I Like Theatre is a lovely, simple idea and a nice progression from last year’s theatre pledge cards.
Note: a mention of the West Midlands Theatre Awards 2012. You saw it there first.
I Like Theatre was prompted by Ian Craddock at Old Joint Stock Theatre from an initial idea and Pledge Card from James Yarker at Stan’s Cafe / @ A E Harris.
A touch of grouchiness for a Monday morning.
Ammo reckons Birmingham’s arts scene is too safe and middle-aged, claiming that rather than providing art that appeals to Brummies, “a human tide of middle class professionals floods Birmingham each day from the suburban shanty towns that ring our city”:
Groomed by the local authority and a small elite of ‘tastemakers’, half-a-dozen ‘flagship’ venues and ventures in the city centre now hoover up most of the taxpayer and corporate cash. Just like the banks, they’ve become ‘too big to fail’.
More and more their programming reflects the tastes – and train timetables – of an alien clique.
Meanwhile, Stan’s Cafe remind us that, as of 1 October, city council funding for some of the smaller organisations ended (see my post with bonus hedgehog vid here):
last time I did the sums it appeared 50% of the City’s revenue funded portfolio was being cut by 100% to save 2.6% of the Arts Revenue budget. I can’t conceive how the city missed out on its last two bids to be crowned a Capital/City of Culture.
That last bit was sarcastic, btw.
Following the closure of the Creative Partnerships Programme, Bright Space announced that they would be closing. Today’s their last day.
This from Stan’s Cafe:
It’s sad because Brightspace were behind a huge number of inspirational projects that took artists into schools to work creatively with students and teachers. Now, despite a great report from OFSTED setting out the great value of these projects, the plug as been pulled, the axe has fallen, the bubble burst, the goose cooked, the turkey plucked, the swan sung and the full stopped.
I’d lost track of what’s happening with Creative England - I thought it was going to be based on a partnership of all the screen agencies but here’s a press release:
On Friday 30th September 2011, regional screen agency Screen WM will bring the curtain down on nine years of support for the screen media industries in the West Midlands and welcome Creative England as the new umbrella body for the creative sector.
The closure of Screen WM follows the coalition government’s decision to replace the UK Film Council’s support for film-making, which core-funded the regional screen agencies, with funding through the British Film Institute.
All the best to the folks working at these organisations who are moving on.
Sadly, I’m predicting a few more posts like this over the next few months.
As I type this very sentence people are formulating answers to the question ‘What more can we do to create a better future for theatre in the West Midlands?’ at day two of the West Midlands Theatre Open Space event. Am hoping some notes will appear from this somewhere.
Photo by Graeme Braidwood, cropped by Stan’s Cafe.
I went to see Stan’s Cafe’s The Cleansing of Constance Brown at AE Harris on Saturday. It was superb and I’d thoroughly recommend grabbing some tickets before it closes on Saturday. Unless it’s already sold out. By rights it should’ve done that long ago.
It’s probably better to go with no expectations/preconceptions of about what you’re about to see but, in case you’d rather take someone else’s word for how it good it is:
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*Alternative titles for this blog post:
Today’s the last day for picking up discounted early bird tickets for Biting Back, taking place on 21 March:
a one day event from Birmingham City Council, mac and Sampad that will address how arts sector professionals and individual artists can learn from examples of successful partnerships in austere cultural landscapes.
Tickets will still be available, they’ll just be more expensive and saving money is the name of the game here. With less cash around to make things happen over the coming years, the idea is to hear from people (some from Birmingham, some from much further away) with practical experience of interesting partnerships and different ways of working.
The schedule for the day is here. I’ll be there talking about what we did with the Created in Birmingham Shop last year. Friction Arts, Stan’s Cafe, the Flyover Show, La Tabacalera, MIR Festival and more will feature too.
Biting Back is also on Twitter, Facebook and Lanyrd.
Stan’s Cafe present ‘The Cleansing of Constance Brown’, opening 1 March at their now permanent home, A E Harris.
Conceived whilst performing It’s Your Film across Europe, its themes embody power and cleansing, and is performed in a 14m long corridor, without words to an extraordinary soundtrack.
The corridor itself with its shifting configuration becomes the 73rd character, blank, often menacing and unpredictable. Scenes intercut and morph into one each other making connections across time and space.
7 PERFORMERS
68 CHARACTERS
70 MINUTES
6 WORDS
10 TONS OF KIT
A SET 2M WIDE AND 14M DEEP
45 AUDIENCE MEMBERS…
…WILL YOU BE ONE OF THEM?
You can catch the performance from 1 – 19 March (except Sunday / Monday), booking is via mac Box Office.
I didn’t make any new year resolutions, but if I did ‘go to more theatre in 2011′ might have been on there. On Saturday I ticked that box good n hard, clocking up the Rep, the Hippodrome and the Old Rep before 5pm.
The Rep – The Final Curtain
The Rep’s closing for a couple of years while they finish off the new library (which will integrate with the Rep to a fair degree). They’ll be touring around venues across Birmingham but before then they held one last little event. Joanne Malin hosted and Polarbear had written a piece for the audience to perform with some help from performers from the Young Rep.
It was short, sweet and good, wholesome fun and a nice way to see off the current place.
