Fierce Artistic Director Aaron Wright will be in conversation with Lois Keidan, Director of the Live Art Development Agency, London about the 2017 programme and issues raised within. There will also be time for the audience to ask questions about artistic decisions and pieces presented within the festival.

The acclaimed Mexican performance artist Rocio Boliver will give an illustrated talk about her life and art. Rocio’s story is particularly compelling: once a teenage model Rocio became one of Mexico’s leading News Readers before having to leave the job when news of her pornographic feminist texts spread. Rocio then dedicated her life to Performance Art. Come listen to this brilliant and often hilarious story ahead of Rocio’s performance closing the festival on Sunday 22^nd.

Sweet 60th – Sunday 22nd October – 7pm – Location TBC

In SIBLINGS the musician and performer Colin Self presents a theatrical fantasy between opera and revue. Conceived as the sixth and final part of Colin Self’s Elation performance series, it stakes out a proliferating meeting space for the alien drags, who advocate empathy for the disintegrated and unidentifiable and negotiate practices of sympathy and caring.

Siblings is included in the Fierce Weekend Pass which can be purchased here.

Presented with BEDLAM Festival

How do you distract yourself from negative thoughts? Herbal tea, meditation, booze, bubble baths? Louisa shares her musings away from the therapist’s chair. Watch as she tries to cope, to care and not to disappear. Louisa Robbin is a live artist and writer. A sad girl who projects her feelings on to glitter and gold and a queer black British (African) woman who is forever ticking boxes. Passionate about the alternative, the untraditional and the awkward; Louisa is intent on making art that explores the beauty in ritual, intimacy and the self (self-care, self-harm, self-esteem). Her recent body of work ‘to care’ explores her depression and the desperate need to keep going, keep doing and be more.

Part of the Discover Day at BEDLAM Festival.

Louis Robbin is  Fierce FWD 2017 artist.

(18+)

In collaboration with SHOUT Festival. Part of Fierce vs The Yard.

Erin Markey has “laser-beam eyes, a hair-raising singing voice, and an intense, almost predatory sexuality” (The New Yorker). She’s a “magnetic diva” (New York Times). She’s one of Brooklyn’s 50 Funniest People (Brooklyn Magazine). And she wants to tell you some stories.

Comprised of her signature story-driven stand-up and scored by sensual homemade pop, Erin Markey’s Boner Killer is an intimate musical conversation between what Markey thinks she can’t have and how she’d have it if she could. Driven by Whitney Houston’s lesbian mythologies, Europe™, and a Pretty Woman accident, Markey and bandmate Emily Bate sacrifice their lives to transform personal humiliations into naked feminist hope.  

Fierce is delighted to be producing Markey’s debut UK tour.

Fierce Says: We saw this show in NYC at 12.30am, straight from an eight hour flight and no sleep – yet we didn’t blink once. Devastatingly funny with Markey’s huge stage presence. Think standup, meets cabaret – and who hasn’t thought about becoming a Craigslist whore? We can’t believe she hasn’t performed in the UK before.

Words and Music by Erin Markey
Directed by Ellie Heyman
Featuring Erin Markey with Emily Bate

Music Arranged by Erin Markey and Emily Bate
Sound Design by Jeff Aaron Bryant
Costume Design by Enver Chakartash & Carter Kidd
Makeup Design by Naomi Raddatz
Tour Produced by Caleb Hammons

(16+)

UK PREMIERE

Buy tickets for the Saturday performance here

Inside the room, dungeon-esque encounters and ordinary domestic lingering exercise a politic that comes with care taking, danger and amnesia.  Aughterlony and Rosenblit alongside Gutierrez and Self on sound, maintain a complicated relationship to order that encourages cracks and leaks inside architectures for gathering. A free-standing wall, a roaming kitchen island and decaying bodies are part of a disruptive ecology that needs constant adjustment. Rhythmic sorcery drives the effort despite the un-governability of ingredients. Is this a construction site or a cooking show? The room offers an expanded horizon, no longer obliged to rid oneself of the things that supposedly suspend progress.

With local guest performer Emily Warner.

Fierce Says: We’ve loved Simone Aughterlony ever since she presented her show Supernatural (by Simone Aughterlony, Antonija Livingstone and Hahn Rowe) at the festival in 2015 and discovering the art of Jen Rosenblit has been a highlight of the past year. When we saw this strange, immersive piece in a Berlin warehouse we knew we had to bring it. Whilst we weren’t 100% sure what we’d witnessed we knew it felt it good, with a banging soundscape from Miguel Gutierrez and Colin Self too.

Everything Fits In The Room is included in the Fierce Weekend Pass which can be purchased here.

Teaser_Everything Fits In The Room from Simone Aughterlony on Vimeo.

