Duckie, Border Force, Brighton Dome, Pride 2015.

Have you ever experienced that unnerving intimacy that occurs at passport control?

They gaze into your eyes, their focus only on you, they want to know everything about you, they smile, you smile, then they hand you back your passport and tell you to move on. You leave blushing, whispering to yourself something about uniforms and jet lag and head straight to the bathroom to splash your face with cold water.

Maybe.


Anyway,  you can see why Duckie might have thought the displacing experience of border control might lend itself to a risqué immersive theatre show. Duckie's Border Force team are flirtation experts, a quick brush with their tight panted security force leaves you feeling like you are shit hot. This is all part of Duckie's intention, in keeping with the Pride ethos, to create the atmosphere of a sexual polymorphous utopia, which does not yet exist in wider world. Border Force is a place in which you can wrap your arms around a small man in a bald cap, whilst straddling a gym horse and rocking a pair of fake boobs, in front of a picture of a semi naked Vladmir Putin and feel like you own it.

Once through immigration, we pose for our own passport and in order to gain visas', and therefore entrance into the various countries; Brazil, China, India and Russia, we need to perform certain tasks. In Russia we pose for a photo as outlined above, China is a ping pong match, India a spelling test and Brazil is a Brazilian wax (although we were able to avoid this by bribing an official with a synchronised dance). Once in each of the zones there is a small sense of anti climax as each room feels quite empty (we might have been a bit uncool early), and my friends and I found ourselves ricocheting from one country to the next until the main parade, in which all four of the countries performed a dance representative (disappointingly stereotypically) of their country.

Russia went first and utterly stole the show with a naked (highly exposing from our angle) ballet routine which ended with the blond Adonis dry humping a dead swan (no animals were armed in this act). After a short interval, skilled lip syncher Dickie Beau, (whose show I have never seen but is supposed to be brilliant) came on and did a Queen Mother on speed speech, not sure who he was lip syncing too, but it didn't quite work, as the leader of the world appeared to be English/American which didn't quite seem the point.  The denouement came when our host/DJ/Prime Minister of the world Amy Lamé, announced the removal of the barriers, both figuratively and literally, to the tune of the Beloved's 'Come Together'. We were then left to dance to vaguely world themed eclectic tunes, bit of Kylie, bit of Bowie (could have done without the stonkingly big gap between songs which made it feel a bit iTunes home party) and have a generally fabulous time.

Underlying all the fun and games, like many of Duckie's themed evenings, a serious point was being made about LGBT asylum and the continued struggles of the LGBT community throughout the world. Recent events at Calais and the subsequent public reaction remind us that discussions about the management of our borders by the governments and how we treat asylum seekers could not be more relevant. Duckie organised a debate around global freedom of movement and LGBT rights in June in which these issues were discussed in more depth. However the point of Border Force was to raise awareness within the LGBT community, to bring back some of the politics to accompany the hedonism and to ask for solitary and support. All this sounds very po faced and to be honest, fun definitely came first, with some of the politics on the evening, feeling a little tagged on. However, walking into town, through the aftermath of the party, the politics did feel entirely forgotten and hats of to Duckie for attempting to remind us. Often, we feel powerless in the world of immigration politics abroad and at home, but in their own way, Duckie, reminded us there that the beauty of the LGBT community is its lack of borders and it is our responsibility to support those who do not yet have the freedom that Pride celebrates.