I am writing this in Birmingham where I live now, in my new role as Director (Artistic) of Fierce. I moved here last October from Toronto, Canada, where I was born and raised.
It is an immense honour to join Pippa Frith and Catherine Groom as the Co-Directors of Fierce and continue the legacy of Mark Ball, Harun Morrison, Laura McDermott, and Aaron Wright and all the people—our partners and you, our audiences—who have made Fierce what it is.
I’ve always been obsessed with beginnings. There is something so hopeful about wiping the slate clean and starting over. In a moment where we are teetering on a precipice— global violence, Birmingham’s effective bankruptcy, riots, and the creeping financial precarity of our sector— the question, though, is not how to begin, but: how do we continue?
I don’t have an answer, of course. I continue to believe, however naively, in the power of the live encounter. To me, Fierce is a verb: hoping, questioning, and attempting. This is not a space for definitive answers, but rather one where we use the edges of contemporary performance to grapple with the stickiness of our collective moment.
While this edition—my first—marks a beginning for me, we have invited artists from previous editions to make a return like Sheila Ghelani (2011), Steven Cohen (2014), Dana Michel (2014), Selina Thompson (2015), Adam Kinner and Christopher Willes (2017), and Keioui Keijaun Thomas (2019), while welcoming new ones to Fierce and to Birmingham at large.
What pulses at the heart of this year’s festival is a sense of insistence. Defiantly we redraw the centre, instead of existing adjacent to the status quo. Insistence as resistance. This manifests in the ways we take up and activate space, reckon with our colonial histories, and imagine possible futures. Insistence reframes our relationship to traditional forms like opera and ballet, to the family and to the body, as sites of endurance, grief, and feeling.
Most of all, I love these artists and feel privileged to begin my time at Fierce, and in Birmingham, this way. I hope you’ll join us in this live encounter.
This is how we begin. This is how we continue.
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Clayton Lee
August 2024