Created in Birmingham

A free, one-off performance will take place at Ikon Eastside at 10pm on Tuesday 3 June.

The Society of Futopia has been developed by four final year students at BIAD, Birmingham City University and will take place during the New Generation Arts Festival. One of the artists, Gareth Burnett did have a blog he was using as a diary – there’s some interesting stuff there but that seems to have petered out. According to the artists:

The performance is rooted in Futurist Theatre and mixes live performance with film and animation; at its core it is an exploration of the human condition. There is a level of interaction with the audience; instead of conventional lighting the audience will be given torches to discover the characters themselves.

Or, rather more excitingly:

In violence we worship beauty. Destroy. Destroy. Destroy. This is the truth according to the Society of Futopia.

The performance will also be filmed and exhibited alongside a set of photographs based around science and genetics in the future, religious structures and the human condition. This exhibition runs from 17th June – 20th June. On the subject of filming, here’s a trailer they prepared earlier:

In the video for Amnesty International’s Unsubscribe campaign, Birmingham-based artist Jiva Parthipan ‘played’ the part of a detainee subjected to waterboarding. That is, for a short while he was actually subjected to it with the treatment (judged by the Bush administration not to be torture) filmed in slow motion at 1000 frames per second.

The video has generated a great deal of coverage and no small amount of controversy. You can see it for yourself here:

Jiva is giving a talk at BIAD on 14 May and will be performing a piece called ‘The Terror Of Living‘ at Warwick Arts Centre on 21 May, both as part of the Fierce Festival.

His own website is at www.jivajiva.com.

The International Dance Festival Birmingham started today and continues until Sunday 25 May at venues all over the city. Pete mentioned this back in January and pointed out how truly international the line-up is, with performers from Taiwan, Australia, South Africa, Cuba and Russia, as well as “rising star” Rosie Kay from Birmingham.

The full line-up for this week (and indeed the other weeks) can be seen on their events page.

Pulling out highlights would be a fool’s errand but for those looking to sample the impressive wares without parting with their hard-earned, there are a few free events to catch:

• Performances in shop windows around the city centre are taking place daily from midday all this week – head for Oasis, the Puma Store, Bathstore and Chamberlain Square. More details here.
• In Victoria Square on Friday night, 9pm and on Saturday at 4pm and 9pm you can see Watch This Space which I have very high hopes for indeed.

Lastly, the festival has a blog, although I see this hasn’t been updated in the past week. I’m hoping they use it to collect together all the photos, videos and reviews that will be spun out by visitors to the events, similar to the Collective Memories that Pete did here (and that I’ll be continuing to do).

Photo by Brian Slater.

The line-up for this year’s Fierce! Festival, the international performing arts festival, has been announced and can be seen on the events page of their newly updated website. You may recall that a significant number of acts were chosen via a public vote and these have now been programmed into the wider festival too.

The opening party will be held at The Vaults on 16 May and promises burlesque cabaret from Miss High Leg Kick and Fierce’s favourite DJ Joe Egg. Entry is free but you’ll need to RSVP as capacity is limited.

In the lead up to the festival there are a few events being held on Wednesdays at 2pm at BIAD:

• On 30 April Breathe will be creating “sensory performative experiences in interactive environmments” with The Other Way Works “daring and remarkable theatre that draws the audience into the very heart of the experience.
• On Wednesday 7 May at the same time and place it’s the turn of Harminder Singh Judge and Hancock & Kelly Live.
• Finally, on 14 May it’s the conceptual artist Yara El-Shirbini and trans-disciplinary artist Jiva Parthipan who will take the stage.

I’ll go into the specifics of this year’s festival a little nearer the time but the main programme runs from 21 to 31 May, with a bewildering array of shows and events in that time.

Here’s the winners of the My Fierce Festival public vote competition thingy:

Theatres
Whisper (Proto-type Theater)
Playing The Victim (Switch)
I Told It To A Mannequin (Francesca Millican Slater & Lindsey Price)

Public Spaces
The Fête Encounter (Various Artists)
B1 Labyrinths (Needless Allies)
It Sank With The Shape Of Us (Victoria Pratt)

Unconventional Spaces
The Moment Before We Kiss (Michael David Jones)
The Divine Edgar (Scott Johnston/Film Ficciones)
Foot Washing Foor The Sole (Adrian Howells)

These will take place over the May Bank Holiday weekend, 23 to 26 May, as part of the Fierce Festival.

I’ve been criminally negligent in reporting on the My Fierce Festival shenanigans this last week but have raised myself from my ineptitude, or something, to inform you that today is the final day to vote on which acts will appear as part of Fierce this year. Get to it!

Artstalking Ana reports on Wunderkammer which opened on Wednesday at BIAD with a live performance, which I’ll let Ana describe:

David Miller and Edward Wakefield were lying inside perspex cabinets as characters drawn from when they were students at Margaret Street. Ed was lying in state, with audio playing (unfortunately you couldn’t hear this very well with all the noise) and David was writhing ineffectually in his white ribbon bondage.

Photo also by Ana with more in her blog post. The show continues (presumably without the live bodies in cabinets) until the 16th, 10am-5pm, not weekends, in the Foyer of BIAD, Margaret St. There’s then a “critique” on the 16th at 6pm.

This year, we get to vote on what we want to see as part of the Fierce Festival!

