Fierce Festival

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Fierce Festival

Birmingham's International Festival of Contemporary Performance. Next festival: 14-18 October 2026 Hot international festival of performance in Birmingham (UK).

Save the date for the next Fierce Festival: 15-20 October 2024.

03/09/2026

Yirramboi
YIRRAMBOI(narrm/Melbourne)

We’re thrilled to be inviting YIRRAMBOI as the Festival-in-Residence this year. A delegation from YIRRAMBOI will be with us for the duration of the festival and will host one of the Fierce Feasts, participate in Fierce Jams 03: Highbury Hall, and takeover the infamous Club Fierce. This residency represents a long-term partnership between our organisations, with the desire and intention for their artists to return to Fierce with a full production in 2028.

Deeply rooted in purpose, YIRRAMBOI platforms expressions of culture, identity, unity and truth through evolutionary and experimental practices, breaking away from preconceived ideas of First Nations ‘art’. YIRRAMBOI provides a stage for First Nations voices to be heard and for stories to reverberate through generations.

Gifted by Elders, YIRRAMBOI means tomorrow in the local languages of the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung peoples. As a critically acclaimed global First Nations festival,
YIRRAMBOI possesses the power to lead the arts industry into a new TOMORROW.

📆Friday 16th October 11am - Fierce Jams
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📆Friday 16th October 9pm - Fierce Feasts
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📆Friday 17th October 10.30pm - Club Fierce
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🎟️Ticket link in bio🎟️

📷Sapphic Flicks

25/08/2026

The Rant That Can’t (Work-in-Progress)
(Berlin)

The Rant That Can’t (Work-in-Progress) unfolds as a live performance where speech stutters and swirls, and where language meets its limit.

A single voice—or a shifting chorus—attempts to articulate a rant that cannot fully emerge. Words stutter, repeat, collapse, and reassemble into chants and partial songs. Fragments of speech loop and echo through the space, building a rhythm that oscillates between play and strain. What begins as an effort to communicate becomes a play on communication’s failure.

Treating the body as a technology and the voice as its appendage, The Rant That Can’t traces attempts and failures at speech when ongoing injustice renders the present as a continuous site of distortion, and a persistent sense of loss overwhelms any sense of agency.

📆Wednesday 14th October, 5.30pm
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🎟️Ticket link in bio🎟️

📷by Frank Sperling

18/08/2026

Th*****megrudzinski (Warsaw/Amsterdam)
UK Premiere

In Th*****me, Wojciech Grudzinski shares the dance space with spectral figures from the past as he grapple with their legacy. In this exercise in phantasmagoric choreography, he goes cruising through the biographies of the legendary dancers Stanisław Szymański, Wojciech Wiesiołłowski, and Gerard Wilk. Brought up in post-war, communist Poland, two of them eventually emigrated, while one chose to stay in his native country.

How have their bodies been remembered? How did these bodies come to recognize their sensibility and express it on stage? How can these marginalized lives be reclaimed and embodied today? How do we construct an untamed, monstrous, illogical bodily archive of q***r history without losing any of their uniqueness?

Th*****me seeks to dispel the myths and rediscover their individual experience in a world that we were not part of. It is a hazy posthumous ballet, a repressed legacy, a reenactment, an act of somatic plunder and transformation.

Th*****me: Do not let these biographies be appropriated, much less consumed by the history of ballet and by politics. Do not let national sentiment lay claim to the oberek. Surrender to the other, so as to disappear and to exist more fully.

This performance is made possible with support from the and .

Part of the .dance Autumn 2026 season.

📆Wednesday 14th October, 7.30pm; Thursday 15th October, 5.30pm
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🎟️ Ticket link in bio 🎟️

📷by

11/08/2026

RAPEFLOWER
(Warsaw)
UK Premiere

RAPEFLOWER is an investigation conducted within one’s own body. It is in the body, not in the discourse, that the experience of sexual violence – both one’s own, inherited and learned — is intertwined with defense and survival strategies. This is a story about r**e understood as a condition, not just a single event.

Identifying oneself as a survivor often entails silence. In order to avoid becoming an object of pity, one becomes invisible. Avoiding confrontation with the experience of r**e can lead to a compulsion to repeat the traumatic situation in search of lost control.

In RAPEFLOWER, Hana Umeda evokes the traditions of the classic Japanese Jiutamai dance, a 19th-century art performed in Japan exclusively by women. For many of them, dance brought the experience of violence while in small rooms during closed shows they were subjected to sexual abuse. The movement, the tension of the body, its confinement and freezing – all of this can be found in the jiutamai body continuously passed on by masters to the next generations of female dancers. Using her personal history and the jiutamai tradition, Umeda reflects on whether dance or theater can become a space for emancipation and healing.

This performance is made possible with support from the and .

Part of the .dance Autumn 2026 season.

📆Saturday 17 October, 3pm; Sunday 18 October, 1pm
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🎟️ Ticket link in bio 🎟️

📷by

05/08/2026

This resting, patience
Ewa Dziarnowska (Berlin)
UK Premiere

Part ghostly repository of unconsumed sensuality, an installative kinetic fadeout, part somatic (strip)tease, This resting, patience addresses attraction, voluntary objectification, proximity and the aesthetics of bareness. Employing an experimental format, it upsets the passivity of installation and the time-delineation and dramaturgical resolution of performance and steps away from the tradition of viewing dance as an alienated spectacle to instead emphasize its immanent sociability. In its devotion to the body, This resting, patience proposes sensuousness and dancing as timeless and democratically available technologies of undoing the world and projecting the continuous present into a future that lasts, quintessentially tender, infatuated, attentive.

