The snows have melted and all around we will start to see the newness of Spring. Fierce has been about “the new” ever since it began, if that’s not a contradiction in terms: it has celebrated the contemporary, the fresh and the novel.
So it’s only natural that we should celebrate the new blog: it’s the first green shoot of the “new” Fierce – new direction, new artistic vision, new Artistic Directors (and direction) and a fresh approach.
So what’s been going on when there has been no festival? Well – to extend the gardening metaphor (possibly to death) – we’ve been preparing the soil.
We had a quiet year in terms of performance in Birmingham – our partners at University of Warwick had a “Fierce” season and there was a wonderful sunny afternoon in May when the Reverend Billy converted all of us to the Church of Stop Shopping outside the Ikon. The honoured guests at Ringside (hosted with the Birmingham Rep) wowed audiences at the Town Hall – exceptionally altered for the event.
So it might feel like we’ve not been around much: if it’s any consolation we missed the Fierce Festival in 2009 as much as we hope you did!
But elsewhere we’ve been busy: the Wunderbar festival is what happens when you take 11 years of festivals experience and distill it, in 18 months, into a brand new region. The result was a quirky and action packed 10 days in the North East that felt like an event that had always been there. Kevin has written about that below so I won’t go on about it here save to say that it had a wonderful atmosphere and discovering Newcastle and the North East has been a real privilege.
We’ve continued our training work: we took 11 arts organisations of varying size and complexity on a journey into the social internet. We’ve made new friends and learned a lot ourselves about the value of sharing your thinking online. This blog will show us thinking out loud and welcoming your input.
We won a big scary national, EU-procurement style tender from Business Link, and now I’m delighted to say that we are approved suppliers of business training alongside the likes of the University of Warwick Business School. We’re working with creative industries to support business growth that has a creative vision at its heart.
We found out lots more about Street and Circus arts when we organised a series of events under the title “elemental” in each of the English Arts Council regions – if you ever want to know more about that world check out our record of the intiative at www.elementalexchange.org.uk.
But that was all last year – and 2010 and all its’ new challenges beckon. While Laura and Harun share their impressions of a new city – I’m off to do the same. As part of the Clore Fellowship programme I get the opportunity to go on secondment. So I’m off to New York – to Brooklyn’s St Ann’s Warehouse – to find out how performance gets made and produced in a country with no statutory arts funding which is increasingly reliant on donations from wealthy individuals. If it sounds familiar it’s because that ’s what the Tories are proposing if they are elected.
So it will be a Fierce Spring for me too: I hope to be able to share some of the work I see or the things I think are cool along the way. I’ll be back in the Summer, I don’t know if the rain will fall or the sun will shine, but it will be a Fierce one.
What would make Fierce Festival a unique experience? What would compel you to visit this festival not only if you lived in the West Midlands, but nationally and internationally? How does Fierce best nourish and support emerging practices in the West Midlands? How could this festival distinguish itself from others of its kind, not just in content but philosophically? How do you engage an audience with a shake-up after a fallow year? What would encourage committed audience engagement and new faces at the festival? And how can Fierce contribute to the ‘Birmingham Renaissance’?
Festivals are proliferating across a range of art forms; there is an appetite for them and perhaps the sense of ‘togetherness’ they can offer is in increasing demand as a corrective to the isolated and sometime lonely metropolitan existence that envelops us. In the realm of performance, live art and theatre there is an abundance of national-scale festivals across the UK. However, we observe that the actual range in terms of their programming models is surprisingly narrow. Further, it is increasingly the case that performance and music festivals operate as informal touring circuits; with one successful show passed like a baton from festival to festival. Although this may serve the reputation of a particular show, is this the role of a festival? These replications of content serve to weaken the specificity of the festival, its curatorial voice and its uniqueness. Festivals are in danger of losing the singular, eruptive, ‘break-from-the ordinary’ quality – by which they earn their name.
How we curate, deliver and communicate our festival and surrounding artistic activity will be driven by these questions? If you have responses, disagreements, suggestions – we’d like to hear them.
Wild speculation that the flat beneath us was occupied by Banksy on hide out. Clues: recycled box of New Balance trainers, empty graffiti cans, in and out at odd hours of the night.
We took a walk along the frozen canals, marvelling at the geometric slabs of ice and enjoying the extra layer of silence that snow brings.
We saw the spray from a duck’s landing on the canal water frozen in time. Nicolas (from EXYZT) spoke about the canals as Birmingham’s romantic hidden world. We navigated home in a left-hand drive car covered in flowers with an abstract but accurate hand-drawn map (turn right at the mosque). We still don’t know our way round but being strangers with our senses still prickling feels like a good thing. It helps us have more ideas about this place. We’ve been inviting artists to stay with us in our flat. This is helping us turn our flat into our home. Nicolas cooks a very good soup teeming with root vegetables, cabbage and leeks. This is how we want to work with people.
Hopefully you heard the good news that Birmingham has recently been short-listed to become a UK City of Culture for 2013 (see the DCMS Press Release). Birmingham is now one of a list of four final cities (the others are Derry, Norwich and Sheffield) bidding for the title. During the bidding period Fierce has been working with Birmingham Cultural Partnership on Big Blank Canvas – a project designed to find out from the people who live and work in Birmingham what they do in their cultural lives already, what they’d like to see happen in the city in 2013. We are engaging with people both online, via the website and in person, on the streets of the city centre, in local libraries and at festivals, gatherings and gigs. This project will continue to grow and gather momentum now that we have been shortlisted.
We have received hundreds of inspiring ideas so far but we want to hear from a real range of voices so please help us to spread the word! Below are a few highlights of the project so far…
We had a team go along to Birmingham’s Chinese New Year Celebrations on Sunday 14 Feb to talk about the bid and gather opinions which you can see on the vimeo:
We are so pleased that Birmingham has been short-listed as we know the talent, determination and creativity that lies within the people of this city and the possibilities that this opens for 2013.
If you’d like to shout about what already happens please add images and video to our vimeo, flickr ‘Big City Blank Canvas’ and facebook page – this is our city and our culture, lets all get involved. And keep adding your ideas for cultural events in 2013 at www.canvasbirmingham.com
You can keep up to date with the latest contributions and news from the bidding process by following us on Twitter @BigBlankCanvas.
