Jem Rolls Adventures in Canadian Parking Lots 1pm Show
jem rolls
ADVENTURES IN CANADIAN PARKING LOTS
Montreal Fringe 2025
English performance poet goes back to the style of shows which made his name across Canada: high-energy performance poetry.
Yet advances into some new kinds of performance.
Jem Rolls lives entirely off the door money from Canadian Fringe Festivals
And has had no proper home since 2007.
He is an ancient tradition made new: the wandering bard.
All you need in this world is a laptop, a passport and a bank card.
Jem has received a huge 45+ FIVE STAR reviews; and 200+ FOUR STAR.
Show features twelve or so Performance Poems, with very different styles, agendas, energies, antecedents and speeds.
Dumb comedy, smart comedy, chunky eco-politics and lyrical poetry.
Show is trajectorial, yet the order is chosen for maximised variety: and to make the audience aware they have no idea what is coming next.
Performance Poetry: Voice text face, breath body space.
Creating so many variables the possibilities are literarily endless.
Show has at least three new territories for Jem.
A piece of spoken-word sci-fi... “Burning Man Festival 2025”.
A piece with a complete disconnect between style and substance, a heavy subject treated as an archly comic poem...
And an unwritten idea Jem will improvise into story form each day.
Pieces written over twenty years:
in Barcelos, up the Rio Negro in the Brazilian Amazon;
in the Cardamom Mountains, Cambodia;
in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam;
in Gokarna, India;
in Mwanza on Lake Victoria, Tanzania;
in Islington, London and Edinburgh;
in Edmonton and Winnipeg;
and on the Camino di Santiago di Compostela.
This will be Jem's 21st full Fringe Tour.
He has done more Fringe Festival's than anyone else this century.
Curiously, few Canadians know the Fringe Tour is unique. Nothing like this happens anywhere else: consecutive festivals across a vast country for months...
From concrete atoll to concrete atoll across the sea of green.
