Set as a fictional documentary in 2045, the character of Youness Atbane observes the dynamics of contemporary art in Morocco. In view of this, Atbane creates an archive about Moroccan art production from 2000 to now.
Jihan is an ordinary child who woke up one day to discover she lost her smile. The sun set, the moon disappeared, everything lost its colour, cold spread throughout the town. Jihan needs to find her smile again.
Daily life in the Syrian war. The disappointed illusion that change is around the corner. It's about those who remain silent, who don’t take a stance but are then eaten up by inner conflicts.
Let your imagination run as clothes on a washing line are brought to life by a magic balloon in a fusion of object theatre, contemporary and traditional puppet arts.
Taha Muhammad Ali is the beautiful picture of the Palestinian people – of all of us. In his verses, Taha documents survival after 50 years of loss – of his home, his lover, his friends and his shop.
Thirty participants are invited into an intriguing theatrical game exploring security, profiling, freedom of expression and privacy in the age of cybersurveillance. Mobile throughout the performance, the participants collaborate, debate and spy on each other. Farsi, Arabic, English.
Funny, poignant, powerful political theatre from award-winning playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak, using comedy to bravely tackle problems facing the Arab and Muslim communities across the world.
These two new contemporary dance pieces from Palestine and Egypt question what it means to be Arab in today’s world. 'Mayhkomsh' tackles social judgement. 'Running Away' challenges cultural norms and burdens put on young Arabs' shoulders.
Heart of Darkness fuses traditional elements with contemporary theatre in an exploration of the feelings and emotions of a woman gnawed by time and her hidden aspirations, expectations, fears, secrets and ambitions.
Humour and pathos collide in a mix of drama, music and physical theatre as five strangers on a plane find their flight rekindles fragments of forgotten memories.
An actress on stage with her iPhone’s personal assistant, Siri, as her only partner. In a precise game of question and answer, their exchanges expose the bizarre metaphysical dimension of the machine and blur the limitations between them.
One woman attempts to articulate her experience of pain. Physical pain with no apparent cause. Also, she’s met someone and they want to make this work. A new show from this Fringe First Award-winning team.
Thus Spoke… is an electrifying piece of existential pop from two of Montreal’s most celebrated artists. Playfully challenging the status quo, writer, Étienne Lepage and choreographer, Frédérick Gravel defy convention in this irresistible antidote to apathy.
A sparkling comedy about first dates, followed by supersonic speed-dating to find that soulmate/casual partner/festival pal or bunch of unforeseen encounters (delete where applicable). All genders and ages (18+) welcome!
Live report with the Egyptian protest singer Ramy Essam. He was an iconic figure of the revolution during the Arab Spring and now tells the story of his life and his fight for a better world.
Two performers express the inner conflict within a modern woman’s head: push and pull, past and present, progress and regression. Interweaving acappella harmony, text and physicality, Mouthpiece is a harrowing, humorous and heart-wrenching journey into the female psyche.
What drives young people to join violent organizations? A show exploring the effects that constant propaganda has on young lives, focusing on war propaganda in particular. We follow eight youths through 10 difficult years, seeing how they change.
Old boyfriend photos, texts, poetry: struggling with her love life, Julie Cafmeyer experiences orgasms, despair, rejection and heaven. It's a coming of age story showing what theatre can be, and you're invited.
Can you help Molly learn how to be a kid again? A larger-than-life story of family, friends and fitting in from Sarah McDonald-Hughes. Warning: contains dancing, chocolate cake and an epic car chase.
An ensemble work, striving to recreate the original story of Medea. With intimacy and immediacy, visually translating the tale through physical illustrations and a playful, profound relationship between two performers who remain present throughout.
The average person says 123,205,750 words in a lifetime. But what if there were a limit? Oliver and Bernadette are about to find out. A play about what we say and how we say it.
Cockamamy comes to Edinburgh after a sell-out run at last year's London Camden Fringe. A heartbreaking, hilarious story about the companionship between Alice and her granddaughter Rosie. This compelling new play explores the reality of living with dementia.
Lorna and Grace are best friends forever. But when Lorna gets into university and Grace gets pregnant, they find themselves in starkly different worlds. A tale of friendship, love and rivalry spanning 30 years from Elinor Cook.
In 2013, Suzanne won a Belgian theatre prize, spending the entire prize money on buying an actual ice skating rink. Why she did that will be revealed in her funny, absurd, moving show.
