Brexit Means Brexit! @ CCA, Glasgow
Glasgow's Take Me Somewhere performance festival kicks off with Brexit Means Brexit!, creating a space in which Remainers and Leavers can hear each other’s views
Take Me Somewhere is Glasgow’s festival of contemporary international performance, and its 2019 edition kicks off with Brexit Means Brexit! Choreographed by Palestinian dancer Farah Saleh and researched by Saleh and Professor Victoria Tischler, the show sets out to explore the collective mental health of UK citizens after the 2016 referendum.
It begins with a man (Robert Hesp) and a woman (Tanja Erhart) on a bare stage in the CCA, with Amy Cheskin providing British Sign Language interpretation. Erhart is an amputee, performing with one leg and crutches, and she deserves especial praise for her hypnotic movements. She and Hesp jerk and flail like dolls caught in a torrent, violently thrown from one emotion to another: bargaining, acceptance, anger, denial, depression.
These same emotions are written on cards and handed out to audience members at the beginning – the whole audience are later invited to enter the stage and to participate, first by getting to know each other and then by forming a large circle. Saleh herself chairs the discussion, asking audience members for their views on Brexit, which makes for an engaging and thought-provoking discussion. It isn’t all dancing and debating though: halfway through the performance, humorous news footage of politicians saying ‘Brexit means Brexit’ (or breakfast) is projected onto the ceiling.
Brexit Means Brexit! is a strange hybrid of a show. The performers have an arguably impossible task in trying to articulate something as subjective and uncertain as Brexit and everything that comes with it: the confusion, the division, the anger. They abstractly convey these emotions through their haunting, robotic gestures, but they cannot explain Brexit, nor provide a solution to it. That’s what the discussion aims to do: If not to fix this mess, at least to heal some of the divisions. In an overwhelmingly pro-Remain city like Glasgow, this show ran the risk of simply being an echo chamber – but by creating a space in which Remainers and Leavers can hear each other’s views, Brexit Means Brexit! plays an important role in today’s divisive climate.
Take Me Somewhere continues until 2 Jun