If you’re aged 25 or under and you like getting things for free then make haste to A Night Less Ordinary and see what tickets you can snaffle up. This scheme’s getting the chop soon, so take advantage while you still can.
Round these parts The Drum, The Rep and Hippodrome have offers. Looking a little wider there are offers at Warwick Arts Centre, Belgrade Theatre, Playbox Theatre and the RSC.
Artsfest, the annual free arts festival is on 10-12 September this year, so not long now.
Most of the details are yet to escape but there’s a few bits and bobs to be found. The general theme will be ‘Landscape and Heritage’ and the latest copy of Forward has some info about some of the bigger items:
Nice idea this:
Who Wants to Be…? is a spontaneous, democratic, live theatrical experience where the public really do take control. People propose ideas, discuss, and then vote on how to spend the evening’s entire box-office takings: Donate it? Invest it? Gamble it? Waste it? Form a collective and make the best idea happen yourself? You, the audience, decide
It says it’s inspired by Birmingham’s City of Culture bid, rather than being part of it, although the Hippodrome and Fierce (who are putting this together) have been involved in the official thing too.
It’s on 11 June Tickets are a tenner and they’re available here.
Read down – there’s a competition for free tickets later on in this post.
I’m conscious that I’ve not mentioned International Dance Festival Birmingham so much on here over the past month. Partly that’s because I’ve been busy working on it and going to just about every event that I could.
There’s only a couple of days left but still a chance to catch some good stuff. Tonight, there’s:
And tomorrow (the last day) there’s:
Put Your Foot Down is a big, free event that’ll run from midday to 6pm. Worth checking out, because the festival has been doing big, free public events very well (for instance, Utopia was great).
I saw Self Unfinished at Ikon Eastside last night and it’s probably the most ‘out there’ event in the entire programme – as David Massingham (festival co-director) said afterwards, it’s probably the furthest you can get from Strictly Come Dancing.
I’m off to Cruel tonight though – athletic Brazilian dancers, knives, spinning mirrors and a ruddy great big globe-shaped chandelier. That’s entertainment. Speaking of which…
Competition
We’ve been given a pair of tickets for the spectacular-looking Cruel tonight. If you want your name to go into a draw for them then email ‘CRUEL’ to createdinbirmingham@gmail.com. We’ll do the draw at about 2pm and let the winner know the good news.
International Dance Festival Birmingham kicks off on 19 April and runs through to 15 May.
At this point I should chuck in a disclaimer that I’ve been working with the festival’s organisers for a year or so on how they approach things online. However, that does mean that I’ve got a bit of a clue about what the line-up includes. Which is nice, because there are any number of ways of slicing and dicing a festival’s programme – this is my attempt to group it up a bit.
There’s more going on than I’ll mention here so see the IDFB website’s What’s On and Taking Part pages for the whole caboodle.
Local stuff
Big ticket items
Something a bit different
Free stuff
For IDFB 2008, Victoria Square was taken over by two stages, gantries, firecracker-stuffed cars and three dance companies. It was so good I went twice. This year we’re told that:
contemporary dancers will form a brand new dance company collective alongside Russian, Spanish, Indian and African folk dance groups, all moving to the turbo-folk Gypsy and Balkan beats of Birmingham’s very own band The Destroyers
The event’s called UTOPIA and will be performed a few times over the Bank Holiday weekend of 1-3 May. In the words of the choreographer:
There’ll be bits of furniture all over the place and basically it’ll look like 40 people, plus the band, have attacked the square
Which sounds pretty good. As does Waves, which is right up my street. Wander past the Hippodrome between 8-11pm from 22 April to 5 May to see/play with that.
Put Your Foot Down is the final showpiece on 15 May – an afternoon of free performances and dance demos, with a mass synchronised hip hop/street dance routine lead by Salah, a hugely popular hip hop artist from France, in St Martin’s Square, Bullring.
Taking part
There’s also a whole bunch of workshops and classes you can get involved in.
SHOUT is:
Birmingham’s first ever dedicated festival by and for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community
There’s an impressively packed schedule of things going on from 28 October to 30 November with arts, sport and politics all accounted for. With such a variety, picking out highlights can be a little tricky. Ben’s picked out his personal highlights over on BiNS while David Viney, one of the organisers, has sent me some suggestions from the more arty side of things:
I’d also chuck in Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray at the Hippodrome (10-14 Nov) which looks pretty interesting, and Mrs Barbara Nice’s Comedy Masterclass (1 Nov).
All the info’s on the SHOUT website and there’s an online version of the festival brochure here.
To promote their Robin Hood panto, the Hippodrome have commissioned a flash game where you have to fire arrows at the Sherrif of Nottingham’s sneaky baddies (while not shooting the goodies).
As Fiona at Audiences Central says, it’s a bit of fun “and people like to interact with something, rather than just having a marketing message shoved at them”. So congrats to the Hippodrome for that. I got 55 on my first go, by the way. I might have another crack in a sec.
Here’s a link to the Robin Hood game.
Also via Fiona, here’s a link to the game the RSC have put together for their Don John.
The Birmingham Post Power 50 (tremble at their might!) has just been announced. With last year’s list having an impressive showing from the arts world, interest at CiB could almost have been described as ‘mild’.
Ok, so it’s easy to be cynical about these things (and it’s open season on the Birmingham Post site – all the winners’ profiles are commentable), but there’s little sense in detracting from the recognition given to the following folks who work hard on the city’s arts & culture scene.
So, from CiB (hating the game, not the playa since 2007) hearty congrats go to:
While I’m at it, the Birmingham meeja luminaries who would like to thank their friends, family, deity of choice, etc and so on are:
The big list of movers and shakers is on the Birmingham Post website which, like I say, they’ve made an effort to do all nice so you can comment on how brilliant and deserving everyone is.
But feel free to vent your spleen in the comments here if you feel the need.
