One Five West will be exhibiting Code and Carpentry, a series of interactive objects that the audience can manipulate through movement, sound and touch. This new body of work is a continuation of Feedback, an installation developed through Fierce Festival’s artist development scheme, Fierce FWD, 2014.

One Five West are interested in tactile creativity and play in a digital age. The structures they build draw inspiration from minimalist sculpture and retrofuturism, and wish to encourage physical interactions in a rapidly evolving digital world that favours the virtual.

The technologies One Five West employ – light bulbs, mini-spy cameras, LED lights and so on – are affordable and readily accessible to audiences. Their objects have no prescribed instructions, so audiences can intuitively create and play according to their individual or collective approach.

Code and Carpentry uses a blend of traditional woodwork with low-fi technological elements to create interactive pieces. This work invites audiences to physically engage with the artwork in order to change the outcomes of the physical and digital elements: using body movement and altering the structures to creating visuals and sounds.

For All Ears Kate McIntosh sets up the stage as an improvised adhoc laboratory for a series of unusual recordings and acoustic experiments, using everyday objects and materials. Chairs are dragged, paper is torn, glasses are toppled. Sounds are gathered, recorded and played back – the action of one part of the performance providing soundtrack, background or atmosphere for another. Along the way McIntosh – as combination curious scientist, mischievous questioner and eclectic storyteller – leads us on a distinctive journey through a diverse landscape of ideas.

There are parables of human and animal behavior, fragments on crowd control and linguistics, jokes about politics and group dynamics, maps of birds and traffic jams, stories about systems, societies and social interactions. At the heart of the piece – in the silence between the sounds recorded, at the centre of the listening crowd – are questions about who we are alone and how we are together, about what it might take to change a culture and what we could be missing in the push for individual self-sufficiency.

[1hr 15]

Gazelle Twin is the creation of producer, composer and artist, Elizabeth Bernholz. The critically acclaimed debut, The Entire City (2011, Anti-Ghost Moon Ray) and following Mammal EP (2013, Sugarcane) was succeeded by a full length industrial-pop offering UNFLESH (2014).

Over the last couple of years, Sarah Farina grew to become one of Berlin’s main tastemakers in underground bass. Sarah is well recognised throughout Germany and noticed by artists and music heads on each and every continent. Her sets are driven forward through futuristic breakbeats and intense basslines. Not sticking to any specific genre, she defines the music she plays as rainbow-bass.

DEEP AEROBICS by Miguel Gutierrez is a participatory spectacle – it’s a movement, it’s a transformative experience for the mind/body/spirit/genital matrix. Gutierrez asks that each participant come in costume. Please push your imagination beyond the 80’s!

DOORS OPEN: 9pm

GAZELLE TWIN: 10pm – 10.45pm

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ: 11.15pm – midnight

SARAH FARINA: midnight – 2am

“It is the transformation of substance that is my concern in art, rather than the traditional aesthetic understanding of beautiful appearances. If the creativity relates to the transformation, change, and development of substance, then it can be applied to everything in the world, and is no longer restricted to art…” – Joseph Beuys about his work Bathtub (1960)

The new solo of Fernando Belfiore, AL13FB<3 investigates the idea of body-sculpture. Fernando (per)forms an encounter with elements to construct a physical experience, body states and retranslate emotions. While leading his audience through poetic and futuristic worlds, he explores the potential of transformation and let the body unfold new materiality. Belfiore reshapes the environment as an alchemic relation of re-creation and renewal.

Fernando Belfiore (1983 Sao Paolo, Brazil) is a choreographer and performer based in Amsterdam. He graduated at the SNDO (School for New Dance Development – AHK) in 2011. Fernando is artist in residence at the production house Dansmakers Amsterdam since 2011, where he created his solo You Must, a dramaturgic collaboration with Ivo Dimchev, and .whatdowefinallyshare., which was selected for Aerowaves as priority company 2013.

[1 hr]

1. Contemporary Other was formed out the desire to dedicate a sole publication to the modern marginalised identity. To deny the standardisations of our cultural and artistic diet and give precedence to diversity of thought.

