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Jogging, a one-woman show at Summerhall, Edinburgh part of the Arab Arts Focus in this year’s festival.
Jogging, a one-woman show at Summerhall, Edinburgh part of the Arab Arts Focus in this year’s festival. Photograph: PR Image
Jogging, a one-woman show at Summerhall, Edinburgh part of the Arab Arts Focus in this year’s festival. Photograph: PR Image

Arab arts showcase at Edinburgh fringe beset by visa difficulties

This article is more than 6 years old

Nearly a quarter of the performers have had their visas denied more than once and one show has been cancelled completely

The first showcase of Arab arts at the Edinburgh Fringe has been forced to cancel and completely rework several productions after nearly a quarter of the visas for their performers and organisers were refused more than once.

Arab Arts Focus aimed to bring work from across the Arab world and the Middle East and give it a platform at the fringe, which is the world’s biggest theatre festival.

The works in the showcase were chosen by a nine-person committee of established figures across the arts and ranged from plays by Syrian and Iraqi playwrights to contemporary dance from Egypt and Palestine, to children’s theatre from Lebanon. Performers from Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Sudan were among those affected.

However, despite backing from the Fringe Society, numerous Edinburgh venues and the British Council – who put pressure on the Home Office – dancers, actors, artists and technical staff have been refused visas to attend the fringe and showcase the pieces they have worked on over the past 18 months.

Sara Shaarawi, an Egyptian playwright who has lived in Glasgow for six years and is the Arab Arts Focus coordinator, spoke of how dispiriting it had been to find how little interest the UK Home Office had in allowing cultural exchange, even when all the paperwork was in perfect order. Their ongoing struggle with immigration services has cost them £5,497 so far.

“We never thought the issues with visas would be this bad,” said Shaarawi. “It’s a continuous nightmare and it has cost us a lot of money, and hours and energy in trying to just bring people over the border. I don’t think people realise how difficult it is for Arab performers to present their work here.“The term Arab is very loaded in the media now, so we wanted to bring something that dismantles that and celebrates our region, breaks down stereotypes and creates space for people from the region to tell their own stories, because you don’t see that very often.”

In order to draw attention to their visa plight, each night at an event called Chill Habibi they are inviting performers to read out one of the visa refusal letters. On Tuesday night Emma Thompson made a surprise appearance to read a letter to one of the performers, which stated the Home Office was “not satisfied on the balance of probabilities, that you will leave the UK at the end of your visit … I am not convinced you are genuinely seeking entry to the UK for a purpose that is permitted by the visitor rules and that you will not undertake any prohibited activity.”

“Why would anyone ever want to visit this country?” added Thompson with an exasperated sigh.

The show hit the hardest was a dance double-bill featuring a Sudanese dancer based in Cairo, Nagham Salah, and a Palestinian dancer, Hamza Damra. Rather than cancelling the show altogether, they managed to intercept another Egyptian dancer who had been performing in Liverpool.

Over just five days, Egyptian choreographer Shaymaa Soukry, and dancer Mahmoud El Haddad, came up with an entirely new dance for the show, which also features a video of the full performance by Palestinian dancer Damra.

“We’d been working on this show really hard for the past three years and when Nagham got her rejection twice we were really shocked because we’ve travelled in Europe with this work,” said Soukry.

Also severely hit was Your Love is Fire, a play written by Mudar Alhaggi and directed by Rafat Alzakout, who studied together at drama school in Damascus before the revolution and who both subsequently fled when civil war broke out. Two of the lead actors in the play, both Syrians living in France, were not given visas and so the entire play had to be rewritten at the last minute and is now performed by two rather than four actors.

Alzakout’s visa was delayed, so they had to postpone the production for a week. He expressed his frustration that the play, which portrays how stifling daily life is for those in Syria, could not be presented to the fringe in its entirety. “This is not the version of the play we wanted to present. But we lost everything we had in Syria, so we will shout and scream whenever we can.”

Jogging, a Syrian play that opened on Wednesday, was also affected after their technician, a Syrian based in Lebanon, did not get his visa, while a Palestinian children’s play, Jihan’s Smile, had a musician refused a visa. Another show, The Elephant, Your Majesty, which featured teenage Syrian performers living in Lebanon, had to be cancelled.

The production team, which was supposed to be 10 travelling from Egypt, was almost cut by a half after four visas were refused, most crucially for their technical director. The chief lighting technician, who is overseeing almost the whole run, was given the wrong type of visa which means he will have to leave the fringe a week early.

“We’re really in trouble because we really really can’t afford for him to leave,” said Shaarawi. “We are already spread so thin – all of us are operating the shows, we are flyering, doing all the admin, all the logistics and the hospitality and now we are really in a panic – but there is no way of extending the visa. The problems for us are never ending.”

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