Rho Chung interviews theatremakers Diana Feng from Don’t Call Me China Doll and Sierra Sevilla from For the Love of Spam about their Edinburgh Fringe shows, unpacking racial stereotypes, tropes, and the histories that have maintained them.

Anahit Behrooz responds to Cosmos, a solo performance by Palestinian contortionist and aerial acrobat dancer, Ashtar Muallem. “My body is my country,” she explains, minutes into her Edinburgh Fringe show. “After all, the first place we live is our bodies.”

Shivanee Ramlochan discusses Michelle Mohabeer’s Coconut/Cane & Cutlass, a mythic/poetic rumination on exile, displacement, and nationhood from the perspective of an Indo-Caribbean lesbian who migrated to Canada twenty years ago.

Eilidh Akilade

It is left unsaid: Drexciya. I clasp it in my hands and it is as if I have held it before.

Drexciya rests on the seabed, beneath the ripples and the tides. From ships, the pregnant Africans were thrown overboard, their children then birthed into the sea. The water babies swam down and made their world at the very bottom. Drexciya.

Hayley Wu (胡禧怡) responds to Thulani Rachia’s ixwa blue, a film that traces several colonial architectural sites in Cachoeira Brazil, investigating Rachia’s paternal line of ancestry. A Fringe of Colour 2021 commission.

Kieren-Paul Brown responds to The Elephant in the Room, a powerful mediation on colonialism and racism, written by Alix Harris and produced by Helen Bovey for Beyond Face CIC.

Memuna Konteh responds to schwarz (Black), a documentary by Amuna Wagner that intertwines poetry, photography and film to present a series of intimate and stimulating conversations between 17 young, Black Germans.

Xandra Sunglim Burns responds to Where Are You From? by Sophie Gresswell, who searches for an answer to this eponymous question by looking back over three generations of her family.