Created in Birmingham

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:

• Volunteers are needed
• The rather good trailer is back online, now with EXTRA LOGOS! Yay for logos
• This is a big deal

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?

• CRAIN report « D’log
  “A useful seven page report from the West Midlands Cultural Research & Intelligence Network conference (PDF link), held in Birmingham on 2nd June 2010″
• Audition Call « Stan’s Cafe Theatre Company
  Quick, bright female capable of playing between 18-30 wanted to perform with Stan’s Cafe in Beijing in November. Click the linky for details
• Birmingham Post – New chairman for Cre8us
  “Professor Michael Tovey, responsible for leading and co-ordinating design education and applied research at Coventry University, has been appointed to the board of Cre8us”
• Birmingham School of Media runs best courses in the country
  Huzzah!
• Screen WM & BAFTA Present: Filmmaking and Archive Workshops
  Courses. Not for horses
• Artist Talk @ Eastside Projects and Durational Performance @ The Rea Garden | Behind Closed Doors
  “We would like to invite you to the finale of Brigid McLeer’s residency at The Rea Garden on Saturday 19th June”
• art hamster in the city
  Don’t think I’ve linked to this one before, but probably should have. Contains mentions of arts stuff happening around Brum. Sarah Silverwood is the author
• Signal box L
  Someone’s built a fairly impressive model of the New Street Signal Box
• The Interview: Ben Javens « The Internationalist
  Ben did some stuff for 8th Continent, a Californian soy milk company. Someone interviewed him about that
• A seismic shift in the UK landscape
  CiB got props in PR Week at the end of April: “the artistic and creative community website Created in Birmingham, which won a Blog Award in 2008, is popular”. Not sure why that made me laugh so much, but it did. The award was 2009, btw

mac have commissioned some new Stan’s Cafe which is being performed there from Thurs to Sat and then touring later in the year.

Tuning Out with Radio Z is best described by they themselves:

The hosts of the night time show Tuning Out know all about facing down the void. Each night they start the show blank, with nothing planned, armed with just a stack of charity shop records and six hours in which to calm the world’s chaos and settle its people down to sleep.

This is a theatre show, which is also a radio show. You can listen to Tuning Out at home on-line via our website but true excitement comes when you visit its extraordinary studio in the theatre and become privy to presenter’s deeply compromised off-mic World.

Here’s the Radio Z website. You can sign in to the News Room bit and, during the performance, interact with things, send messages and so on.

There’ll be a pre-show talk with James Yarker at 6pm on the Friday to discuss the show. I wouldn’t be surprised if the development of this show had something to do (at least in part) with commentating on a Scalextric race for 24 hours last year, but you never can tell.

Applications are now open to companies across Europe for the first ever BE Festival, which will take place over four days: 30 June – 3 July 2010

The venue will be A E Harris where, as Stan’s Cafe point out, a fundraiser will be held for this event:

Temple Theatre are going to be performing their production Out Of Chaos @ A E Harris on 21st May. Doors open 19.30 show at 20.00. Tickets £10. To reserve tickets email info@befestival.org with your name and the number of tickets you require

The show’s had some great reviews and it all sounds worthwhile considering.

Incidentally, if anyone’s looking to sell tickets online for an event, Eventbrite does the job pretty well.

Intrepid reporter that I am, I went along to the Fierce Start Party last week to see what Laura and Harun, the new artistic directors, are planning for the next 12 months.

If you’re not familiar with Fierce they’ve been responsible for some of the most weird, wonderful and worrying live art presented in Birmingham over the past… well, ever.

The event was covered by this is tomorrow who’ve collected together audio, video and some photos, including this interview with Laura McDermott:

and this general summation of the whole thing:

Strikingly, the artistic-directors do not know the content of the next festival, due to commence in February 2011. Over the next ten months audiences will be able to follow the development of these projects as they emerge in response to a series of visits to the city. The fruition of these journeys will culminate in the festival.

