Fierce Festival
Fierce Festival is annual international festival of live art that takes place across Birmingham. A man in a giant bird’s nest on the side of a high-rise; Una White’s name spelled out in our lights above the city; a flock of hot-air balloons playing music at dawn… For over a decade, Fierce Festival has established an international reputation for risk-taking, excellence and innovation and is now widely recognized as one of the UK’s most important contemporary arts festivals.
Since 2009, Laura McDermott and Harun Morrison have been joint artistic directors of Fierce. The duo have introduced a new ‘slow burn’ programming model centred around a core group of artists called the Fierce Festival Caravan of Artists. Fierce Festival was founded in 1998 by Mark Ball, now Artistic Director at LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre).
Live Art: This includes performance art, theatre, dance, music, installation, public intervention, digital and interactive practices.
Collision: We believe a good festival should celebrate collision – of artforms; of artworks and contexts; of ideas in salons, debates, workshops and talks and of strangers in late night parties…
Hyperlocal: Artists from across the globe showing work in Birmingham, developed in Birmingham. Performances in car parks, legendary clubs, the Brutalist Central Library and @AE Harris (a venue in an old metal factory), alongside established art centres like IKON, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Symphony Hall, Birmingham REP and mac.
Supernow: adj. [soo’per nou] 1. an intense sense of presence or awareness in a moment 2. an emergent or contemporaneous form 3. an attitude provoking new ways of seeing, being, feeling and thinking
