Fierce Jams is a new, ongoing, and nomadic performance series that indulges in small-scale experiments in contemporary performance and live art. It is an excuse for Birmingham’s performance community to gather and to develop their practice in conversation with each other. Each edition features 4 local artists – selected through a mixture of invitations and an open call – plus a guest national or international artist. With a keen desire for new collaborations across the city, Fierce Jams is an attempt to refute the models of scarcity imposed upon our present artistic ecology while insisting on experimentation as an essential ingredient to artistic practice.
The second edition of Fierce Jams is on the banks of the beautiful Edgbaston Reservoir at the Midlands Sailing Club and will feature Birmingham-based artists Margot McClane, Francesca Millican-Slater, Harmanpreet Randhawa, Sym Stellium, and Melbourne-based Emily Parsons-Lord.
If you’re a Birmingham artist and interested in participating in future editions of Fierce Jams, we have a rolling, ongoing call for expressions of interest.
This edition of Fierce Jams is made possible with support from The Saintbury Trust.
About the Artists
Margot McClane is a multidisciplinary artist, working across performance, video, installation, paint, collage and text, often utilising found and readymade objects within her work. Through a feminist lens, she explores pertinent issues including systemic violence, institutional injustice, identity and agency, and personal space in the public realm and questions how, during these times of societal inequity and collapse, we can create spaces for transformation and growth.
Francesca Millican-Slater is an artist working in theatre, performance and audio. She also sit pets. Fran makes work in response to histories of place, people, nature, objects and how stories are collected and told. Her shows have been co- produced and commissioned by Birmingham Rep, New Vic Stoke, Duckie & Fierce Festival (Princess Promenade) and she has been artist in residence at The National Waterways Museum and Warwickshire Archives. Her audio works include podcast Stories to Tell in the Middle of the Night (strange stories for sleepless nights) and commissions for Coventry City of Culture and The National Trust. She’s usually trying to get wet in a pool, pond or puddle.
Emily Parsons-Lord makes visually stunning, embodied installations and performances. They elicit wonder and provoke critical re-examination of some of our most fundamental materials: air and explosions. These materials of the climate crisis speak to both the invisibility and the spectacle of collapse, and the confluence of personal and environmental catastrophe. The work interrogates the experience of witnessing this expanded unstable moment of multiple simultaneous catastrophes. It shifts in register and scale from the sublime to the relatable, humorous and queer.
Harmanpreet Randhawa is an artist and artist-curator working across drawing, performance, sculpture, writing, and curation. Informed by material semiotics and postcolonial thought, their practice gestures at the limits of dominant Western knowledge systems. Attending to the complex relationships between materials, words, knowledge, identity, place and the body, their work advances a mode of narration that values pluralism, abstraction and opacity over linear and readily visible forms of meaning.
Sym Stellium is a live artist, facilitator, holistic support worker & ritualist based in Birmingham. The exploration of connection, autonomy and liberation on micro & macro levels sits at the core of its practice. Its work primarily revolves around: healing justice, bodily autonomy, ritual & intuition and distorting notions of time. Using a combination of movement, soundscapes, chanting and meditative practices – Sym attempts to create embodied expressions of the ethereal and break down internalised colonial belief systems. Sym has performed in spaces such as Humber Street Gallery, Mimosa House, Eastside Projects, Graves Gallery and St Ninian’s Church for Glasgow BUZZCUT festival.
Getting there
Head to: Midlands Sailing Club, Icknield Port Rd, Birmingham B16 0AA
W3W: ///enjoy.metro.forum
🚌 by bus – 80 (1-min walk)
🚂 by train – To Five Ways station (wheelchair-accessible) – 1.4 mile walk or catch the 80 bus for 7 mins
🚲 by bike – places to secure bikes on site
🚗 by car – we are working to confirm car access on site, if you need a nearby space for accessibility reasons, please let us know when you book, otherwise there is residential parking available in adjacent streets.
Access
This event will include smoke, scents, blood, raw animal products, and small-scale pyrotechnics.
Performances will be inside and outside of the Midlands Sailing Club. The venue has a sand and dirt beach as part of the site. You can access this for some performances or watch from within the Club House. Activities in the Club house may take place on the ground floor (wheelchair-accessible) and first floor (accessed via a passenger lift or stairs). There are wheelchair-accessible toilets available. Contact us if you have specific questions.
We operate a relaxed performance approach across our events. Relaxed Performances were originally devised to make performance more accessible to people disabled by the usual rules of theatre / arts event etiquette. Whilst we do not adjust the sound and light levels of our shows, we do encourage audiences who may need to tic / stem, or make other noises and/or movements during the shows to do so. We also understand that sometimes people need to come and go from the space. We want to create a community where everyone is welcome.
Soft drinks and alcohol will be on sale at the event. Payment is by card only.
If cost is a barrier to attend Fierce Jams, we offer free tickets. Please email contact@wearefierce.org and we will add you to the attendee list.