Award-winning Nilaja Sun (No Child...) breathes life into a vibrant mix of Lower East Side neighbours as they prepare for a hurricane racing towards NYC.
Can art save the world? Belgian theatre-maker Enkidu Khaled's award-winning show analyses and simplifies the complex process of making theatre. Using the experience of war, he empowers the audience, utilising their imagination and artistic expression.
Gentle, poetic, cruel or comical; Mireille & Mathieu unpack their paraphernalia at a flea-market. Objects turn out to be bursting with stories where in this happy delirium of exploration and absurd experiments, nothing’s taken seriously.
Moving, truthful and darkly comic, Box Clever by nabokov’s associate-playwright Monsay Whitney, with music performed by Avi Simmons, is a new play about one woman’s experience of a refuge and a mother’s commitment to do the best for her daughter.
Being a small-time drug dealer is tough. Especially when your old man owes £6,000 to a loan shark who’s got a tattoo of Beyoncé on his neck. Comedy from acclaimed writer Alan Harris (Paines Plough, National Theatre Wales).
Get under the skin of the well-to-do, the 1%, super rich, the ones who pull the strings, the faces we never get to see. For one night, you can take their chairs. You call the shots.
A funny, frank, and occasionally explicit insight into heterosexual female desire, read out loud by a male comedian. MANWATCHING is a show about what one woman thinks about when she thinks about sex with men.
Leah and Chris were raised on Harry Potter, New Labour and a belief they would be special. Gig theatre about when dreams don’t become reality, from the team behind the award-winning Weekend Rockstars.
A cabaret with the best performance the Arab World and Scotland have to offer! Expect words, music, comedy and otherness from new and established artists, including David Greig, Julia Taudevin and Karl Sharro.
Mediterraneo brings Africa, southern Italy and Scotland crashing into Summerhall. Featuring pizzica exponents The Badwills, Zimbabwe jit legend Rise Kagona (ex Bhundu Boys), and Scottish psychedelic ceilidh maestros Awry.
Late-night in Upper Church. The first performance based on the poems of Swedish Nobel Prize in Literature-winning Tomas Tranströmer. A fast-paced, visual and highly physical theatre piece exploring loneliness, anxiety and desire. Devised in Estonia.
Tighten your laces, and don't let your knees hit the ground. There's live music and wall-to-wall dancing in this sweat-soaked marathon with Northern Soul. No Miracles Here is an anthem to feeling alive and keeping the faith.
A show about tech savvy extremists, our collapsing world, digital fantasy and nightmare, and a generation of resentful, directionless, violent young men.
Rebecca and Paul are running away. Away from memories and mistakes. They’re trying to save their relationship. They need time and space. An isolated house in the country is the perfect place to work things out. But you can’t run forever. Especially when you’re being followed.
A journey to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. In February 2016, two artists got on a cargo ship to retrace one of the routes of the Transatlantic Slave Triangle – from the UK to Ghana to Jamaica and back.
A twelve-year-old girl sneaks across the border into her own country. Her parents watch her on a computer screen. The works of a half-forgotten performance artist seem to hold the key to bringing down a brutal system operating on our behalf and under our noses.
A witty and touching new play about class, friendship and absence, set in the forgotten town of Skelmersdale by award-winning writer and comedian Jackie Hagan.
Erupting into life in 2011 with the appropriately-named debut album New Brigade, recorded when the band were all in their teens, Danish punk quartet Iceage reinvigorated the idea of rock music as a primal, dangerous force for youthful expression.
Presented by Trans Creative and Contact. When there’s no rule book, you have to write your own… Through song, dance, humour and hard-won wisdom, Kate shares the ins, outs, ups and downs of transitioning, asking: have you changed?
A darkly humourous musical tale about refugees and how to love when you're broken, starring Klezmer folk sensation Ben Caplan. This is a true story from luminary Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch.
Morale is High will predict what could happen between now and the next general election in 2020, exploring the effects of popular culture, political policy and inane day-to-day actions on who we choose to vote for.
This August Rhythm Machine - a night of dance music & live art - returns to Summerhall for three consecutive Saturday nights after a twelve month sell-out run in 2015/16.
Is the world out of joint? Who is torturing whom? How does it feel to be poor? Why is the water calling out? Where are you now, Woyzeck? Brand new from award-winning Finnish playwright/director Jari Juutinen.
An interdisciplinary work from Turtle Island that takes shape around peoples and the land. Indigenous artists of Canada invite reputed artists of othered communities to collaborate in artful protest and celebrate the right to do so.
