Palestinian Dancer Farah Saleh Set to Perform at Fruitmarket Gallery This April
The end of April 2022 sees Palestinian dance artist Farah Saleh give three days of performances in the Warehouse, a new space for art at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.
It will see Saleh return to the Fruitmarket three years after her performance What My Body Can/t Remember was shown in 2019, and ahead of premiering her new work A Wee Journey at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2022 in collaboration with Turkish composer Oğuz Kaplangi.
PAST-inuous is a new live interactive dance performance with an in-person and digital cast of 11 Palestinian dancers, created in collaboration with video artist Lucas Chih-Peng Kao. It explores the bodies of the artists as living archives and aspires to reflect on the future of the Palestinian refugee cause and its connection to the current global refugee condition.
It follows its premiere at Dance International Festival (DIG) at Tramway in Glasgow and Dundee Rep, and will be presented in companion with Gesturing Refugees, an interactive dance performance which premiered at Avignon Festival in 2018 and uses the bodies of refugee artists and the audience as the main archive, while playing with other archive material, testimonies and imagination.
These performances will be accompanied by an in-conversation event between Saleh and collaborator Claricia Parinussa, an interdisciplinary artist with a body-based practice that encapsulates movement, performance, research, writing, producing and community organising. The event will engage with the depth of Saleh’s research into archiving stories of refugeehood.
Talking about presenting their work at the Fruitmarket, Farah Saleh said “I am really excited to see how PAST-inuous can transform from an interactive dance video into a live performance, through which the dancers performing from 4 different locations can interact directly with the audience. This also comes at a time when artists are trying to find hybrid ways to work both digitally and live, continuing the potentiality of the digital as a way to defy distance and tackle refugeehood.”
Performance details are as follows:
PAST-inuous
Wednesday 27.04.22 1pm–1.25pm, 2pm–2.25pm, 3pm–3.25pm. 4pm–4.25pm
Thursday 28.04.22 1pm–1.25pm, 2pm–2.25pm, 3pm–3.25pm. 4pm–4.25pm
Gesturing Refugees
Friday 29.04.22 3pm–3.40pm, 5pm–5.40pm
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 