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.
Since the middle of 2008 I’ve got very used to the lengthy cross-country train journey between Birmingham and Newcastle, and also between London and the North East (which irritatingly, is significantly shorter – why do those cross-country trains go at the speed of a hackney cab in rush hour?). The reason – I’ve been working as Executive Director alongside Ilana Mitchell, delivering the inaugural Wunderbar Festival, the first of which took place from November 6th – 15th 2009.
Fierce won a tender from Arts Council England back in early 2008 to scope out the feasibility of a new Live Art Festival in the North East, so we spent the first six months or so in deep and rigorous consultation with local artists, organisations, agencies and regional authorities, together with masses of research and things like audience development plans. Result – yes, a festival could certainly work and make a real difference, and we got incredibly positive buy in from the amazingly rich and fertile artistic community in Newcastle and the wider North East. The challenge was to set something up that was unique not just to the North East, but anywhere in the UK, and that audiences and artists would want to be part of and truly get involved in.
The journey over the past 18 months has been nothing less than remarkable. Fun, knackering, joyful, enriching, a massive learning experience and absolutely bloody brilliant to be at the very beginning of something that you truly believe to be that good. Working with organisations as diverse as the Baltic, Sage, Theatre Royal and Royal Shakespeare Company, through to some of the brightest, most individual and inventive artists you could wish to meet was a joy. Here are some images of the events we had at Wunderbar, and as you can see there was everything from Big Green Lizards (well, one lizard actually), to beautiful gallery installations with hundreds of tiny lights and mirrors that you could walk on and make dance, to the opportunity to make work with real people in real houses and flats – and then open it up those same homes up to the public for a whole series of performances.
So what were the highlights for me? Well… The opening party for starters – a ‘Vogue Ball’ (going to that Madonna concert, though ludicrously expensive, did help with my moves…) that took place in an NCP car park in the middle of the city that I’d seen looking exactly like a car park at 5 o’clock, but which by the time I went back to the party two hours later had been transformed into a magical, other worldly, techno place that made you feel you were in the newest avant garde club in The Bowery; there was The People Speak, where we had everybody debating for two highly charged hours – bankers, students, shop assistants, actors –to decide how the box office takings for that night would be spent (it’s actually going to build a water pump for a remote village in Zambia where one of the audience members had been working as a volunteer – a worthy cause; then there was sitting in peoples’ homes experiencing in all sorts of ways their remarkable stories.
You might wonder how it can possibly work, but it totally did. Working with Ilana Mitchell, my co-director, was an inspiration, and the start of a journey that I know will see us working together on loads of things in the future. Fabulous woman! Oh, and how could I forget…? Ending up on a Sunday afternoon with a red Mohican, asymmetrically cut (I’m just the wrong side of 50, so you probably get the picture…) that was the result of a haircut by two delightful nine year olds – Megan and Kyle (who decided that my Mohican should henceforth be known as ‘The Kyle Style’ and clearly sees it having the success of ‘The Purdey’ or ‘The Farrah Fawcett’ of the 80s – well, I did say I was old enough to remember those days, sadly).
Other unforgettable moments included myself and a journalist from The Guardian being dressed up in a pink tutu in homage to Mavis Cruett of Willo The Wisp as part of Pop Sandwich; attending a performance inside a wardrobe and seeing people of all ages from children through to pensioners in Eldon Square (Newcastle’s city centre shopping precinct) getting totally involved in dialogue with Rajni Shah, and each other, in Give What You Can…
The marketing side of me is hugely proud that we got well over half a million pounds worth of press coverage, including things like BBC Newsround (which featured my Mohican) and most of the nationals, but also that our partners in the organisations across the North East, and the artists too, all gave Wunderbar a big thumbs up and want to be part of it again. As for audiences, some great feedback, and also with my marketing hat on – smashed targets with sellouts ahead of opening week and brilliant recall of our branding and promotional campaign. OK… I can see I’m starting to sound like someone from Marketing Week now, so I’ll shut up and save something for the next blog.
Looking from the window of the Fierce offices on a Monday evening in February I find myself wondering why and how I find myself here in Birmingham, but more specifically the West Midlands.
For a little context, I was born and raised in Stoke-on-Trent and I went away to study Drama and Theatre Studies in Chester and then back to Stoke-on-Trent. I didn’t think I’d stay for five years, but then I didn’t plan when I’d leave – but I don’t think of myself as local to a city but local to a region and I’m proud that it’s the West Midlands.
So what do I love?
I love the fact that everywhere feels like home, and that we embrace the diverse cultures that surround us – we can create something from nothing and that we built our region on creativity of individuals that consumes the residents.
To help me find the reasons why I ♥ the West Midlands I jotted down words that I found summarised the creatives I have worked with, met and the general ethos of the region. Here is the result – we are resourceful, determined, supportive, optimistic, inclusive, innovative and collaborative. We always look for new ways to make work and work together.
The region has an exciting, diverse range of creativity and talent in its midst and by working together, and making our own opportunities in the region we can really make a difference to the cultural landscape locally, nationally and internationally.
Open Space Technology is a simple but remarkable system that supports a gathering of people to discuss issues that are important to them. Phelim McDermott introduced this system to the UK theatre community in 2006 at an event called Devoted and Disgruntled: What are we going to do about theatre? Which has since turned into an annual meeting, a January diary staple.
Open Space is democratic and invigorating and so Fierce celebrated the news that the Art Council’s Alison Gagen had instigated a West Midlands edition: The Challenge of Change – How can we create a better future for theatre, here, in the West Midlands? http://thechallengeofchange.toyoutome.net/ which took place in November 2009.
An essential part of the Open Space process is the venting – getting gnarly grievances off your chest and into the open. This is the therapeutic bit, but it isn’t the bit that changes anything. The real beauty of the Open Space system is that it insists that the gathered group take full responsibility for itself – finding solutions for even the most gnarly of woes.
At the event in November (expertly facilitated by Seth Honner of Theatre Bristol) the Friday afternoon was entirely given over to ‘action planning’. Several juicy outcomes have already emerged from this… Fierce’s favourites are:
The twenty ten theatre pledge – a downloadable, pocket sized pledge card that asks for a series of small acts of commitment to theatre (‘theatre’ in all its gloriously multiple manifestations) that will make your year more unpredictable and exciting and earn you a ticket to a bloody good party thrown by Stan’s Café at the end of 2010.
On Call – another brilliant ruse that places three experienced producers (based in the West Midlands region) in a café or pub to share their expertise with anyone who cares to turn up. Come with a specific question, come to put a face to a name, come for a chat with one or all of the producers at any session (sessions are two hours long and operate on a just-drop-in basis). If nobody turns up, the three producers On Call will just talk amongst themselves, which will no bad thing at all. Genius. Laura and Helga have already committed to slots (at Hudsons on 9/3/10 from 11am – 1pm and Urban Coffee Company 2/3/10 from 11am – 1pm respectively) where they will be imparting pearls of wisdom, and (of course) laughing and drinking tea.