The Lemon Bucket Orkestra: Canada's only balkan-klezmer-gypsy-party-punk super-band. Born on the streets of Toronto as a busking band in 2010, the original quartet of guerrilla-folk troubadours quickly amassed a battalion of musicians.
Part-The Last Leg, part-Buzzfeed and part-piss up, Middle Child and Luke Barnes return with “Some Tiny Plays About How Fucked We Still Are”, using verbatim text from the web to explore the world we live in.
Discusses how notions of identity, nationality and politics influence the creations and reception of Arab theatre makers. As artists increasingly work internationally, does ‘being an Arab’ ease or complicate to get your works seen?
Since 2006, Brian Shimkovitz's Awesome Tapes From Africa blog has been sheddinglight on obscure and wonderful sounds from across the continent.
The last Durham Light Infantryman, a veteran of Ypres and Somme. What does it mean to survive, to be a hero, when all he wanted was to work with horses? ‘A truly superb play’ (WalesArtsReview.com).
Come play with The Mayers Ensemble. Theatre and dance blend to explore boundaries, personal histories, gender, skin colour and how slavery helped found modern gynecological practice.
The brutally authentic story of four police officers struggling to remain in control as the community they serve disintegrates. Written by a former police officer, this immersive production shows the modern day police service laid bare.
A thrilling and humane portrait of army life telling the stories of five men and women serving on the front line.
Choice comedy line-ups from the country's most innovative and good new purveyor of live content, Fight in the Dog Ltd.
This year again we welcome Balkanarama - Scotland's own riotous night of all things Balkan! OPA!
2017 is their last year! Edinburgh’s favourite purveyors of sousaphone-fuelled brassy honkstep will be hanging up their horns at the end of this year.
A new play by Caitlin McEwan (Soho Writer’s Lab 2015/16) about a generation who have been told the world is theirs for the taking, and what happens when they discover that isn't the case.
Celebrate five years of silly songs and satirical anthems from the multi award-nominated musical comedy stars. Six performances only – advance booking essential! Stars of Radio 4’s The Now Show and the BBC’s Live at Television Centre.
Arab Arts Focus Talks Programme supported by Tamasi Collective for the Performing Arts and curated by Jumana Al-Yasiri, Sundance Institute Theatre Programme.
A 60-minute theatre performance: Hanan Al-Haj, a woman in her 50s and a Lebanese citizen, follows her daily routine of jogging to keep herself safe from obesity, bone diseases and anxiety.
Unique and radical reworking of Witold Gombrowicz's (the Shakespeare of Poland) classic play. Fusing language, physicality and comedy, one of Belgium's most exciting young companies creates a thrilling contemporary retelling of a lost masterpiece.
Frànçois & the Atlas Mountains are a French/British pop group, combining indie pop, folk pop, and African rhythms
Since bursting onto the Madrid DIY scene, Hinds - Ana Perrote, Carlotta Cosials, Ade Martin and Amber Grimbergen - have mastered a raw and playful sound all their own.
This is the remarkable, hilarious and heart-lifting story of how James actually gave his best mate the send-off he wanted. Combining storytelling, comedy and live music, Team Viking won the Vaults Festival Origins Award and was a runaway hit at the 2016 Edinburgh Festival.
A contemporary triple-bill of adapted Greek mythology and new writing, written and devised by the company, exploring theatre performance through the physical, musical and poetic.
Herself as "other". An exploration of blackness, gender, sexuality, religion and Jamaican nationalism, seen through the lens of individuals from different backgrounds confronted with the gaze of their own realities. A one-woman show.
The Vagina Dialogues is a series of episodic monologues, duologues and movement pieces set to live music. The work is innately feminist, humorous, grotesque and, let’s face it, a little nude in approach.
Trumpet, electronics, text. One man’s love letters from the front line. Dennis Marshall wrote to his fiancée towards the close of WW2. Dennis's grandson, trumpeter Tom Poulson, explores his letters in an extraordinary, immersive musical performance. madeinscotlandshowcase.com
Released in 2001, shortly before the band split, Lift to Experience’s sole album The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads is a cult classic - now Josh T Pearson and the band are back together to revisit it live.
50% Jamaican, 50% British, 100% reppin’ Shepherd’s Bush. Nathan Bryon is many things. Part story, part stand-up, a fusion of Afro-Caribbean flair and British awkwardness in a searing, searching, very funny exploration of what being mixed race means.
