6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The National
What reparations should Palestine receive? The Fringe show where you decide
That is the speculative future Farah Saleh, a Palestinian dancer, choreographer, and academic based in Edinburgh, is inviting audiences to step into at this year's [[Edinburgh]] Fringe show, Balfour Reparations.
Focusing on Edinburgh-born Arthur James Balfour, who when serving as prime minister (1902-1905) and foreign secretary (1916-1919), denied Palestinian political rights, difficult questions are placed squarely into the hands of the audience — a community tasked with imagining a future of reparations for Palestine.
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'The performance starts from this year in which I say at the beginning of the performance we're going to look back at 20 years ago when the letter was issued exactly today.
'So it's the day of the performance 20 years before that the letter was issued. And we reflect on all the reparations process, the effective one that took place," she explains.
The work, which runs for 40 minutes followed by a 20-minute Q&A, takes the audience on a journey that connects the past, present and future — a weaving together of grief, history, and hope which they are witnessing today as the genocide in Palestine is live-streamed.
'For me, when I connect past, present, and future, I manage to hold space for all of these different emotions and states,' Saleh says.
Born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and having lived in Jordan, Palestine, and now Scotland, Saleh carries with her a lived experience of exile and return. This long view of time and movement is central to her work.
'It's not only about love and peace that doesn't exist in like a hope in the sense of it will be peace and everything will be perfect. We say that peace is a white person's like concept or word for liberation or freedom.'
What unfolds in the performance is not a linear narrative, but a shared space of responsibility. Audience members are given letters and sometimes embroidery. They are asked to read aloud from the stage. And, crucially, they are invited to imagine reparations — to speak them into the room.
'So if they want to fight, they can,' Saleh says, 'but it's just like one person says recommendations for the future... It's an accumulation of thoughts.'
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Tension, for Saleh, isn't a threat — it's part of the work. 'I have no problem with tension. Tension is part of our life. So I'm, I'm, it's welcome.'
The audience suggestions range widely.
'Some people say we need reparations money because it's very material, what they destroyed, and some people say no reparations it's not only about money, it's more cultural, it's songs, it's all the people that passed away, their legacy, like how can you keep it,' she recounts.
'There's people talk about trees and seeds,' she adds. 'Some people were like saying what do we do? With these new settler plants, do we adapt to them or do we cut them?'
A QR code at the end of the show invites further responses, and Saleh notes that 'around five people each performance send some further reparations, even if it's like a sentence or two.'
This interaction — a sort of living archive of ideas — is as much a part of the work as the performance itself. 'It's how they experience that responsibility in and how they transport it outside and hopefully keep feeling that responsibility also outside the performance space,' she says.
'They take the letter with them home ... they can read through it and see all the different points they can contribute to.'
The timing of the piece is deliberate. The year 2045, only twenty years away, anchors the performance's speculative structure in the near future.
'So hoping that all the people in the room will be around like the 20 years,' she says with a small laugh, 'it's also about thinking further than 2045 with them.'
As Saleh reminds us, reparations are not abstract ideas or distant policies. They are embodied, cultural, material, and — perhaps most importantly — collective. 'It's their responsibility to keep the show going.'