Created in the frame of Utopian Realities, a co-production of HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Haus der Kulturen der Welt as part of 100 Years of Now, curated by HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. Supported by the NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ (NPN) International Guest Performance Fund for Dance.

Simone Aughterlony also leads workshop A Necessary Ecology with Artsadmin 14-15 October

(16+)

UK PREMIERE

Buy tickets for the Sunday performance here

Inside the room, dungeon-esque encounters and ordinary domestic lingering exercise a politic that comes with care taking, danger and amnesia.  Aughterlony and Rosenblit alongside Gutierrez and Self on sound, maintain a complicated relationship to order that encourages cracks and leaks inside architectures for gathering. A free-standing wall, a roaming kitchen island and decaying bodies are part of a disruptive ecology that needs constant adjustment. Rhythmic sorcery drives the effort despite the un-governability of ingredients. Is this a construction site or a cooking show? The room offers an expanded horizon, no longer obliged to rid oneself of the things that supposedly suspend progress.

With local guest performer Emily Warner.

Fierce Says: We’ve loved Simone Aughterlony ever since she presented her show Supernatural (by Simone Aughterlony, Antonija Livingstone and Hahn Rowe) at the festival in 2015 and discovering the art of Jen Rosenblit has been a highlight of the past year. When we saw this strange, immersive piece in a Berlin warehouse we knew we had to bring it. Whilst we weren’t 100% sure what we’d witnessed we knew it felt it good, with a banging soundscape from Miguel Gutierrez and Colin Self too..

Everything Fits In The Room is included in the Fierce Weekend Pass which can be purchased here.

Teaser_Everything Fits In The Room from Simone Aughterlony on Vimeo.

Created in the frame of Utopian Realities, a co-production of HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Haus der Kulturen der Welt as part of 100 Years of Now, curated by HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. Supported by the NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ (NPN) International Guest Performance Fund for Dance.

Simone Aughterlony also leads workshop A Necessary Ecology with Artsadmin 14-15 October

WORLD PREMIERE

“$elfie$” is is the third performance work in a series built around the ontologies of Black and Queer aesthetics against our current political moment.

Operating with an expanded and leaky choreographic proposition, “$elfie$” reneges the imprints of the contemporary moment and places them in high-relief. In full view, it suggests another world that looks at/away from/and fiercely transverses the emotional landscapes of allostatic load (the wear and tear of the body due to repeated stress) alongside unabashed, unapologetic joyousness, the advent of political melancholia and ambivalence to extreme forms of desire and violence.

An unravelling work, $elfie$ holds the mirror to the audience and at the same time extricates itself into an existential and resistant aesthetic force–and that force says no to authoritarianism’s stranglehold on our present and future aesthetics.

$ELFIE$ – Official Promo Video from Malik Nashad Sharpe on Vimeo.

$elfie$ is commissioned by Fierce and The Marlborough Pub and Theatre, Brighton and supported by Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts and Diverse Actions with additional support from Chisenhale Dance Space.

Marikiscrycrycry is Malik Nashad Sharpe who is a Fierce FWD ’17 artist.

WORLD PREMIERE

Blurring the lines between live art, dance, theatre and fine art, The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein explores representations of women, looking at ways in which social media and consumerism have redefined how we relate to the female body, one’s ‘true self’ and public shaming.

In this irreverent phenomenon of music, dance and ‘witch-bitch’ ritual, The Famous plunges into the ghostly underworld of popular culture, seeking, as she puts it, ‘the real me, the pure me, behind this soiled shroud of promiscuity.’

Pulling from the myth of Medusa, Nicki Minaj and her own legendary self(ie), The Famous examines pop culture’s take on the ‘female monster’. Expect visual overload and risk-taking from this raw, timely and uncomfortably hilarious interdisciplinary performance.

Fierce Says: We heart The Famous. We’ve wanted to bring her back to Brum ever since her infamous dozen eggs performance back in 2011, so we’re thrilled to be commissioning this major new performance. Think American Idol vs Marina Abramovic and you’re not far off…

Commissioned by Fierce and Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts. Supported using public funds by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, and by PACT Zollverein, Kone Foundation and the Barbican.

Notorious is included in the Fierce Weekend Pass which can be purchased here.

Created by The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein

Associate Artist Krista Vuori

Collaborators Krista Vuori and Brogan Davison

Design by David Curtis-Ring

Produced by Sally Rose

Lighting design by Martin Langthorne

Production Manager Hannah Moore

Company Stage Manager Chloe Dorato

Marketing and Producing Assistant Molly Giles

Company Production Assistant Lóa Björk

Dramaturg Eirini Kartsaki

Development by In Company Collective

Make up by Thom Shaw

Press by Mobius

Commissioned by Fierce and Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts