Fierce Festival: 29th March – 8th April 2012
29th March – 8th April 2012
Fierce: 29th March – 8th April 2012
Birmingham’s international festival of live art returns again! Expect a distinctive cocktail of interventions, theatre, parties, gigs, installations, talks, workshops and feasting. Since spring 2011 a few changes have been made. We’ve extended the festival to two weekends including the Easter; and we won’t be running alongside our close friends Flatpack Festival who now precede us by a couple of weeks. ‘Getting involved’ is at the heart of this festival. Mehmet Sander’s IMPACT, Ron Athey’s Gifts of The Spirit and Mette Edvardsen’s Time Has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine involve volunteer non-professional performers collaborating with international artists to create shows. On the 31st March 2012 the Dachshund UN will take place for the first time in the UK; sausage dogs from the West Midlands and beyond will represent the delegates of each country in the United Nations General Assembly.
We’ve been lucky to work with a dizzying range of partners, from large institutions to smaller independent spaces. We’ve kept our international outlook too with artists from the US, Norway, Ireland, Turkey, Spain and South Africa. As ever we hope engaging with Fierce encourages you to re-imagine the city. We’ve found some fantastic new sites for works including the legendary Q-Club (a converted cathedral) for our closing weekend party and Ann Liv Young’s Mermaid Show; while miles away in Aston you’ll be able to glide beneath Spaghetti Junction on Graeme Miller’s Track. We look forward to hanging out with you all in the Festival Hub. Make 2012 Fierce!!!
Fierce Festival is annual international festival of live art that takes place across Birmingham. A man in a giant bird’s nest on the side of a high-rise; Una White’s name spelled out in our lights above the city; a flock of hot-air balloons playing music at dawn… For over a decade, Fierce Festival has established an international reputation for risk-taking, excellence and innovation and is now widely recognized as one of the UK’s most important contemporary arts festivals. Since 2009, Laura McDermott and Harun Morrison have been joint artistic directors of Fierce Festival. The duo have introduced a new ‘slow burn’ programming model centred around a core group of artists called the Fierce Festival Caravan of Artists. Fierce Festival was founded in 1998 by Mark Ball.
Live Art: This includes performance art, theatre, dance, music, installation, public intervention, digital and interactive practices.
Collision: We believe a good festival should celebrate collision – of artforms; of artworks and contexts; of ideas in salons, debates, workshops and talks and of strangers in late night parties…
Hyperlocal: Artists from across the globe showing work in Birmingham, developed in Birmingham. Performances in car parks, legendary clubs, the Brutalist Central Library and @AE Harris (a venue in an old metal factory), alongside established art centres like IKON, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Symphony Hall, Birmingham REP and mac.
Supernow: adj. [soo’per nou]
1. an intense sense of presence or awareness in a moment
2. an emergent or contemporaneous form
3. an attitude provoking new ways of seeing, being, feeling and thinking
