Fierce FWD artist Suriya Aisha is working with Fierce to hold two sessions considering access as part of her wider project, Horizontal. Sessions will be held in a closed space at Centrala (a short 2-minute walk from the hub) and will have some light refreshments available and some music. They are an informal space for groups to meet up, share and reflect on their experiences of the festival. No need to book, just turn up on the day.

10.30am – 12pm – Disability / Access Discussion

12.30pm – 2.30pm – People of Colour meet-up

“I don’t want to use the word ‘screwed’, but I screwed him” “All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me” Donald “She talks like a truck driver” Trump Depression Hotline Tour

Part of Be The Change: An Edwardian Tearoom Late

These award-winning wild anti-consumerist gospel shouters and Earth-loving urban activists return to the UK to spread their word. If you’re concerned about a world rife with global advertising, multinational control, climate change, packaging, supermarket domination, TV merchandising and all the rampant free marketeering epitomised by the US President, this is for you. If you’re not, this is REALLY for you!

The Church of Stop Shopping is a New York based secular political religion founded in 1999. Since “I don’t want to use the word ‘screwed’, but I screwed him” “All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me” Donald “She talks like a truck driver” Trump, the Frankenstein of shopping culture, won – or stole the election, the church has been a repository of community anguish. Under the direction of Savitri D They have paraded, boycotted and protested while singing multiple harmonies. The choir has opened for Neil Young, been produced by Laurie Anderson, and hosted a benefit for Black Lives Matter with Joan Baez.

Lets exchange warmth!

In the name of Sympathy, Empathy, Humanity, Human, Savagery, Last, Divided, Lives, Soil, Being, Forever, Loss, Breathe, Stateless and Tradition.

Words that floating around us. Words that we come across every single day. Here I invite you to come and join me to listen to my song unsung. Song lost in despair. I am here from the other part of earth to be with you to share a time lost in questions. Questions that don’t have any particular answers. When asking is also answering then why ask. When standing beside, holding hands, and keeping silence shows the way of solidarity then come and hold my hands and lets have stain together.

Stain wash later but have it inside you. Lets create a memory.

We are standing at a point what known to our civilization from prehistoric era. Earth is orbiting as civilization fights on supremacy. But may be its time to gain strength from each other. Show respect to our own resilience. Get some peace watching each other.

Here I am bringing hope from a country of despair. Here I am sharing warmth from the country of rising sadness. Here I am while standing against a wall but still spreading hands.

Wont you come and listen my unsung song to be sad for two minute in silence?

This event forms part of our late night takeover of Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery ‘Be The Change: An Edwardian Tearoom Late’.

Biography

Reetu Sattar is a Dhaka-based theatre actor, director and performance artist working with performativity, video, text and objects. Her time-based work explores presence and absence, memory, loss, resilience and the ephemerality of existence. She enjoys her journey of transition between performance and theatre. So the works are consciously away from theatrical practice but it adds voice, conversations, sound, props, costume and sculptural elements as spontaneous necessity.

Reetu’s recent exhibitions and performances include Para/Site, Hong Kong (2017), Jim Thompson Art Centre , Bangkok (2017), Fierce Festival, Birmingham (2017), Chobimela ix, International Photography Festival, Bangladesh (2017), 16^th and 17th Asian Art Biennale, Bangladesh (2014 and 2016); Britto, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2016); Bengal Performance Art Week (2016); Bengal Foundation Visual Arts, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2016); National Art Exhibition, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy (2015); Forashgonj Orphanange, Old Dhaka, Bangladesh (2015) and South Asian Media Academy, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2014), Dhaka Art Summit (2014).

Presented in Collaboration with Culture Central and the Birmingham Weekender. Supported by British Council.

Images: Harano Sur, 17th Asian Art Biennale, 2016, Photo: Forhad Rahman. Courtesy of the artist.

