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St Alfege Church, SE10 9JT, London
Friday, 13th September 2024
- Afternoon Performance: 15.00 – 16:30
- Evening Performance: 19.00 – 20:30
Culture& proudly presents the London debut of Balfour Reparations (2024-2044), a performance lecture by Palestinian dancer and choreographer Farah Saleh.
Photo Credit: Sonska Studio.
This performance lecture investigates ways of confronting the United Kingdom’s colonial legacy in Palestine. In particular, the role of Arthur James Balfour, the country’s Prime Minister (1902-1905), Foreign Secretary (1916-1919), Chancellor and Rector of many prominent UK universities (1886-1930), in the historical denial of Palestinian political rights in their homeland.Saleh layers history, fiction, and fantasy through a lens of Critical Fabrication and Afrofuturism while engaging with and being inspired by archival material, such as documents, photos of historical sites in England, Scotland and Palestine, and videos including Balfour inaugurating the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1925 juxtaposed with Farah as a Palestinian scholar inaugurating decolonisation at a British University in 2024.
Photo Credit: Sonska Studio.
Saleh compellingly dances across the stage in a solo performance, wearing a black scholar robe decorated with Tatreez, a form of traditional Palestinian embroidery. In 2021, UNESCO recognised the art of embroidery in Palestine as an important intangible cultural heritage. The audience is invited to participate in the performance, imagining new futures beyond the twenty-year projection. The performance lecture takes place in 2044 to reflect on the fictive apology letter that the United Kingdom will have issued in 2024 to the Palestinian people, promising reparations.
The audience is an active member of the performance and the reparations evaluation committee created on the 20th anniversary of the apology, with their voices forming the soundtrack and crescendo to Farah’s closing act.
The performances will happen on Friday, September 13th, at 15.00 and 19.00. Each erformance is 40 minutes long, followed by 20 min Q&A. There will be a drinks reception after the final performance for guests to discuss their reflections on Saleh’s work.
Ⓒ Farah Saleh, Balfour Reparations (2024-2044), Haneen Hadiy for Common Ground Festival
Farah Saleh is a Palestinian dancer, choreographer and scholar based in Scotland. She has studied linguistic and cultural mediation in Italy and, in parallel, continued her studies in contemporary dance. Since 2010, she has taken part in local and international projects with Sareyyet Ramallah Dance Company (Palestine), the Royal Flemish Theatre and Les Ballets C de la B (Belgium), Mancopy Dance Company (Denmark/Lebanon), Siljehom/Christophersen (Norway) and Candoco Dance Company (UK). Saleh has also been teaching dance, coordinating and curating artistic projects, including the Sareyyet Ramallah Summer Dance School, which she co-founded in 2016. In 2014 she won the third prize of the Young Artist of the Year Award (YAYA) organized by A.M. Qattan Foundation in Palestine for her installation A Fidayee Son in Moscow and in 2016 she won the dance prize of Palest’In and Out Festival in Paris for the duet La Même. She was an Associate Artist at Dance Base in Edinburgh from 2017-2021, and in 2023, she earned her practice-based PhD from Edinburgh College of Art. In 2024, Saleh started a lectureship in Global Majority Performance at the Theatre Studies Department at Glasgow University.