2. CO is a limited biannually printed publication – A celebration of alienated voices, artists, thinkers and activists. We stand in solidarity with these voices and acknowledge their contribution/necessity to the fields of art, performance, politics and culture.

3. CO is interested in building a platform for the documentation and discussion of subjectivity for the modern ‘others’ experience.As the idea of the ‘other’ and ‘otherness’ is pivotal to sociological analysis of how majority and minority identities are constructed in society. Contemporary Other therefore is interested in the dismissal of the majority and favouring the other.

Presented by Fierce Festival and mac birmingham as part of BIRMINGHAM WEEKENDER

“We find a space in the margins of the city in which to gather: to start an ad-hoc ceremony, to stamp our feet and shake our limbs, to dance in the face of an ending.”

Of Riders and Running Horses is a stirring and visceral new dance event by Still House created as a communal animation of urban spaces. Five female dancers and a live band conjure a new kind of old dance, an insistent rhythm, a joyful step into what it means to move together.

This performance will take place off-site – on the top floor of a Birmingham car park with sweeping views across the city.

At a website dedicated to the work of a cult novelist and his personal obsessions, fans gather to interact with their hero – and each other.

In this delirious space where identity is slippery and ideas are everything, an anarchic virtual community of queer punks and lonely teens, paranoid artists and wannabe slaves, forms and endlessly re-forms, until it’s hard to know what’s scarier: that a lot of what happens here isn’t really real – or that some of it is.

Inspired by and loosely based on the notorious blog of writer and artist Dennis Cooper, Weaklings disorientingly blurs fiction and documentary, fact and fantasy, to create a compelling portrait of people on the edge, finding a strange refuge together in dangerous times.

Featuring a specially composed soundtrack by Scanner, Weaklings brings together a remarkable cast, including Karen Christopher (ex- Goat Island) and Christopher Brett Bailey (This Is How We Die) as well as two members of Chris Goode’s ‘avant-garde performance boyband’ Ponyboy Curtis.

[1h 20]

WEDNESDAY 7 October

Post show discussion with Chris Goode and Dr Cath Lambert (University of Warwick sociology department)

THURSDAY 8 October

Weaklings Theatre Club with Maddy Costa

Join writer and blogger Maddy Costa after the show for Theatre Club: an informal discussion (with biscuits and wine) that works like a book group. No one who made the show will be present: it’s a space for audiences to share what they thought and interpret the show with and for each other.

A singular experiment in exotic companionship; a meticulous yet playful study of hand bell algorithms; an affective assemblage of Male Breast Feeding… Culture, Administration & Trembling exposes a collection of durational, artificial situations developed collaboratively between dance artists Antonija Livingstone, Jennifer Lacey, Stephen Thompson, and visual artist Dominique Pétrin. Each piece, or “time-based sculpture,” is conceived as a score that prompts a series of rare, endangered practices the public is invited to witness. A collective mode of attention, these choreographic sculptures shift between the human and the animal, the real and the imaginary, the old school and the now to create a series of unexpected contemplative landscapes.

In this intimate yet out-of-bounds choreographic salon, Livingstone proposes a critically joyful and queer study of movement, presence and territory where dance becomes a curatorial practice. Enacting a series of vital tremors, the work unfolds in a collection of sublime, precarious choreographic ecologies.

[1hr or 2hrs depending on 5.30pm or 6.30pm entry]

Karaoke brings strangers together in a room to watch one another become stars for the moment. Sometimes prepared, other times spontaneous, a great number of us have found ourselves at least once looking through the karaoke catalogue in a bar and begrudgingly singing in front of expectant friends. Inevitably along with the screens that display the bouncing ball or the words turning yellow on cue is a simple, tasteless, and more often than not kitschy video. These videos vaguely support the song but are actually non-entities.

[2 hrs]

Emily Mulenga uses video and the digital to explore ideas based around the (female, Black) body in the internet age, with a view to utilising the supposedly democratic nature of online space as a platform for the gendered body of colour.