2023 Shubbak Festival to Take Place This Summer Featuring Performances, Community Workshops & More

London's largest Arab Arts Festival, Shubbak Festival, will be placing accessibility at the forefront of their vibrant 2023 programme, offering a jam-packed roster of stellar performances, community workshops, and affordable ticketing schemes this Summer. The festival is dedicated to ensuring that the arts are readily available to everyone by working alongside a delegation of disabled and non-disabled artists.

For the first time, Shubbak is opening its Free Ticket Scheme to members of the public. Subject to availability, anyone on a low/no income can request a ticket to over half of the festival's events. With BSL interpretation and/or closed captions from Difference Engine provided across the festival, Shubbak will be offering several free activities, enriched with childcare provisions for families, as well as a pay-what-you-can price scale across various events.

Kicking off the free events will be a Takeover Weekend at The River Stage, National Theatre, featuring over 20 terrific acts with a phenomenal range of free concerts, workshops and exciting art installations. Showcasing something for everyone, this wild weekend will platform electric DJ sets with featured Boiler Room artist DJ Saliah, tapestry workshops that transcend borders with Aya Haidar, punchy performances from female dance collective Hawiyya, breakdance by Rain Crew and multimedia performance artist Zahed Sultan. The weekend will also showcase a fusion of acrobatics, Chinese pole and urban street moves in Taroo, a wonderful and wacky Parkour and circus show that will tell stories from streets all over the world. Audiences are welcomed to an array of musical genres performed by Amira Kheir, Beirut Groove Collective, Berber Diffusion and more.

Joining together families, friends and strangers from Slemani, Iraq to London, The Legitimated Body and Navigated Listener will share a sonic social commentary on the integrity of international law. Relayed through a radio circuit board, audiences will use their bodies to manipulate the frequencies heard in the other city, in creating their own unique soundscape. As well as this, other family-focused events taking place will be Dar Jacir - Tools for Solidarity with Resolve Collective: A Workshop for Families that will be led and curated by permaculturist Mohammed Saleh, that will explore play through an interactive structure assembled in The Mosaic Room's Garden.

Providing parents with some well-deserved reprieve, Rest, Play, Feast will offer nourishment of the mind, body and soul for families and children of all ages. Offering a day of dedicated creative workshops in the heart of Kilburn, this free event is for parents and their little ones to come together in community, without having to worry about any economic barriers. Rest, Play, Feast will feature healing movement workshops led by Lama Amine, Palestinian embroidery circles hosted by the Tatreez Collective, children's storytelling, and music-making with wonderful Syrian musician, Rama Alcoutlabi. A free feast for all will culminate the full day of events.

At Rest, Play, Feast the workshops will be in collaboration with Metroland Cultures and will extend dedicated support that will double up as childcare for parents at the events. Both Rest, Play, Feast and the Takeover Weekend at The River Stage will have access support workers present, so audiences who have access requirements can join the fun with the knowledge that there is a dedicated staff member available to facilitate their requirements.

Striving to have the festival as open to all as possible, BSL and closed captions will be across most events. The following events and performances will offer BSL interpretation for at least one of the performances: Hamed Sinno: In Conversation at The British Library, Dreamer at the Battersea Arts Centre, Olive Jar and Bad Diaspora Poems at Grand Junction, and Art & Disability Under Siege, a virtual conversation about the challenges and opportunities disabled artists face living and working in the context of geopolitical instability. Closed captions powered by The Difference Engine will be available across the rest of the programme. Bilingual Arabic-English poetry will feature across two events: I Will Not Fold These Maps by writer and artist Mona Kareem (also BSL interpreted) and A Friend's Kitchen - an intimate stroll with legendary Sudanese poet Al Saddiq Al Raddi and friends.

At Soho Theatre are comedians Sharihan Hadweh in No Cheri and her director, Manal Awad, who will share their stories on growing up blind, in male-dominated spaces and the woes of being a woman in the creative arts. The Stereotype is the Story: A Long Table followed by aftercare, will be a closed space for artists from the Global Majority world to discuss the nuances of telling their stories truthfully without getting drowned by reductionist stereotypes. The Royal Opera House is fully accessible and BSL will be provided upon request.

Joint CEO's for Shubbak Festival, Alia Alzougbi and Taghrid Choucair-Vizoso comment, Prioritising accessibility across the festival is a core principle of the spirit of Shubbak Festival 2023. By delivering multiple access points across our programme, from providing childcare to free and pay-what-you-can tickets to welcoming d/Deaf, Disabled & neurodivergent audiences, we hope that everyone will feel welcome.

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