‘We are for you because we are against them’ invites the public to take on the role of voyeur, and observe an elaborately staged dinner party. Eight diners will participate in this public gesture which combines both elements of the uncanny and absurd. A normally private dinner party becomes the object of the public gaze. Notions of ‘we’, ‘them’ and ‘other’ shift across the registers of both the personal and political.

Inspired by the child’s ‘weeble’ toy marketed during the 1970’s with the slogan “weebles wobble but they don’t fall down”, this work highlighted central concerns of the artist’s practice around issues of control and power and how we assert and relinquish both. A sense of the absurd coupled with what the artist terms her “tendency towards dangerous behaviour” is evident in the work, where power shifted uncomfortably from the artist to the spectators in the gallery, who were invited to interact with the piece.

Eight lucky diners will have the chance to participate in this unique dining experience. Tickets are available on a first come first served basis, and participants receive a three course meal and beverages.

Diners should arrive at 6pm for a 6.30pm start.

This performance takes place as part of Be The Change: An Edwardian Tearoom Late at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

We’re not sure what this will be yet but Fierce closing parties are usually a messy affair! Meet us in the Festival Hub from 10pm. We suspect Karaoke may be involved. All welcome!

This is a drop in event. In collaboration with Birmingham Repertory Theatre’s  The Young Rep

The number of wild animals on earth has halved over the past 40 years.
You cannot commit suicide by holding your breath.
Butterflies taste with their feet.

Children have an insatiable curiosity and hunger for facts – the kind so amazing, it’s hard to believe they’re true. In the interactive installation Crazy But True, children between the ages of 7 and 11 form a rolling panel of ‘experts’. A text is whispered to them via headsets. They repeat what they hear, as they hear it. What comes across seems like a slow-motion internet, hyper-linking from hilarious LOLs to a picture of a darker world that as adults we’re faced with on a daily basis, and for which we’re often collectively responsible.

This simple proposal using minimal resources becomes increasingly addictive, the longer you stay with it. A tender, inter-generational confrontation involving both tragic and comic extremes.

Ant Hampton is known for automated devices (autoteatro) which frame and organise unrehearsed performance situations for the general public.

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OPEN INVITATION TO CHILDREN (7-11)

Any children accompanying the adult audience will probably check out the situation before deciding whether to have a go. If they do, they’re performing for around 12 minutes; and every 4 minutes there’s a changeover. No rehearsal required. You can come and go as you please.

An Imagine2020 co-production with Rotterdamse Schouwburg, Artsadmin (London), Kaaitheater (Brussels) and Kunstencentrum Vooruit (Ghent).

The Line up for HOTLINE #2 is:

Lucy Suggate
Adam Kinner
Christopher Willes
Gnucci

Information on HOTLINE #1 can be found here.

HOTLINE aims to be a critical space that can facilitate and hold complex conversations that don’t look to agreement as a point of entry or conclusion. The events start from our own intrigue, attractions and research, there are no given themes or topics of conversation. For each event three people are invited to share provocations/presentations/thoughts.

We are interested in why people do what they do, how the particular logics are formed that drive and direct decisions/actions/tastes and art-making. We want to look at the more invisible parts of people’s practices – with their specific interests and intrigues becoming catalysts for group conversations. We work with the understanding that everyone attending is involved in the creation of that space and how the conversation unfolds.

We hope for those conversations to nurture a deeper need for connection, communication and generative live encounters that motivate and mobilise bold creative action.We both work within the arts and presenters are often but not exclusively artists; HOTLINE is not an artist talk or panel discussion.

HOTLINE is a constantly shifting format for a public conversation, a space to share in the love the hate the ambivalence and the complexity of things, hosted by Jamila Johnson-Small and Sara Sassanelli. Each event happens at a different location that we can access at no cost.

We are interested in the growing demand for artists to be present in ways beyond the show/exhibition/text that create spaces and exacerbate systems of unequal exchange, where institutions or curators cash in on the cultural capital of artists but give little in return. We want to move beyond spaces that enable complicity between artists, audiences & curators that serve to perpetuate modes of consumption of artist/s as resource or infallible authority.

