Images by Victoria Sharples
“Multilayered, rich and emotive performance that pulls Palestine in to the materiality of the space through storytelling and movement”
Saltwater Crossing
Saltwater Crossing traces lines between body, land, and sea. Moving through personal and inherited memories of Palestinian migration, loss, and resilience. Through choreographed gestures, sound, and live narration, the performance invites audiences to sense the crossings that shape Palestinian experience and diasporic identity, set against the backdrop of the current escalation of genocide and its root in 1948 British Mandate Palestine. The performance is a living archive of movement - part ritual, part storytelling, part political witnessing.
“Poignant and affecting”
Towards Liberation
Until 2018 I regularly visited the West Bank. As a person of Palestinian heritage holding a British passport, I could move as an international visitor — sliding between different parts of Palestine and Israel while also witnessing the daily injustices of occupation and experiencing racial hatred towards Palestinians first hand. Those encounters inspired an earlier short film, The Slide, which marks the emergence of Saltwater Crossing: a woman travels between Tel Aviv and Nablus to collect seawater and turns it into salt.
In writing the story that this performance is centred around, I researched the indigenous Balad Al-Sham storytelling tradition of the Hakawati — a form that holds multiple stories within one. I was interested in how those cyclical structures might live not only in words, but in movement, gesture, and dance.
Performances
Gloam Gallery, Sheffield, 11 Oct 2025. Curated by Stu Burke and Victoria Sharples
“Got me thinking a lot about the ways we typically engage with news about Palestine, Congo, Sudan and more. And how we can’t allow systems of power to reduce them/us to numbers.”