Portobello Town Hall is a versatile community venue offering flexible spaces for a variety of events. With a capacity of up to 800 people (seating 650), the building features a theatre-style setup with a stage and balcony. Historically hosting everything from comedy to musicals, live music to exhibitions, the Town Hall at Edinburgh's seaside is vibrant centre for a diverse range of events. 

A mini-festival to celebrate Palestinian art and culture, with freedom and without censorship. Across the week we will have theatre, dance, comedy, food, storytelling, music and poetry, showcasing artists from Palestine and the diaspora. Experience the affirming power of culture and the vital role it has in the ongoing call for Palestinian liberation. Enjoy an atmosphere of compassion and creativity with this one-day ticket, and a new line-up everyday. Full listings on www.FringePalestine.com including tickets for individual shows.

Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine

This lecture-performance invites the audience on a personal and political journey through the West Bank's fragmented landscape. The narrator recounts their return home after a prolonged absence, facing the stark reality of a land under occupation. Guided by intimate hikes through the West Bank, they weave together encounters with fellow hikers. Slowly the audience is invited by the narrator to collectively reclaim a lost landscape in the face of settler colonial violence. www.FringePalestine.com

An Orange Tree, an Olive Tree and a Painting That Knows No Borders

These are the stories of young people from Gaza, born under Israeli occupation and blockade. They are people who have endured unspeakable struggles and losses, who keep fighting to be recognised not as numbers, but as human beings. Founded in 2014 to give voice to the youth of Gaza. Writer Ahmed Alnouq will share their writing, spanning over ten years to the present moment. Their work offers an unparalleled insight into the past, the current and next generation of Palestinian leaders, artists, scientists and scholars and imagine where we might go from here. www.FringePalestine.com

We Are Not Numbers

Dancing, genies, animals, mother-in-laws and ghosts. Messages – phone calls, zoom calls, voice notes – reporting a nightmare of bombed hospitals and schools, children lying like rubble in the collapsing streets. 19 plays by children from Gaza and the West Bank, written pre-October 7th, 2023, are woven into a continuous 90-mintue play, continually interrupted by a message from genocide. Continually interrupted by verbatim audio, written and video, the play portrays real life in Gaza before and after the watershed of October 7th, 2023. www.FringePalestine.com

Welcome to Gaza

Gaza’s first female oud player, Reem Anbar, and writer and buzuq player Louis Brehony. Gazelleband presents the Palestinian story through instrumental music and storytelling. Having toured three continents in the past year, the duo brings tales of solidarity and musicality from the road. www.FringePalestine.com

Gazelleband

The play Craving Mangoes is written by the wonderful Palestinian playwright Dalia Taha (Royal Court). This will be performed alongside the second episode of Keffiyeh: Made in China (a collection of award-winning short plays), testimonies and a poem of Mahmoud Darwish. A nameless couple sits outside the vault, unable to step inside. They try to avoid confirming the identity of a young, unidentified body, doing their best to narrate a version of events in which he is alive. It is a surreal psychological thriller with a story that explores themes of loss, denial and grief. www.FringePalestine.com

KeffIyeh: Made in China

Sami (The Sheikh, Channel 4) presents 30 minutes of theatre and comedy, taking aim at the fascistic tendencies of Western "civilisation". Storytelling, joke-telling and physical comedy abound in this attack on the flimsy construct of nationalism and the tools of state oppression. www.FringePalestine.com

The Rockstar Voice of the Palestinian Diaspora

Ruh al Ruh follows the story of a couple that is in the war trying to find their lives inside the situation. The woman tries to hold them together inside their home clinging to their old life. The man goes outside to try to fix their life, but he is an artist and wants to fight the war in his way, through imagination. Both fight in their different ways to keep sane within the situation of war. The play is an ode to imagination and the "artist way of living". www.FringePalestine.com

Ruh al Ruh (The Soul of My Soul)

Two contemporary dance works from two of Palestine’s acclaimed dancers and choreographers. Within This Party searches for the personal and the intimate within the collective. It continues Amir Sabra’s exploration of that elusive and distinctive quality that can take familiar movements and gestures and transform them into something individual and unique. CHÈ: (Not) A Ballet is a duet where two female activists create a political ritual of reclamation, confront silence, reshape narrative and embody ancestral resistance. www.FringePalestine.com

Dance Double Bill

A musical encounter where Amal Kaawash brings to life songs from the Palestinian tradition. This is part of the wider heritage of Bilad El Sham, alongside her own original compositions, rooted in her experience as a Palestinian artist born in Lebanon to a family displaced from Palestine in 1948. Amal weaves music and storytelling into a continuation of the collective narrative, where inherited memory and present-day expression meet. www.FringePalestine.com

Marajeeh (Swings)

An intimate concert and reading of Harvest the musical by composer, writer and performer Amira Al Shanti. The musical follows the story of six women during the Olive Harvest in Palestine, showcasing how traditions prevail despite the ongoing challenges of occupation and apartheid. This is the first time Harvest will be shared publicly, with a unique showcase of the songs and reading of the plot by Amira. Like roots sprouting from a seed, it is hoped that this showcase will lead to more opportunities for this musical in the future. www.FringePalestine.com