HOTLINE at Fierce will feature contributions from artists presenting in the festival.

WORLD PREMIERE
A Fierce commission

fic.the.sky is a 4-hour performance ‘hangout’ created with performance troop Medeber Teatro, entwining music, dance, role-play and sculpture.

Drawing inspiration from the leftfield antics of Fandoms, Experimental Theatre, and Open-Source-Culture, performers carve out a different sense of time, where fantasy, the reworking of popular myths and images, and the invention of new folk narratives are made possible.

As salvaged jpegs, cutesy cat pics and fascist memes become monuments of democracy, fic.the.sky stages as its imperative: the desire to seek out new images and stories, to imagine new and better worlds, and to have a good time while doing it! This is 100% silly putty realness! Spiel Mit!

fic.the.sky is part of Fan Riot – an expanded project and Fan Club series by Owen G. Parry with contributing artists and fans. http://fanriot.tumblr.com/

Obsidian is a new performance drawing upon Rochat’s recent travels in China and the extreme landscapes of the Qinghai Province, the performance is a delicate balance between text, body and substance.

Anne Rochat immersively subjects her body to the matter of ice whilst nearby research materials and a collection of videos related to the travel experiences in China will be exhibited.

Obsidian is an ongoing project associated with a residency program of Pro Helvetia.

Fierce Says: We first came across Anne’s work on Vimeo and were gripped by the risk and intensity to her various performances which include hanging as a human chandelier adorned with glassware and scaling a precarious pyramid made of sheets of rusting metal.

(18+)

This is the big one. Over the years our club nights have earned us a hot reputation. Undoubtedly the best line-up in town: join us and throw some shapes on the dancefloor to some of the freshest acts in the world today. BIG looks encouraged; be your best self; come get your life!

Kiddy Smile (FR)

Catapulted into the public consciousness by Beth Ditto, Kiddy Smile seeks to spread the retro love in his beats – all of which he produces, sings and sometimes even raps over himself. Deeply influenced by the sleazy, lazy feel of 80s and 90s house music and the fabulous legacy of the Ballroom scene, he has performed live alongside the likes of Hercules & Love Affair, The Gossip and LCD Soundsystem.

Gnucci (RS)

“I SWEAT ALL OVER MY GNUCCI SUIT AND STILL MANAGE TO LOOK CUTE“

Ana Rab, better known as Gnucci, is an exuberant, eclectic singer who has made a name for herself through the creation of pumping rap and club music. Of Serbian descent, she currently lives in Sweden, and is a one of the new generation of female hip-hop and rap performers on the international scene. Expect rap, bass, and dance music –– but also pop, a complex hybrid style rich in sound. The rapid, energetic pulse of her witty rap hits home, making her live presence magnetic.

Marie-Caroline Hominal (CH)
Silver

I have been wondering and begging for love
I have been sleeping and dreaming of love
Mysterious night coming over and over
Thinking you are my only lover

Silver is a dance and musical performance, a crescendo where Marie-Caroline Hominal brings text, light, smoke and choreography all together for a 30-minute show. Silver is a reflection on the idea of the “show”, what is a “show” and how to present a “show”, but also on how energy, beats and movements affect us personally. UK Premiere!

Imma Asher (US)

Trans performance artist Imma Asher formerly known as IMMA/MESS is a major nightlife personality, trained at the Alvin Ailey School of Dance, they’re one of the most spellbinding performers we’ve ever come across.

LMGM – Room 4 Resistance (DE)

Room 4 Resistance is a Berlin-based queer forward collective focused on community building and creating space & visibility for women, gender queers, non-binaries, trans people, black people & people of colour in Dance Music.

Last entrance at Midnight.

Club Fierce: We Are Fierce is included in the Fierce Weekend Pass which can be purchased here.