Line of Action
John Norton and Mathew White’s Bordergame, an interactive digital theatre experience, invites theatregoers to assume the role of migrants, giving us a new language with which to understand the refugee crisis and this swiftly disappearing thing called identity
Radhika Iyengar
Last year, we saw a humanitarian crisis of colossal proportions, considered to be the worst since World War II. As the world witnessed a mass exodus of people fleeing war-torn countries like Syria, it dawned on us that the world was becoming alarmingly bleak, fragile and splintered. In countries scarred by war, where terror and uncertainty loomed, people left homes in hurried, stressful and unprepared circumstances. It was like being ripped out of a womb. In response to the refugee crisis, artists and performers engineered stirring, dramatic works which would not entertain alone, but prod people to engage, think and have dialogues about the disintegrating world.
In mainstream conversations sculpted by the media, while many have conversed about the refugee crisis, the plight of the refugee is seldom spoken about – what it feels like to be displaced. What does it mean to be uprooted from a land you’ve called home and planted into one that is alien and doesn’t want you?
Those discomfiting feelings are explored through Bordergame – an interactive, immersive experience developed by John Norton and Mathew White, who belong to a tribe of theatre artists using the platform as the means to hold a mirror before society. Produced by National Theatre Wales, it invites theatregoers to assume the role of migrants. It places the participants in the nerve-wrecking situation of what it may feel like while trying to illegally negotiate across the border into another country. Through Bordergame, Norton and White try to replicate that crippling sense of fear – that uneasy sense of the unknown.
Norton, who founded Give it a Name, a Cardiff-based theatre company in 2007, has constantly tried to reinvent and remould theatrical frames. This interest has pushed him towards creating immersive worlds – theatrical pieces set in nightclubs, on trains, back alleys, on headphones and even across borders.
The fictitious world of Bordergame features Wales as the Autonomous Republic of Cymru – a refuge for those trying to escape NewK’s (i.e. the United Kingdom’s) tyrannical regime. The participants who become asylum-seekers cover the short distance between Bristol and Newport. So, in the dead of the night, squeezed in a transit van, they are approached by an intimidating and angry man who haphazardly demands from them payment with a heightened sense of urgency. That in itself is an unhinging experience. Precariously holding onto fake documents and a new false identity card, the participants are shoved out of the van and are given low-cost mobile phones, which would instruct them via text about how to proceed, including how to cross the border. At one point, they are even dictated to hop on to a local train and travel with real, unsuspecting commuters.
Crossing the border is an unlawful act, which the fictitious Border Agency of the Autonomous Republic of Cymru (BAARC) – an invention of the director – finds discomfiting. While a part of the audience participants assume the role of refugees, the remaining become Active Citizens (Cymru nationals) who work through an online portal, in tandem with BAARC, to weed out these refugees. ‘We developed the online world of smug civic surveillance and citizen vigilantism, where the online audience played the antagonists, just as the street audience were the protagonists,’ Norton informs.
In order to make the story as believable and concrete as possible, Norton and White ingeniously created a video in which BAARC’s head Alun Trevor – a no-nonsense looking guy dressed in a crisp suit, hands clasped, tries to reach out to Cymru’s citizens, encouraging them to actively work with BAARC to stop illegal immigrants from entering the country, voicing extreme xenophobic ideology eerily similar to what many nationalists in Europe, Australia and the United States are voicing.
The intent of Bordergame is rooted in creating a heightened sense of displacement. It is to pluck the audience-participant out of his/her relatively comfortable environment and drop him/her in a far more disconcerting one. It is an attempt to make theatregoers/participants understand the gravity of what it means to be dislocated. ‘I’d had enough of the dangerisation of foreigners in the press,’ Norton says, describing what led to the conception of the piece. ‘I have press cuttings going back 10 or 15 years of the same blame rhetoric blithely recycled and applied to new arrivals. Scapegoating is no new thing. I’d also had enough of all the nonsense I’d heard being talked about identity. We had UK ID cards forever being nearly launched, an absurd new citizenship test (which I failed, although I was born in the United Kingdom and lived here most of my life) and yet another wave of easy nostalgia being marketed and lapped up with a backdrop of increasingly crippling economic conditions, riots and global instability.’
For Norton, the border between Wales and England – a real border that is not quite a ‘real border’ – seemed like the ideal place to unpack the story he had in mind. ‘For a long time, I had the image in my head of a Welsh Border guard on the train from England to Wales checking passengers’ papers, asking if they have visas and vaccination certificates. It is an odd and disruptive image and yet sort of aspirational for Wales as a potentially independent nation. This was the starting point.’ From there, Norton met and worked with a real group of asylum seekers and refugees who were visiting the National Theatre Wales for lessons in drama. The interactions were revelatory. ‘I began to understand that asylum seekers have their stories checked, their facts checked, their accents checked and their cases are eventually judged on their ability to tell a coherent story, to convince their audience.’
These interactions helped him understand and piece together the necessary elements that would form the backbone of Bordergame. The experiential theatre therefore expects the participants to do a series of acts which include purchasing fake documents from ‘dangerous, smuggling gangs’; learning how to pretend to be British; and journeying across the border while receiving a series of instructions by text and hiding in plain sight.
At the end of the piece, the participants are invited to sit and have conversations with real asylum seekers. This opens a whole new world for the participants who’ve never had any visceral contact with refugees earlier or an experience of migration. It gives them a deeper insight into the lives of those who’ve been forced to flee. In fact, it has led to a few participants to later volunteer at local refugee centres after being part of Bordergame.
Although Bordergame was made in 2014 – before the debilitating refugee crisis that altered the narrative of our collective global history, before the election of Donald Trump, before the world politically began swinging far right – it’s terrifying how prescient the show is in 2016. ‘We made Bordergame as an extreme reflection of “current trends” as we saw them then,’ shares Norton. ‘It was set in an absurd, divided UK, outside of Europe, with a health service in crisis and really active and empowered extreme nationalisms at play. Tragically, it doesn’t seem far-fetched at all anymore.’
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All Images Courtesy of Farrows Creative/National Theatre Wales
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