicked, some matter-of-fact, resigned.

The crowd that filters out of the dark auditorium of the Town Hall and into the sunny street is sombre, weighed down by the reality of the staged performance. It is not that one was ignorant of the goings-on, but that one had chosen to ignore them.

Are We Here?

The show had kicked off with a video of three young girls in a dark room. In the light of the candles they hold, they look out of the screen at the audience and ask, “Is anyone there? Can you hear us?” The lack of response registers; they resign. “They don’t see us. We are all alone.” And the candles go out.

The video is a sharp stab at our apathy to situations outside of our blinkered existence — situations that show up on the news, in the papers, and in our social media feeds but are switched away or scrolled past without as much as a pause. Because if we don’t see it, perhaps it does not exist?
And that is where the role of movements like Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine lies — to nudge our eyes open and help us see.