Fighting “absurdity with absurdity” in our post-Brexit world - Worthing show

It premieres in the Connaught Studio, Worthing on Thursday, February 13 at 7.30pm – a home-town gig with a view to an autumn tour.

Choreographer and performer Jennifer is a UK immigrant from Canada who was told after Brexit to “go home.” But she hasn’t lived there in 25 years, and due to the Brexit points-based system, she would not now be eligible for a visa to live in her country of birth. They don’t want her kind there either, she concludes.

But then the absurdity of it all gets even worse. It turns out that at her age and gender, the only visas she is eligible for are the ones for rich people or as an elite sportsperson. Bad Immigrant is the tale of her attempt to become the latter. Inspired by her childhood figure-skating hero, ‘Canada’s Sweetheart’ Elizabeth Manly, Jennifer takes up roller-skating…

The result is a show she describes as a cross between a leisure disco and Stars on Ice “highlighting the futility and absurdities of borders” and asking “Why do we insist on keeping people out of our group when we all just want to be in?”

“The last show I did was about the place where I grew up, and it started to reveal lots of questions for me about my identity and my place in the world. And then with the Brexit situation it all came to the forefront. For years I've always been appalled at how migrants and refugees and outsiders are seen, that whole thing of the in-group and the-out group and that if you are not in the in-group then you are excluded. I've been fascinated by that for as long as I can remember, just trying to understand how it happens. And I think when you go back you can understand that there was perhaps once a kind strength to be part of a group when there were sabre-tooth tigers around, but really I think this show now just comes from being very, very p*****d off with the situation. Anger is the catalyst and the answer is comedy. It's the old saying about joking is coping. I was talking about Brexit and what someone was saying was ‘Well, if you don't like it you can just go home.’ I've been here for 25 years and it feels that now it is a very different welcome here to the welcome I had. Now it really is quite muddy. And it is not just me personally. When I arrived it was almost like being a celebrity when people heard your accent and wanted to know where you were from and would find it exciting almost but now it's much more a question of ‘Oh, you haven't lost your accent’ as if you have not tried hard enough to be British.”

On the back of which Jennifer investigated the points system and discovered that she wouldn't be able to return to live in Canada now anyway unless she became an elite sportswoman: “And this is a show about how silly that is. The show is almost like a documentary looking at me trying to learn to become a roller-skater at a level that would be approved of by the immigration services. That's the absurdity.

“It was a very hard show to make and I don't mean in an artistic sense but because it was very hard to try and understand something the generations have been unable to crack. That's almost a lofty aim: how can you solve fascism? I've done lots of interviews and lots of research from Middle East conflict negotiators through to marriage counsellors and thinking about the ideas of how we can share lines to bring people together even when they disagree. But the trouble is it's easier to do that when there is a middle ground to be found. It is very difficult to find the middle ground with someone who comes from a place of hate. But if you don't try to do that then people just become more and more entrenched in their camps.”