The Fierce Festival Caravan of Artists 2010-11 (as they’re calling it) includes Eitan Buchalter, Sheila Ghelani, Stan’s Cafe, Plan B, Lundahl&Seitl, Quarantine, Jeanne van Heeswijk, James Webb, Kira O’Reilly, Dominic Johnson, Manu Luksch & Mukul Patel, Denis Tricot and EXZYT.

A nice touch was the loyalty cards they handed out to everyone who attended. Some super sleuthing tells me that dates for forthcoming Fierce events are:

• 24-26 April 2010 – Fierce Interrobang 1: Regeneration
• 24-26 September 2010 – Fierce Interrobang 2
• 11 November 2010 – Fierce Countdown
• 22-27 February 2011 – Fierce Festival

And if you don’t know, now you know.

The next PILOT Night, co-piloted by Kindle Theatre at AE Harris, Birmingham will be on Thursday 1 April 2010. Here’s some copy/pasted info. For more knowledge, and to apply, go to www.pilotnights.co.uk.

Pilot is a platform for testing new theatre work from the West Midlands and beyond. Deadline for submissions Monday 1st March, 12pm

RELEASE THE BEAST

Had an idea laying dormant for a while that you almost daren’t wake up? Not sure if it’s mad or genius?
Kindle invite performers/practitioners/fools to submit ideas for performance which frighten them. Whether in form, content or style it must push you beyond your comfort zone into unknown territory.

Challenge yourself in a lively, supportive atmosphere and get honest feedback from peers and audience. All fools will be applauded.

AE Harris is an industrial warehouse in Birmingham’s Jewelry Quarter. It’s big, blank and open to you, with four huge spaces and lots of corners, nooks and crannies to test your idea in. Site-specific ideas are most welcome.

We can offer you a small bursary, documentation of your performance, and rehearsal space in the venue from Monday 29th March.

Kindle will also be hosting an unusual meal for all the artists involved on the Wednesday night, in the venue.

In other news, on 6 March you should definitely go to Warwick Arts Centre for The Bite Size Festival 2010:

a whirlwind tour of the region’s theatre, offering you the one-off opportunity to sample a range of great work in one place on the same day.

This year’s lineup includes Stans Cafe, Pentabus, Foursight, Kindle, Jane Packman Productions, Spanner, New Macho, Needle and Thread and Vanessa Oakes. PLUS the first opportunity to see two shows we’ve commissioned especially with Warwick Arts Centre and mac following the First Bite Festival back in November: Caroline Horton’s You’re Not Like The Other Girls Chrissy and Untied Artists’ Al Bowlly’s Croon Manifesto.

Grab a day ticket and wallow in some entertainingness. Kindle Theatre will be doing 30 mins of Eat Your Heart Out, which I saw last year and thought was really very good indeed.

I was in Coventry at the Institute for Creative Enterprise (home to companies like Imagineer Productions, amongst others) when I spotted the Stan’s Cafe theatre pledge cards sitting in a tidy pile on the reception desk.

The process by which they came to be there is quite compelling and seems to have gone something like this:

1. Attend talky get-together
2. Have idea
3. Take action

Whether they achieve their stated aim or not doesn’t matter. If nothing else they stand as evidence that 2 (coming out of 1) can lead to 3.

Tangent – this reminds me of the bit in Scott McCloud’s utterly excellent Understanding Comics that talks about the action all happening between the panels.

The other day someone described CiB as ‘a little ray of sunshine in [their] RSS reader’. I’m going to take time out now to ruin that by talking about funding cuts and such. Sorry. If it’s any consolation I’ll end the post with a picture of a bunny.

The other week West Midlands Regional Observatory brought out their latest recession snapshot. For the cultural sector the figures weren’t bad:

the cultural sector continued to see increases in numbers of customers through the door in the last three months of 2009, building on the unusually high increase in footfall seen over the summer.