The legendary duo of Optimo will be taking over The Dissection Room space for another Optimo (Espacio) event this Festival.
A reflection on the non-verbal political discourse, identity issues, negotiation between contemporaneity and traditions, and gender prejudices carried by the Arab dancing body.
A live, eclectic set from three contemporary Scottish artists. Summerhall's unique and enchanting Dissection Room will see NEHH team up with Made in Scotland for an evening of innovational music.
A singer, songwriter, novelist, journalist, former singer in a gothic metal band and nominee for the Norwegian version of the Brit Awards, Jenny Hval is a polymath creator with a strong track record.
t’s the 90s. New Labour, Fred Perry, strappy vests, 3 lions and 3 stripes. A night of electrifying immersive theatre, quality new writing and a score of banging live & recorded music. Not Too Tame bring Under The Influence: 90s Britpop to the Roundabout for one night only.
For those who don’t feel like they’re in the right life, online is a place to be yourself. Out in the real world though, things can be very different. A story of first love through the eyes of a gender-curious teen, Scorch examines how the human story often gets lost amidst the headlines.
The worldwide smash-hit is back. A play about depression and the lengths we go to for loved ones. 'Heart-wrenching, hilarious... possibly one of the funniest plays you will ever see' Guardian. 'Captivating' New York Times.
We want to talk about masculinity and patriarchy, but the words that exist aren’t good enough. So there’s music and dance too. RashDash return with their Fringe First winning show about gender and language.
A welcoming forum for finding collaborators to make new ideas happen, Pitch Up is made up of five-minute pitches – and one-minute elevator pitches – from theatre makers, producers and venues. Visit housetheatre.org.uk for more information.
Electronic artist from the UK and one half of F*ck Buttons. Blanck Mass is a heavy, shimmering and orchestral work defined by manipulated field recordings, warm analogue synth, heavy sub and deep drone.
We all have a nationality. For some, it's like eye-colour. For others it's a straitjacket. For some, it fits the borders of a state. Others want to draw new borders so they fit (...)
'They said I'd be good at it.' The story of a young female soldier's journey through post-traumatic stress by award-winning playwright Lesley Wilson, developed in collaboration with the British Army. Originally developed with support from Tron Theatre Creative.
American wanderer Julie Byrne's second album, Not Even Happiness, vividly archives what would have otherwise been lost to the road (...)
Fancy getting dirty later? Come join the Dirty Protest gang as we celebrate 10 years of shaking up the theatre world with five new short plays from five of Wales' most exciting writing talent.
The AAF invites you to meet some of the most exciting Arab theatre makers and choreographers working today in Cairo, Beirut, Paris and Marrakech.
Svelt, intelligent balladeer trapped inside the body of an oversized, oft-bearded folk ogre. 'A heady and enthralling mix of genres are each anchored in solid melody' (LouderThanWar.com). Live music and special guest DJs.
The Arab region is witnessing the rise of several institutions dedicated to funding, developing, and promoting the work of confirmed and emerging independent artists from the Middle East and North Africa.
Up the dark, dark stairs, upon the bloody gallows of soft rock, through the oubliette of cheese, into the torture chamber of disco, you are welcomed to the Late Night Pop Dungeon.
A charismatic charmer and a smasher of pianos. A madman and an earnest poet. A strummer of delicate chords and a lover of bent and broken melodies. Ben Caplan is simply unforgettable.
The discussion on how to support Arab artists often focuses on the challenges of securing sustainable sources of funding for new productions.
Daniel Kitson does a very clunky, warm up run through of a pre existing stand up show but with some new bits and bobs swapped in for other bits and bobs.
It'll be about 2 hours long and obviously, its late. so. Bear that in mind.
Can Arab performing artists use the stage to give different perceptions of their homes, struggles, and lives as human beings? Is it possible for a Syrian or Iraqi playwright to put on paper a simple love story? And isn’t a love story also an expression of time as experienced by its author?
Master of Cretan lute George Xylouris and Jim White (Dirty Three), a most innovative and charismatic drummer, are creating a musical duo. Fluid in nature, exciting and edgy, the music is riveting, compelling and spellbinding.
Est. 2010, this is Edinburgh’s institutional shot of Deep Rhythms and Rugged Grooves. For one night residents Cameron Mason and Calum Evans will be spinning the finest selections of Deep Funk, Latin Rhythms and Rare Disco into the early hours at Edinburgh’s very own Summerhall.