Saltwater Crossing: Embodied Storytelling against British Colonial Forgetting

This article reflects on the making and presentation of Saltwater Crossing, a solo performance exploring Palestinian connection to the sea, displacement, water, memory and embodied storytelling. Beginning with a 2015 visit to the West Bank made by the author in 2015, the article traces how the impossible gesture of transporting seawater from Tel Aviv to Nablus became a fictional performance narrative about movement, borders, salt, family history and the afterlives of 1948. It situates the work within Palestinian counter-archival practice, settler colonial erasure, British colonial forgetting and the contemporary suppression of Palestinian cultural narratives in UK arts contexts. The article also examines the performance’s somatically informed methodology, in which recorded voice, bodily listening, improvization, movement, image and sound generate layered forms of knowledge beyond verbal narration. Through audience response and documentation, it argues that Saltwater Crossing creates a relational, multi-sensory space of remembrance, resistance, solidarity and care in artist-led settings, against institutional silence and complicity.