After a decade of stop-you-in-your-tracks live art events and performances FIERCE is trailblazing once more giving you, the audience, the power to program your own festival!

We’ve reserved a range of spaces from theatres to pavements, broom cupboards and dressing rooms. You decide what goes in them.

* Read the artist pitches
* Choose your top three performances and vote!
* Come back to build your festival line up and use the leader board to help you.

Shows with the least votes will be eliminated; the most popular shows will be performed LIVE during Fierce Festival at venues across the West Midlands 23rd – 26th May.

They has a blog too :)

The website for this year’s Fierce Festival is up and given the open nature of the “Wikifest” it gives out shedloads of info about how it’s all going to work.

Go read!

Nu Century Arts is an organisation established in 2000 and based in Handsworth who are “dedicated to the development and promotion of performing arts in the African-Caribbean community”

The company’s work encompasses a professional theatre group, organising a regular live music event ‘The Live Box’, literature in the shape of ‘Wired Up’ magazine and a broad range of education work, from jazz workshops, to youth theatre and group trips as far a field as South Africa and the United States.

Given Birmingham’s location within the United Kingdom and the breadth of talent within the city, Nu Century Arts has maintained that its artists should not be marginal, but play a central role in the cultural direction of the country; have access to the fullest possible range of skills; and produce the highest quality work. Moreover, it seeks to provide a consistent base and a framework promoting new African Caribbean work, irrespective of political/ cultural trends and fashions.

The do work in a variety of venues including The Drum and The Rep and the artists listed on their site include Soweto Kinch, Julie Dexter, Eska Mtungwazi and Shabaka Hutchins.

Awareness came to me from Osahon Orchard who is running a free 10 week acting course for over 19 year olds as a “way to regain confidence as well as get back into performing” at 16 Grosevenor Road B20 3NP. Contact him on osahon.orchard [at] ntlworld.com for details.

[Update: The website has been updated so most of the links below are broken.]

The big press release of the day appears to be for the International Dance Festival Birmingham coming out of DanceXchange and the Hippodrome with events happening at the Rep, Town Hall, Ikon and the Mailbox from 28th April to 24th May.

Here’s the press release and programme highlights (PDFs).

Quote from the festival co-directors:

David Massingham, Artistic Director of DanceXchange: “In great cities all around the world, I see arts festivals creating passion and energy, adding spirit and excitement, galvanising local communities, celebrating identities. Birmingham’s new International Dance Festival is about bringing one of the most human and accessible artforms into our everyday lives.”

Stuart Griffiths, Chief Executive of Birmingham Hippodrome: “This truly will be a festival with an international reach. We’ve managed to secure the involvement of some of the world’s most prominent dance companies and the programme looks set to help establish Birmingham as a major cultural player within the UK, and across the world.”

When they say international they’re not kidding and it’s great to see a Birmingham festival that lives up to that tagline with dancers from Taiwan, Cuba, China, South Africa, Russia, India, Pakistan, Japan, Australia, USA, Portugal and more. But there’s also local talent involved. Quickly scanning through the PDFs I spotted the phrase “Birmingham-based rising star Rosie Kay” and did some digging. Here’s her pretty well stocked website which has plenty to dig through along with a link to her Flickr stream containing a mix of press shots and informal behind the scenes photos. Nice. Here’s one from her company’s production of The Wild Party:

Rosie appears to have had a pretty good 2007. This interview goes through some of the highlights and covers the Birmingham connection.

What bought you back to the UK – and Birmingham, where you’re based?
I’d almost given up dancing – I knew I wanted to be a choreographer, but I couldn’t be abroad, I needed my own language, and I’d have to start again. I saw the Dance Artist in Residence post at DanceXchange in Birmingham. I’d taught a huge amount but this kind of gave me my choreographic stripes. It was great experience working with a massive range of people – and it just got me back into the UK scene.

I had a good look at the funding system and around then (2003) it was becoming more regional. I thought if I could survive in Birmingham – with beautiful studios and real support, I could really invent my own world here. And I’ve had dancers from Korea, Hawaaii, Brazil, people come and work with me. I don’t feel the pressure of a big scene – and I don’t feel lonely, because there’s DanceXchange.

[Later: I just discovered her company did the wonderful Ballet on the Buses one of the highlights of last year's Fierce Festival.]

Expect more coverage of this event over the forthcoming months…

via Audiences Central

A couple of videos have been released from the Reality Estate project that took place at Five Ways earlier in the month. The first is a musical walk though the show (if you can call it a “show”):

The second is a slideshow of the feedback tickets left in the Five Ways roundabout:

My for-what-it’s-worth review is here.

Whatsthebigmistry‘s Doorwonderland, which was one of my personal highlights of the Fierce Festival this year, is returning to Birmingham on November 28th and 29th. More details on the Custard Factory blog.

The official photos from Project X Presents are online already.

Best viewed as a slideshow I reckon.

Marc Reck points to photos of yesterday’s final setup for Project X Presents.

More here.

If you’ve got your Gigbeth wristband you can get into the dress rehersal tonight and some tickets are still available on the door tomorrow for the show proper. A year in the making, by all accounts. Should be good.

If you’re not sure, the Rainbow Warehouse is just along from the Rainbow pub itself on Adderley St. Should be fairly obvious.