Strong audience figures suggest the value placed on culture by the general population has only increased during the economic troubles

However, people are expecting cuts – 72% of respondents being ‘less optimistic’ about the stability of core funding compared to a few years ago. Quite right too – on a daily basis you hear politicians dodging around the c-word like [insert inappropriate simile here].

Jeremy Hunt, the shadow culture secretary, has gone some way towards setting his stall out (could The Guardian have found a pic of him looking any more smug?), saying (and I paraphrase hugely):

• arts administration costs need to be hacked back to 5% of any cash government hands over
• they’ll introduce a US-style culture of philanthropy by encouraging tax breaks on lifetime giving
• The national lottery would be returned to its original good causes (which includes arts)
• they’d get rid of audience development targets in the arts

Some might find encouragement in some of that, although he did add:

I wouldn’t say that everything that happened under the last Conservative government was good

So nevermind.

The philanthropy thing has been jumped upon and was clearly at the forefront of people’s minds on a recent Cultural Leadership Programme session, as blogged about by Friction Arts in a post called Preparing for a Cultural Nuclear Winter.

On the Stan’s Cafe blog James gives the benefit of their experience and says:

Big UK arts institutions are already doing all they can to raise sponsorship and court donors, it’s not as if a funding cut is ‘required’ to prod them into action. [...]

In short, the US model is deeply flawed and we are a million miles away from being able to deliver that model as well as they do.

As things stand the figures, for the West Mids in particular, support him, the Birmingham Post pulling the numbers from analysis by Arts & Business. The headline numbers there being that in the West Mids private investment dropped 25% over the last period, while the national average was a drop of 7%.

A&B chief Colin Tweedy said that:

We would like to be optimistic but predict the worst is yet to come

Here’s the bunny:

I just stumbled across an interview that Stan’s Cafe did with Neil Rami a few weeks back. Neil’s the Chief Exec of Marketing Birmingham.

Topics include the role of the arts (esp independent art) in marketing the city, who Marketing Birmingham markets Birmingham to, what the challenges are and which cities are doing it well.

I’d pull out a quote but I can’t choose one and, besides, going all soundbitey just isn’t becoming of an august publication such as this one.

The first of what might become a regular thing, Knowing Me, Knowing You was fun last week. As part of Capsule’s longest birthday party… ever, we got together and invited a bunch of interesting people along to introduce themselves and say (for the sake of getting a conversation going) what they might do if they were to get their hands on VIVID for a little while.

The kind participants were:

• Dan Davies
• Ben Waddington
• Fin & Ken from a new (currently nameless) housing co-op
• Sara from Needles and Hooks
• Mark Murphy from Surely?
• Stuart and Ben from First Fold Records (who’ve blogged about it)
• Sarah from Heat and Light
• James Yarker from Stan’s Cafe (well, I read out his submission)
• One of Eagle and Feather from Kipple
• Ben Javens

All ably compered by Jon Bounds with half-time entertainment provided by Charlie Pinder‘s cake orchestra.

Truth be told, we weren’t sure what people would come back with or what sort of direction the evening might take. As it turned out, ideas included:

• Social spaces
• Turning the place into a massive ball pool/packing it floor to ceiling with jelly
• Setting up a swapshop
• Using it as a place for realising unfinished ideas
• Creating an edgeless, white room and projecting images through hung pieces of perspex
• Kipple Live
• Artist talks

And some other things that escape me just at the moment. To be honest, the suggestions themselves weren’t the most crucial part of the evening. The point was really to get people out, meeting each other and sharing thoughts and ideas. As far as that goes I think the evening was a success.

Capsule have written up the event here with lots of lovely photos. Thanks to them, to everyone who took part and to those who came along to watch.

A couple of weeks back there was a meet-up of West Mids theatre folk – the event was called The Challenge of Change and (from what I understand) there were two days of workshops and discussions around the future of West Mids theatre.

Graeme Rose (Stan’s Cafe, The Modified Toy Orchestra, etc) has written up some notes about the first day.

