Fierce Festival Storms Back to Birmingham's Digbeth — SkimNews
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- Fierce festival returned to Birmingham for one week, taking over conventional theatres and unconventional venues in ex-industrial Digbeth, with bill highlights including late-night artist dinners, a show in a swimming pool, and a six-hour performance jam at a gothic hall said to have inspired Cluedo.
- Tung-Yen Chou's VR piece Traversing the Mist is set in a gay sauna where users walk through concrete corridors, showers and cubicles populated by identical blank-faced men; the reviewer described the immersive tech as 'engaging, and yet eerily lonely.'
- Wojciech Grudziński's solo Threesome features him performing upside-down pliés and yogic moves in bottomless frilly knickers while telling the story of three Polish ballet dancers shamed for their homosexuality, described as 'strangely compelling, building to a sort of catharsis.'
- Melissandre Varin (n:u), an 'atmosphere-maker' rooted in Congolese, Guadeloupean and Beninese heritage, presented the rehearsal FREE(HOLD), an 'opaque ritual' in which performers drag ropes around their ankles and keen to the sky, evoking 'endurance, suffering, slavery and colonialism.'
- Faye Driscoll's acclaimed, award-winning Weathering received its UK premiere at the festival, with 10 performers on a rotating platform forming a slowly distorting tableau vivant that the source called 'a few levels up in terms of concept, commitment, execution and scale.'
- Chou is also showing In the Mist, a shorter sit-down VR piece described as 'basically a sad porno' that served as a precursor to Traversing the Mist.
Why it matters: As Britain's longest-running live art festival now in its 27th year, Fierce gives Birmingham's fast-creative-hub Digbeth a week-long showcase of international experimental work that mainstream UK venues rarely programme, with Faye Driscoll's award-winning *Weathering* marking a notable UK premiere on home soil.
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