Espirito Brum is the UK edition of Espirito Mundo, a cross cultural celebration bringing together musicians from Brazil and Birmingham, in a three day festival that forms the first stage in a ongoing global exchange.
This’ll run from 14-18 September and will have contributions from an impressive roster of organisations:
Espirito Brum is a collaboration between Espirito Mundo, Instituto Quorum (Espirito Santo, Brazil), Magpie Brown, Friction Arts, Spotted Dog, Oya Batucada, South Birmingham College and PST. It receives creative support from Marketing Birmingham, 7 Inch Cinema, Punch Records and Shakti Women.
On the subject of exotic festivals, I didn’t make it down to Jamaica Live on Saturday but, judging by the photo I’ve been sent by Ammo from Punch, I must’ve been in the minority.
Only 3 short months after their launch, Fazeley Studios are now hosting their own digital festival which aims to bring together the city’s creative businesses through a variety of events, including the usual seminars, debates and networking opportunities, but also including Fazeley’s own innovative slant of unconferences, swap shops and media mash-ups including Second Life, Twitter and live video streams.
The event which has most piqued my curioisity is entitled “My Dad’s on Twitter but he doesn’t know why”. More than just another opportunity to ‘talk shop’, this event promises to collate the ideas and input of attendees into a collaborative group mind map exploring how and why people use social media. In addition, after the event there will be an opportunity for an online audience to have input into the map as well. I’m keen to see how this will utilise Bubbl.us – something I stumbled across earlier this week, and which looks like another great free tool.
The event which has most piqued my TASTEBUDS however, is definitely the festival finale – a grand high tea for 300 creative workers in Fazeley Studio’s magnificently restored 19th century chapel reception. Fazeley currently provides a high tea for tenants every Thursday and have decided to build upon the success of this for the festival. I’ve been promised there are exciting and secretive things planned for this event which will be unveiled on the day, but if the promise of the tea alone isn’t enough of an incentive, there will also be a preview of the latest Ikon Eastside exhibition – an installation by an emerging Chinese artist called Xu Zhen.
For more details on all of the events taking place during the festival, the Fazeley Digital website will keep you in the loop, as well as provide opportunities to sign-up for certain events and provide feedback/interact with others.
The website for the Film Forum West Midlands, which I mentioned just the other day, has been spruced up and is looking very nice indeed. The domain name is now filmforumwm.co.uk and if you subscribed to the earlier version of the blog you’ll need to update to this new one.
With all that said, they have news of a free screening of ‘Festival’ at the Library Theatre on 19 Nov at 7pm. Our own Roger Shannon produced the film and will be introducing it. Here’s the flyer:
