When the pandemic forced us into lockdown, dancers and choreographers, normally reliant on being in the same room to create work, were left particularly at sea. Scotland-based Palestinian choreographer Farah Saleh, however, was midway through making a digital-based dance installation and found that the pandemic brought some silver linings. 'It worked wonderfully. Suddenly everyone was doing digital platforms, and Zoom was there as well. In 2017 and 2018 I worked with Skype and over Messenger. Now we had an advanced digital platform.'

Saleh, who was born in a refugee camp in Syria and grew up in Palestine, was already ahead of the curve when it came to creating digital-based work. While most choreographers can bring dancers they want to collaborate with into the country from Europe and further afield, Saleh works specifically with those from refugee and migrant backgrounds, to whom an increasingly hostile UK government routinely denies visas. In order to continue her practice, she had long since turned to digital.

Her new piece, PAST-inuous (referring to the ongoing situation in Palestine and the connection between the past and now) is showing as part of Dance International Glasgow before touring to Dundee and Edinburgh. Dancers from Berlin, Gaza, and Nablus will all appear live via video link, while Saleh and dancer Jamal Bajali perform in person before the audience. All the dancers are from Palestinian refugee backgrounds, and to create the piece, they scoured family archives (photographs, videos, oral testimonies) to excavate a language of gestures passed down through generations, connected to displacement and uprising. 'What is the connection between my grandfather in demonstrations against the British mandate in the 1930s, and my gestures today in Edinburgh?' she says.

Saleh is determined to keep themes of refugeehood in the public eye, despite them dropping off the arts-scene radar. 'It's outdated already, as if the refugee crisis has evaporated or it's resolved. It was just an artistic trend and then people forgot about it.' Pitching some of her pieces to festival programmers recently, she was told that the subject of her work was no longer in fashion. 'They were like "no, we did something on refugees two years ago. It's over." I'm insisting on both the form and the content, because it's very much there. There are millions of refugees all over the world.'

But although technology can bring together the diaspora of Palestine's refugees, creating digital work between continents still has its problems. 'You will see how the quality of the internet and the image is very different between Berlin and Gaza,' says Saleh. This digital inequality, she points out, is due to Israel's embargoes on Gaza, which have disrupted electricity services for years. But ever seeking ways to create art from turmoil, Saleh has made the grainy quality of those images an integral part of the piece. 'Technically speaking it's a lot of work and sometimes it's not easy but on an artistic level, of course it makes sense to work with it.'

Farah Saleh: PAST-inuous, Tramway, Glasgow, Saturday 26 & Sunday 27 March; Dundee Rep, Tuesday 29 March; Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, Wednesday 27 & Thursday 28 April.