This performance is made possible with support from the and .

Part of the .dance Autumn 2026 season.

📅Saturday 17 October, 3pm; Sunday 18 October, 1pm
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🎟️Ticket link in bio🎟️

📷 by

31/07/2026

Weathering
(Los Angeles)
UK Premiere
Presented with .dance

Faye Driscoll’s Weathering is a multi-sensory flesh sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids and objects. Ten people (dancers/singers/crew) enact a glacially morphing tableau vivant on a mobile raft-like stage surging through the Anthropocene. Their voices generate a score that crescendos and resonates as they clutch, careen and cleave, in a space too small to contain them, spilling off the edges. The audience embanks the performers, close enough to smell the sweat and feel the steam of the central, spiraling scenes. The symphonically active, luminously living work is a breathing, leaking, choreography of micro events within a momentum thrusting from just beyond the perceivable. Driscoll and her team of collaborators ask: How do we feel the impact of events moving through us which are so much larger? Yet are animating and activating our bodies all the time? How do we get closer to the impact? Can we slow down enough to feel the dust, hurt, howl, absence, spill, plume?

Part of the .dance Autumn 2026 season.

📅14 – 16 October, 7:30 pm
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🎟️ Ticket link in bio 🎟️

📷: Angel Origgi

10/04/2026

🍯 Fierce Jams 01 Artist Spotlight: Tammy Woodrow🍯

Tomorrow!! Last chance to grab your tickets. 🎟️

is a multidisciplinary, transcultural artist based in Birmingham and acts as an ACTIVATOR -INITIATOR -INSTIGATOR – INFILTRATOR. Being part of the postfeminist, postpunk protest performance group Bapz on Crack and coordinating an experimental platform for woman artists called Ventilator Gallery (based at the OldPrintWorks, Balsall Heath) are a few strands of her subversive activities. She recently gained her MA Fine Art (School of Art, BCU) and currently explores the relations between performance art and personal social experience. As a mixed heritage woman artist, she uses her own life as inspiration. Tammy creates alternative projects that challenge conceptions about gendered historic heritage. These propositions will ultimately create pockets of ‘micro-utopias’ through feminist activism and collaborations. Her artworks have been shown nationwide.

📅11 April 2026, 3:30
📍Stechford Leisure Centre

This edition of Fierce Jams is made possible with support from The Saintbury Trust and .dance.

Tickets are £5 - link in bio. E-mail [email protected] if price is a barrier. ❤️❤️❤️

09/04/2026

🍯 Fierce Jams 01 Artist Spotlight: Eric Scutaro 🍯

is a Venezuelan choreographer, dance performer and activist, refugee in the United Kingdom and based in Birmingham. For 16 years, he has been a TrailBlazer in his country in Waacking and Voguing, dance styles belonging to the LGBTIQ+ community since the 70s. And now TrailBlazer in the West Midlands for 5 years. His choreographies, workshops and performances explore hip-hop, Waacking and the Voguing style as a way to advocate for LGBTIQ+ community. His work has also stood out for doing Q***r activism within the hip-hop culture.

📅11 April 2026, 3:30
📍Stechford Leisure Centre

This edition of Fierce Jams is made possible with support from The Saintbury Trust and .dance.

Tickets are £5 - link in bio. E-mail [email protected] if price is a barrier. ❤️❤️❤️

08/04/2026

🍯 Fierce Jams 01 Artist Spotlight: Dana Michel🍯

In advance of the premiere of her latest work YOU CANNOT CAN at Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Montreal-based artist joins us for Fierce Jams 01!

Dana Michel is a live artist. Her works interact with the expanded fields of improvisation, choreography, sculpture, comedy, hip-hop, cinematography, techno, poetry, psychology, dub and social commentary to create a centrifuge of experience. Before graduating from the BFA program in Contemporary Dance at Concordia University in her late twenties, Michel was a marketing executive, and a competitive runner and football player. In 2014, she was awarded the newly created ImPulsTanz Award (Vienna) in recognition for outstanding artistic accomplishments, and was highlighted among notable choreographers of the year by the New York Times. In 2017, Michel was awarded the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennale. In 2018, she became the first ever dance artist in residence at the National Arts Centre, Canada. In 2019, she was awarded the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art (Kuopio, Finland). In 2022, the Canada Council for The Arts awarded her the Jacqueline-Lemieux prize in recognition of her contribution to dance in Canada. In 2024, she was awarded the Prix de la danse de Montréal, International Distribution Category, presented by CINARS.

📅11 April 2026, 3:30
📍Stechford Leisure Centre

This edition of Fierce Jams is made possible with support from The Saintbury Trust and .dance.

Tickets are £5 - link in bio. E-mail [email protected] if price is a barrier. ❤️❤️❤️

📸: Clara Lacasse

07/04/2026

🍯 Fierce Jams 01 Artist Spotlight: Jessie McLaughlin 🍯

is an artist/ writer/ researcher from London, now based between London and Birmingham. Jessie likes to read books and poetry, and at the moment is most interested in S*X, PAIN, CLASS and MUSIC.

📅11 April 2026, 3:30
📍Stechford Leisure Centre

This edition of Fierce Jams is made possible with support from The Saintbury Trust and .dance.

Tickets are £5 - link in bio. E-mail [email protected] if price is a barrier. ❤️❤️❤️

Address

103 Argent Centre, 60 Frederick Street
Birmingham
B13HS

Website

http://www.wearefierce.org/

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