No man is an island After a pandemic-enforced beach holiday, Jem Rolls returns to his favourite fringe festival By: Alan Small Posted: 6:11 PM CDT Wednesday, Jul. 19, 2023

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/07/2023 (1100 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Jem Rolls resembles Chuck Noland, the luckless courier played by Tom Hanks who is stranded on a tropical island after a plane crash in the film Cast Away.

The London-based poet, spoken-word performer and Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival favourite is heavily bearded, well-tanned and leaner than a rail as he walks barefoot down Market Street Monday, as if a Winnipeg sidewalk were a sandy beach.

Among the dozens of posters slapped on the wall of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre is one advertising Jem Rolls Maximum Crusoe, his new fringe show that began Wednesday night at Manitoba Museum’s Alloway Hall and runs until July 29.

While Rolls wasn’t marooned on a forgotten isle in the Pacific, he did spend almost two years on a beach, specifically in the Arabian Sea town of Gokarna, India, a Hindu holy community about 700 kilometres south of Mumbai, which is Maximum Crusoe’s setting.

“Where I was in India, it was burningly hot a lot, but I was on the sea. If you went half a mile from the ocean, it was screamingly hot,” he says.

“I used to float — in the middle of the morning, the sea was as flat as a glass of water — and I could actually float for hours. I ended up giving lessons to yoga teachers on how to float because I got so good at it.”

Rolls, who says he’s a nomadic sort, had visited Gokarna before. He calls it “Shiva’s soul” but also a hippie hangout where he was “surrounded by stoners and conspiracy theorists and yoga people and spiritual types, and I’m none of those things.”

It was where he was relaxing after months of fringe shows in the winter of 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic created a worldwide shutdown. He felt Gokarna was the safest place to be after reading about how difficult life had become in Europe and Canada.

“It was going to be an adventure being there,” he says. “I would have a chance to go for the rainy season, but I’d have no idea two fringe tours would be cancelled and it would last as long as it did.

“In a sense, nothing happened, but of course, when nothing’s happening, a lot happens and fills the days. A lot of crazy people, and that’s the story, really.”

Rolls had lots of time to lie around on the ocean and the beach, but his tales for Maximum Crusoe come from the people he met and the odd life he led.

“It was a real mix of people and as time goes on, more and more of my friends were Indian, although I wouldn’t call them desperately normal Indians,” he recalls. “One of those people appointed me as their spiritual master and that’s quite a part of the show.

“I had a disciple for about a year. Sometimes you’re wondering if they’re taking everything you say too seriously, because I only mean 50 per cent of what I say at the best of times.”

Rolls’ long-limbed body has been a part of his fringe act, but he’s become even more slender since he was last in Winnipeg, owing to a diet heavy on lentils in Gokarna.

“I had the same breakfast of lentils and puri 600 times,” he says, adding he never got tired of the same morning meals. “When I finally got out of India, everyone said, ‘Are you sure you’re not sick?’ because I was so thin, so I had to have blood tests to see there was nothing wrong with me at all.”

He was keen to fringe again, and he did tour in 2022, performing The Walk in the Snow, the half spoken-word, half-poetry slam story of nuclear physicist Lise Meitner that he staged in Winnipeg in 2019.

Winnipeg wasn’t part of his odyssey until Monday, when he was back to his fringe routine of slapping posters on walls and sandwich boards in front of RMTC, meeting with old friends and the folks who have put him up for two weeks.

Old memories returned, such as the strange taste of masking-tape adhesive, and the realities that have refused to succumb to pandemic pivots, such as the way the Giant Tiger outlet in the Exchange runs out of tape Monday at 2 p.m. every year, like clockwork.

He remembers how he fell love with Winnipeg in 2003 after winning a Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals tour lottery. Prior to that, he had never ventured beyond Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa events and didn’t know what to expect.

He stumbled upon a 12-day theatrical nirvana, which he’s recited around the world and written about, including in the pages of the Free Press.

His first impression of the 2003 Winnipeg fringe is posted on the website worldfringe.com.

“And nothing was ever the same again ever / and I did get to go West / by coach from Toronto / into the vastness of the Prairies / and freedom / where my first Winnipeg experience blew my head off the Festival was plain gorgeous,” Rolls wrote.

He met lifelong friends along the way and “a veritable unthreshing unmachine of unbackstabbery,” the opposite of the sharpened teeth he’d faced in the fringe meccas of Edinburgh and London, to which he’d become accustomed.

“It’s my favourite fringe and my favourite audience,” Rolls says. “Edmonton is very similar but Winnipeg has a great friendliness. The warmth you get from the audience for the show is kind of unique. It hasn’t been part of my life for four years.”

Rolls turned 61 prior to arriving in Winnipeg, but looks forward to the gruelling theatrical marathon ahead that staggers fringers half his age.

“This is my 19th fringe tour that I’m now on,” he says. “People do say to me, ‘How are you still alive?’

“It is the most fun I’ve ever had and it’s the best way to create art that I’ve ever come across. There is no gatekeeper. I don’t have to impress anybody but the audience.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall

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Alan Small
Reporter

Alan Small was a journalist at the Free Press for more than 22 years in a variety of roles, the last being a reporter in the Arts and Life section.

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