Harvest

As the Israeli army again invades Jenin refugee camp, And Here I Am is both a powerful Palestinian tale of the past and an urgent story of the present. Based on the life and performed by Ahmed Tobasi, it spans the First and Second Intifada. Following his epic journey from the battle-scarred alleys of Jenin Camp to the confines of Israeli prison, from armed resistance against invasion to cultural resistance against eradication. Combining fact and fantasy, tragedy and comedy, award-winning writer Hassan Abdulrazzak captures an extraordinary odyssey of defiance and the unbreakable pursuit of freedom. www.FringePalestine.com

And Here I Am

A combination of food and storytelling. You will be hosted by Diline, an author and storyteller from Gaza, living in Scotland. Diline will make a popular Gazan recipe while sharing stories about Palestine's culture and cuisine, their role in dealing with the grief, resisting the injustice and keeping deep connection with Palestine. The stories, smells, sounds and finally the taste will make you feel as if you were in Palestine. At the end you'll be excited to go home to make the recipe you learned and tell the stories you heard over and over again. www.FringePalestine.com

Gaza Food and Stories

A science-fiction solo show, which charts humanity’s spectacular downfall. Asheerah, a young woman enduring genocide, utilises local inventions to avoid consciously feeling the pain of bombings and annihilation. Wrapped in a shroud, she wakes up in 2055 and comes to realise that she is the last person on Earth. She finds a friend, an AI companion that carries the consciousness of Italian legal scholar and expert on human rights, Francesca Albanese. Asheerah learns, through Francesca’s history channels, how the world ended, and how those who resisted made sure to carry out justice before their demise. www.FringePalestine.com 

The Last Palestinian Alive

Mohammed Lafi is a Palestinian rap artist from Jabalia Camp, Gaza, known for using music to confront oppression, siege, and political repression. "My people have been annihilated for 77 years for land grab based on religious and nationalist claims we neither chose nor understand. Outside Gaza, people can reshape their lives, we face only death in different forms, now by hunger. We want to escape and rebuild what’s left of us. The sand will remain, but our souls won’t. I’m Lafi. I carry this land inside me, I seek life beyond this cage.” www.FringePalestine.com

LAFI: The People x Land

Get ready for an electrifying DJ set that dives into the heart of Palestinian underground music! From the freshest beats to the lively rhythms of dabke and dahyeh, this performance is an explosion of sound and energy. It's a journey through the vibrant pulse of Palestinian culture, bringing together traditional dance with cutting-edge underground sounds. In short, it's a non-stop Palestinian dance party! www.FringePalestine.com

Arab a Dub DJ Set

Join Mohammed Mousa for a heart-wrenching performance and reading, My Death Is Not a Song, where poetry becomes a lifeline amid genocide’s shadow. Mousa shares the struggle of crafting poem in crisis, reciting powerful works from the Gaza Poets Society’s second anthology and his upcoming book. Dareen Tatour is a poet, photographer and filmmaker from Palestine. Her work chronicles her experiences and those of Palestinian people. Dareen came to international prominence in 2015 when she was arrested in her home by Israeli security forces and accused of inciting terrorism for writing Resist, My People, Resist Them. www.FringePalestine.com

Poetry from Palestine

A tale of uprooting and devastation, where the merciless force of war descends upon a village, turning residents' lives into a nightmare. At the heart of this village lives a man with his chicken and dog, unaware that the planes above will shake his home and life. It is a silent performance laced with dark humour. Puppets are cardboard crafted: terrified animals, missiles and a village facing war’s brutality. He resists with a water basin, a piece of cloth and anything that might delay destruction. www.FringePalestine.com

Performance Desperately in Need of an Audience

A performance between fire and water, between the past and future. A voice tries to speak, faster and faster, until it breaks. A body slips, calls out, wishes. My mother was a hydrologist. I saw her one last time. Water wages war. First fire found me. A father plays the oud. A smell disappears. A child sings. Between confession and collapse, something is carried. Something refuses to leave. www.FringePalestine.com

Flux in this Forgotten Farm

Directed by Volodymyr Smotrytel. Premiered in 1996. This one-man show is an interactive performance game involving children aged five to ten. It has been enjoyed by audiences in Poland, Germany, Macedonia, Switzerland, and Turkey. What sets this play apart is that within its 45-minute duration, a unique clowning masterclass unfolds, where children sing, dance, play musical instruments and eventually transform into clowns themselves! In 1996, at the International Theatre Festival in Trabzon (Turkey), the performance received the Mirror Prize. It also received a diploma for organising charitable shows for children as a form of laughter therapy.

I am a Clown!

Mazepa. Directed by Yaroslav Melnychuk. Premiered in 2009. The play Mazepa revolves around the main character Ivan Mazepa, who in his old age finds himself excommunicated and cast out beyond the borders of his homeland due to anathema. Through his own memories, he relives the key moments of his defeats. This performance serves as an exploration of a unique technology of betrayal, which is an affliction and a misfortune for both present and future generations. 'Do not judge me too harshly, I only wanted good for Ukraine. Goodness and freedom!' (Ivan Mazepa).

Portobello Town Hall

About this venue

Spaces at this venue