There’s talk of Action Plans coming out of the event but I’m yet to find anything online anywhere just yet. Until they turn up, I rather like this list of pledges sketched out by James Yarker (also of Stan’s Cafe):

1. Attend 12 theatre shows in the next 12 months, 4 by West Midlands writers/artists/companies you haven’t seen before, 1 in a West Midlands Venue you’ve never been to before.
2. Take 12 people who have never been, rarely go, or don’t ‘do’ Independent Theatre to a show. Share transport.
3. Host a meal/party for 8 people 4 of which you barely know.
4. Write 12 comments/reviews/blog entries about theatre on other people’s sites.
5. Attend 1 mid*point or return to the next Open Space event.

They seem like common sense things that you’d hope people would be doing anyway but probably aren’t by everyone. I’m sure very similar things could be drawn up for many different artforms. James explains where the pledges came from. It’d be nice if they really were written up in some formal way. Michelle Knight has opted in. Is anyone else prepared to be held to these? If not, how come?

Of all the things on last night I only made it to two out of five. I missed out on the opening of Ryoji Ikeda’s exhibition at Ikon Eastside (which I might go and catch at lunchtime today), Jordan McKenzie’s ‘Day Into Night’ at Vivid and Colour’s night at The Victoria featuring World of Fox’s album launch.

Still, I did make it along to the Arts & Business Awards. The special guest was Patrick Stewart (who walked, not teleported on stage – disappointing) and the winners were:

• Community Award – EC-Arts & National Express Coach
• Cultural Branding Award – Stan’s Cafe & AE Harris (Birmingham) Ltd
• Museum, Libraries and Archives Award – Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust & Inchscape Motors Shrewsbury
• People Development Award – Holte Visual & Performing Arts College, St Francis Primary School & Signet Trading Ltd
• Sustained Partnership Award – Sinfonia ViVA & Rolls Royce plc
• Young People Award – County Youth Arts & Balfour Beatty Capital
• Business Volunteer of the Year Award – Colin Wells from Prologic plc & Multistory (also winner of the Champion of Champions Award)

Congrats to all of them.

After that I wandered down to the Sunflower Lounge for Gallery of Owl’s ‘All You Can Eat Zine’ which was fantastic – billed as ‘a night of Zines, comics, small press, music and performance’. It provided all of that as well as a palpable sense of

I didn’t stay for that long, but long enough to catch Richard Peel‘s entertaining performance of Dracula, have a chat with Claire from ATTA grrl a buy a couple of zines (ATTA grrl and Girls Who Draw, since you asked). There was a good turnout, a great atmosphere and the excitement of knowing there’s loads of interesting stuff going on around the city.

Here’s what I picked up:

And check out the hand stamp too – easily the best one I’ve had in a while:

The latest performance from Stan’s Cafe is as weird and wonderful as usual. Timed to coincide with the official Le Mans 24hr race, Stan’s Cafe have converted their factory HQ into the site of a major Scalextric track on which six teams will do battle in a gruelling 24hrs of slot-car racing.

There will be a weekend of themed activities taking place along-side the performance including film screenings curated by 7 inch Cinema and Outer Sight, family stuff and ooh la la even some fancy French cuisine.

Stan’s Cafe presents: 24 Hour Scalextric. 13 – 14th June. Weekend tickets: £5 / £3

Nearly five years ago, a group of friends and I decided to take some initiative and create for ourselves the kind of organisation and event that we would most want to be a part of. The result is Project X Presents – a Birmingham based creative network producing events once or twice a year which aim to fuse many different strands of creative endeavour into one cohesive whole.

So what is a network anyway? In our case, a free association of individuals bonded by two essential qualities – an interest in creativity and a friendly, open minded attitude. We realised that between ourselves and our immediate friends we have between us a tremendous variety of interests and an urge to be together and be creative. Weekly meetings began and continue still, the network steadily grew. Our fifth event – Xhibition, comes up this Saturday in Moseley.

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