Edinburgh Festivals 2019: 4 Great shows about seeking refuge

Lines are being drawn, doubled down on and fortified even as others work to push them back or erase them all together. As more and more of us find ourselves penned in by borders physical and ideological, art can offer us a place to escape to, a space in which our identities are not subject to state lines or legal statuses. Alternatively, it can expose the costs of our pursuit, and who it is that pays them.

This year, numerous shows at the Edinburgh festivals have explored this idea of refuge from a variety of angles. Here are four of the best Edinburgh shows about the quest for refuge.

Kalakuta Republik, Lyceum, 8-11 August

Serge Coulibaly wrote this Fela Kuti-inspired, Afrobeat-infused, dance extravaganza so that he and the company could take to the stage and do “anything we want to.” The name comes from Kuti's own “Kalakuta Republic” - the moniker her blessed his home with as he declared it an independent republic, free from the tyranny of the Nigerian government he had railed against for years.

In the same spirit, Coulibaly claims the stage in the name of himself and his fellow dancers. Whatever country it might lie in, as long as the music plays, his stage is a space in which they are beholden to no-one and in which their deepest selves can be expressed without restraint.

As the music builds and their bodies fly across the stage faster and freer with each passing beat, it begins to seem like even the laws of physics hold little jurisdiction over Coulibaly's free republic.

Interview with Serge Coulibaly

The Secret River, King's Theatre, Until 10 August

The Secret River is an Australian epic from the Sydney Theatre Company, based on the best-selling novel by Kate Grenville. Set in New South Wales, 1806, it tells the story of a convict named William Thornhill who works to win his freedom and “take up land” on the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney.

He seeks to live an honest, wholesome life by the standards of his time - labouring to provide for his wife and child, building them a home by the sweat of his own brow. The reality that cannot be reconciled with his innocent fantasy lies with the aboriginal tribes whose home he is staking claim to. Their nervous, watchful eyes fill the background of his tale while the music of their rising anger fills the air, building ominously towards the story's awful, inevitable conclusion.

When one nation builds its homes on top of another, like overlapping plates, a tension is created that will always find some violent release.

Illegal, Underbelly Cowgate, Until 25 August

An American artist scrambles to hold on to her life in the UK as her Visa expires. A Guatemalan graduate tries to find the courage to strike across the US border. Jessica Phillipi's narrative poem draws their stories together to show their dreams, relationships, fears and aspirations reflected in one another. Though they live on opposite sides of the globe, their lives are constricted and cut apart by the same imaginary lines.

The stakes they face are not the same but the central questions are – Where do we find our refuge and what will we risk to claim it? Who gets to decide where we do and do not belong?

Patrick Monahan: Started From The Bottom, Now I'm Here, Gilded Balloon, Until 25 August

Iranian-Irish comedian Patrick Monahan has lived his life at the centre of so many contradictions and, for his new show, he mines much of the humour from these odd dichotomies.

The jarring transition of fleeing Iran for Northern England as a child. The conflicting attitudes of his socially-conscious Iranian mother and his ever-scavenging Irish father. The shift from life as a working class kid in a coastal caravan to a swaggering comic with a posh girlfriend in West London. In ethnicity, nationality and class, he has continually found himself caught between supposed identities.

At home everywhere and nowhere, Monahan pokes fun from the perspective of the perennial outsider, loosening the terms of the “us and them” mindset by pointing out how ridiculous those boundaries are in the first place.

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