Words: Lauren O’Neill
Make it stand out
On a cultural landscape which feels grimly defined by cuts, lack of funding, and a death of imagination from those involved in fuelling it, consistent spaces for nurturing new ideas and creative projects - especially when those spaces are outside London - are dwindling. That’s what makes Fierce Festival, Birmingham’s long-standing biennial showcase for international contemporary performance makers, so very special.
This year, Fierce Festival will take place in venues across Birmingham from 14-18 October, showcasing performances that put experimental, interdisciplinary, and queer voices centre stage. If you’re thinking of going along - and you should be if you want to see performance art that feels truly interesting and challenging - here are our picks for what you should be checking out.
From 14th-16th October, enter the world of Faye Driscoll’s Weathering - a “multi-sensory flesh sculpture” made up of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids and objects. Made up of ten people onstage on a raft-like stage too small to contain them all, Weathering is a fully embodied experience like no other, asking “How do we feel the impact of events moving through us which are so much larger? Yet are animating and activating our bodies all the time? How do we get closer to the impact?”
Weathering by Faye Driscoll
Birmingham is a city of many faces, and while it’s a brilliant incubator for performance and artistic talent, it also has a fabulous culinary scene. Fierce Feasts - a series of artist-hosted dinners, featuring food from some of the best restaurants and caterers the city has to offer - brings the two together, recognising the strong links between the stage and the restaurant, with each night spotlighting a different cuisine and artist proposal.
On Saturday 17th October, get on the dancefloor at BLAX ACT III, a clubnight spotlighting iconic First Nations performing talent. Expect genre-hopping from talent curated by YIRRAMBOI, The Motherless Collective and Indigenous All Stahz: it’s gonna be big.
Club Fierce: BLAX: ACT III
The Brutal Joy by Justine A. Chambers
In the UK premiere of this scored improvisation performance, taking place on Friday 16th and Saturday 17th October, Justine A. Chambers draws upon family gatherings on the South Side of Chicago, to “unfurl Black vernacular line dance alongside sartorial gesture in the lineage of Black dandyism—as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black-living.” The performance pays tribute to “inherited gesture, individual and collective affective memories, and under-documented histories,” and is not to be missed.
The Brutal Joy by Justine A. Chambers