They were doing backstage tours after that but we didn’t have time for that because we wanted to go and see…
Birmingham Hippodrome – (re)Stretch
This was ace. I went to a little preview on Friday night and it was so good I went back on Saturday. (re)Stretch answers the question ‘how much fun would it be to string up 8 miles(!) of fine elastic to make a 10 metre-wide screen and then project things on to it and make it make noise too?’. The answer is, of course ‘very fun’, especially as you’re encouraged to get involved and play with the thing.
At the preview on Friday a couple of dancers cavorted in and around the piece (it’s presented in association with DanceXchange), which was lovely, but they were no match for the unrestrained glee shown by a class of young ballet dancers on Saturday when they were let loose on it.
It’s free and it’s there until Sunday 16 January. Martin Pickard’s taken some lovely pics from the Friday which you can see in this slideshow:
The Old Rep – The Firework Maker’s Daughter
We managed to score some tickets to this at the last minute, leading to the admission that I’d never actually been to the Old Rep before. It’s a good place and the staff were very nice and friendly. The show itself (written by Philip Pullman) was more kiddy-friendly than the sort of thing I’m used to (this was the Christmas show, after all) but it was entertaining enough – the elephant costumes were ace and it had a good energy about it.
Also on a theatrical tip
We’re taking a bit of a break here but CiB will return in the new year. In the meantime, I’ll be posting a few ‘year in review’ things to remind you that 2010 was alright really, and that all the talk of (and worrying over) money over recent months shouldn’t detract from some great art, work and artworks.
Meanwhile, just to show how 2010 looked on Created in Birmingham, we published 649 blog posts and attracted 578 comments, garnering 222,264 pageviews from 81,937 unique (like snowflakes) visitors. There was also 1 shop that took £45,000, with most of that money going to the artists themselves.
Over the past 12 months we’ve also had 40 CiB supporters and a handful of advertisers – a big thank you goes out to them for helping us to keep the site going.
These were the 10 most popular posts published this year:
I’m not really one for doing ‘best of’s but (off the top of my head) it was good to see the MAC reopening, I liked the Steve McCurry retrospective at BMAG and Len Lye at Ikon (which is still on), Birmingham European Theatre Festival was fun and I enjoyed a load of things at International Dance Festival Birmingham.
Odd but great moments included ‘sleeping’ on stage during Stan’s Cafe‘s Tuning Out with Radio Z (which I’ve written about here) and, of course, That Shop.
There was plenty more besides and far too many things I wish I’d seen but didn’t. I suppose I’ll just have to try to see more next year.
The Slavic Soul Feast is taking place on 23 October, organised by Polish Expats Association as a part of Black History Month.
This offers an opportunity to promote knowledge on the contribution made to society by Black people along with the distinctive dances and costumes and original melodies from over 70 regions in Poland.
Lively Hops, picturesque twirls, energetic, joyful movements, coral necklaces, flowers, ribbons, head scarfs, and embroided, gaudy fabrics!
…This is also a pretext to learn more about diverse histories, heritage and culture traditions of other ethnic minorities living in the UK. Along classics of Polish alternative music you will hear the whole range of contemporary Slavic folk beats!
With contemporary art videos examining multicultural society and ethnic identity by Andrzej Karmasz, followed by delicious vegetarian pierogi and meaty bigos.
The event takes place from 7pm at Stan’s Café @ A.E. Harris. Tickets are £3 on the door, for more information contact roma@polishexpats.org.uk
On Saturday night I took a couple of (out of town) friends to AE Harris for the Birmingham European Theatre Festival. We turned up a bit late so only managed to catch the last piece – one which would’ve been a fantastic spoof on art student theatre if it wasn’t for the fact they were taking themselves seriously.
Serves us right for turning up late – I’m told some of the earlier suff was ace. The night wasn’t over though, with a reasonably-priced bar, music from the TG Collective (in the rather dark pic above), some last-night awards handed to the companies that had performed, the results of the singing workshop from earlier in the day (audio below) and, as reported on Stan’s Cafe’s blog, music and dancing till dawn.
Despite some worries about ticket sales in the weeks beforehand, the last couple of nights of the festival were pretty much sold out and the various theatre companies who had come to the city seemed to have enjoyed themselves, with much talk of returning next year.
There was a fantastic atmosphere and my friends went away impressed with the sort of thing that Birmingham gets up to, so well done all who were involved. As Graeme rightly comments:
It was worth being there for the sense of gathering alone
One last thing – it was a little odd to see AE Harris decked out as a ‘proper’ theatre but it scrubs up rather well. I’ve seen it used for all sorts of things since it opened – 24HR Scalextric, launch parties, a Christmas party, filled with rice by Stan’s Cafe and filled with detritus (including upturned cars) by Kindle Theatre. It fills a very important and individual gap in a city that’s not blessed with mid-size venues, so it’s encouraging to hear that discussions are ongoing to keep the place open past the initial lease.
The line-up for the first Birmingham European Theatre Festival (Wed 30 June to Sat 3 July) is now up. I don’t know enough about theatre (European or otherwise) to tell you whether it’s good or not, but really that seems like reason enough to get a ticket. Anyway, I’ve been assured that it is a good line-up.
Also, it’s only a tenner for an evening of entertainment. Tickets here.
From elsewhere on the webs we can see that:
To quote Stan’s Cafe from that last link:
OK, it feels like crunch time now. Is this City going to allow itself to develop a proper theatre scene or should we just all move to the seaside?
