Joint Artistic Directors of Fierce Festival, Laura McDermott and Harun Morrison invite you to Fierce Start Party!!! |||| What’s a Start Party? It’s the beginning of an exciting journey. What will be there? Fierce Festival artists sharing tasters of their work. When’s the next festival? We’ll tell you the shape of Fierce’s next year |||| A.E Harris Building,128 Northwood Street, Birmingham, Jewellery Quarter, B3 1SZ |||| Save the Date!!! |||| Thursday 15^th April |||| visit our new blog at www.wearefierce.org for additional details about the Start Party|||| Doors open from 3pm. Words at 7pm. Party from 9pm.||||

We are aware that the funded distribution of international culture remains focused on a network of capital cities. A major show in Paris, will go on to Berlin, to London – it may go to Manchester or Liverpool; but these capitals are already default beneficiaries of international culture. Major art institutions are generally located in the major cities and define their majority. They are the default host of the ‘big-name’ international artists. Yet the capitals are already have a set of ‘attractors’ (through signature architecture, networks of transport, tourism, history, art schools, work opportunities, music and club scenes) which centralizes international culture, even without the sustained aid of the agencies and cultural embassies established to promote the formal, officially sanctioned end of the spectrum of these exchanges.

It is different for large non-capital cities, for coastal towns and rural communities. Local access to international work in these places can have the kind of transformative impact that it rarely has in the capital cities, where there isn’t the muffle of ‘art saturation’. There should be even more encouragement and support of international artists to present across the breadth of the country. In doing so, those in London would travel to places they might not otherwise visit for an artwork.

Expanding where international works tour in the UK positively changes the dynamics and hierarchies of the art scene nationally, challenging assumptions as to where the most exciting work is to be found.

Of course an engagement with international arts culture does not solely lie in the showcasing of acclaimed work. We more interested in searching for additional modes of operating internationally, both in the long and short-term, than replicating existing models of touring. We’ve talked of establishing a Fierce Hotel in the West Midlands, where artists from abroad and nationally can co-habit and engage deeply with each other and the UK arts scene over a number of weeks. We intend to align our desire to engage internationally with more consideration of when we travel by plane and how often. Coupled with this is an ongoing and increasing use of online social technologies to talk to artists and curators and develop projects. Over the next year we’ll be researching and developing a model of international engagement that best suits our festival and Birmingham, one that we hope will be applicable to other organisations and practices. If you have suggestions, experiences or ideas that might contribute to this research please post them.

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.

• names and places I’ve never been or heard of
• Kingsheath or Moseley?
• Too much shopping
• beautiful-ugly
• mistaken for a woman by blokes outside the British Legion pub while walking with Laura
• what’s the front door you imagine when asked to imagine home?
• Eagle-tattooed front man: head-crashing, ear-pulsing, knee-jerking, gentle-whispering
• Looking for Auden and Tolkien in the landscape
• Recognized by staff of London Midlands trains
• 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.
• Berlin or Birmingham? Berlinham
• Kira O’Reilly lives in Birmingham
• A beautiful eighteenth century dovecote
• AE Harris building singing with potential
• A flat transforming into a home parallel to the establishment of a collection of household items destroyed by guests
• ‘M.S.’ melted our kettle and burnt the oven gloves
• Nicholas made soup
• Inspiration walks
• And what about my per diems? It all over – It all over!?
• Stan’s Cafe live in Birmingham
• Met the occupant of the flat beneath us. He is a graf artist, not Bansky. Disappointed.
• Baskerville is currently my favorite font
• Staggering towards the terrifyingly named ‘Bear Grease’ – actually a Wetherspoons called The Pear Tree
• The coming insurrection
• ducks and swans cracking ice on the water in front of the MAC
• a drawing of a giant snowman in the car park
• “We are now approaching Birmingham New St. our final destination”