From Press Release
jem rolls’ LEASTEST FLOPS –
2009 fringe tour
how i stopped worrying and learnt to love the mall
* The biggest selling show on the 2008 Canadian Fringe Tour
* More sell-outs that any other show at the biggest Theatre Festival in North America – the 2008 Edmonton Fringe
* 2nd most successful show at the 2nd biggest Theatre Festival in North America – the 2008 Winnipeg Fringe
* Press smash… 5 five star reviews, ten four star
* More than 25 five star reviews since 2003, over 90 four star
After six progressively more successful Fringe Tours, Jem Rolls returns with LEASTEST FLOPS
Despite the fact that …every June Jem gets off the plane in Montreal and commences talking about himself … and then proceeds to head west for three long months, forever talking about himself with ever-growing verve, vigour, stamina, and erudition… and only when he finally gets on the plane at the far end in Vancouver does he finally stop … talking … about …himself…
Despite all this, Jem remains as modest ever… and can only call his Greatest Hits show LEASTEST FLOPS
Having created a new show every year since 2003… a challenging process for a performance poet… especially one who, whilst promoting hundreds of highly successful poetry cabarets, first in London and then Edinburgh, barely managed to write a new poem every year… Jem is very eager to take it easier on the writing and gleefully go for the performative like never before…
Last year’s show, his most successful ever, was his most theatrical yet, and this year’s show will be even more diversely so… For it is in the performative that Performance Poetry can be its most original… in the comedic, the vocally lyrical, and, particularly, the physical…
And as the Fringe Tour is such a great mix of performance styles, it has proved an excellent milieu for a 47 year old with no theatrical training whatsoever, not even a workshop… who never got on stage until he was 31… to learn a wide variety of new techniques
Performance poetry also allows the writer more room than any other medium to play with disjointedness … to throw disconnected ideas past the listener at speed … because, unlike the page, the voice face and presence of the performer pulls the abstract together into a coherence impossible on the page… This might sound complicated but in the brute heat of the stage moment, it is one hell of a lot of fun
LEASTEST FLOPS allows him to go back to pieces which worked very well and create extended deluxe versions…or boiled-down-and tightened versions… of pieces from every year’s show from 03 to 08
§ The New English History Syllabus [a.k.a wewonwewonwewon-wewonwewon] … regarded by some as his signature tune
§ A 12 inch version of his ode to the acutely socially awkward … I Am Clanger Man
§ His unromantic tragicomedy We Broke Up Cos The Sex Was Too Good
§ And the piece which still seems genuinely unique, A Bit Shattered, a poem entirely composed of spoonerisms …because, hey, spoonerisms make handy rhyming couplets
Some pieces have had to change… wewonwewon… because events have passed them by… and, shockingly, one of THE TWELVE STEP ROAD TO TRUE PESSIMISM has had to go … because it was far too pessimistic … Obama’s election proved it wrong, yes wrong, unequivocally wrong… Jem certainly never expected that
The only justification for such a show is that it be a killer show… and that it take performance poetry where it has never been before… as with Jem’s 2008 show…
And Jem has been in Laos and Vietnam … rehearsing on the banks of the Mekong River… on idyllic jungle trails … on the back of boats up the Nam Ou… in remote mountain villages of the Akha people… behind the loos of Laotian bus stations … on barren slashed’n’burnt hillsides… in magical-realist blizzards of white butterflies on mud-sand river beaches … working intensively on the inventive the energetic and the varied in performance poetry
ROBERT GILL THEATRE 214 College Street , 3rd Floor .
Sat July 4th 8.45. Sun July 5th, 3pm. Mon July 6th, 10.45. Tues July 7th, 5.15.
Thurs July 8th, Noon. Fri July 10th, 7.30. Sat July 11th, 1.45pm.