SCOTTISH musicians are set to team up with artists from Palestine for a Celtic Connections show in the New Year.
Former Franz Ferdinand musician Paul Thomson will collaborate with Ben Harrison from Grid Iron, international director Raeda Ghazaleh, theatre-maker Zoe Hunter; audio visual designer Dav Bernard, and the Palestinian Arab Orthodox Scout pipers of Beit Jala.
The show has been inspired by diaries of teenage girls growing up in war-torn Bethlehem during the second Intifada (2000-2005).
Bethlehem Calling will present the experiences of the girls who grew up in the West Bank, alongside present-day testimony from current students and those same women, two decades on.
The show will take place at Tramway, Glasgow, on January 25.
In 2000, a group of Palestinian teenagers living in Bethlehem were asked to record their experiences by their English teacher, Suzy Atallah, at The Terra Sancta School for Girls Sisters of St Joseph.
The diaries mixed everyday observations about teenage friendship and Backstreet Boys fandom with accounts of homes being destroyed and family members being killed.
Director Ghazaleh worked with the girls to put their diaries on stage in 2002. Later, she took the girls’ writing to be performed as a verbatim theatre piece on stage in London.
In 2023, Hunter reconnected with Ghazaleh with the aim of revisiting and updating the project, working with a team of musicians to bring the diaries back to the stage and adding leading Scottish theatre director Ben Harrison who previously worked in Palestine.
“Lots of arts organisations are not touching anything Palestinian because they’re worried about being criticised for it,” explained Hunter.
“But the music industry has been doing fundraisers and speaking out and is not afraid to call out the obvious. I thought, why not do something that mixes these young women’s testimony with something that’s musical?”
Other collaborators are the Palestinian Arab Orthodox Scout pipers of Beit Jala, who grew up in the same region where the Bethlehem Diaries originate.
The pipers’ connection to Scotland dates back to their formation in 1924, when they learned how to play Scottish pipes from the Scots Guards stationed there at the time.
Over time the Beit Jala pipers developed a sound and style that draws from both the music of the region and from Scotland.
Tickets for the show can be found here.
