Fierce festival’s local legacy-building

There are bigger, showier festivals but Fierce understands it’s not just the party that matters, but the traces it leaves “A poet’s hope: to be like some valley cheese, local but prized elsewhere,” wrote WH Auden . Harun Morrison, joint artistic director of Birmingham’s Fierce festival , argues that you can say the same of festivals. But to continue the cheese theme, as Jonathan Holloway, late of the Norwich and Norfolk festival and now heading Australia’s Perth festival , says: “Two cheeses on a plate do not make a festival.” You can chuck a few pieces of work together and brand it as a festival, but you won’t kid anyone that it’s the real thing. After a day spent in Birmingham at the start of Fierce – the first festival since 2008 – it’s clear to me that Morrison and his co-director, Laura McDermott, are eschewing both the chuck-it-in-and-hope-for-the-best approach and the cherry picking-style curation typical of so many festivals. Everyone always claims that their festival reflects their own particular city – Brighton has responded to its lack of performance spaces with site-responsive productions; Hat Fair turns the whole of Winchester into a glorious, outsized village fete – but in too many cases it feels as if the work has been made elsewhere, then parachuted in. The rising number of performance festivals across the country are often driven as much by economic as artistic considerations, and leave no real legacy for either artists or audiences. Yet long before yesterday’s first day of performances and installations, Fierce was busy leaving its own snail trails across Birmingham, drawing on the work of local artists such as Stan’s Cafe , but also working with many other artists who have been spending time in the city over the last year. The relationship is a long-term one: this year’s artists won’t simply be replaced by next year’s shinier models. In a city where theatre output has been dominated by conventional forms demanded by the Birmingham Rep building (currently being redeveloped as part of the new library complex to include a new 300-seat theatre, bridging the gap between The Door and the main house), Fierce is getting out from behind closed doors and playing all over, in its museums (do catch Lundahl and Seitl’s mind-boggling Symphony of a Missing Room if you can), its canals , its streets, its train stations and its open spaces. It’s also offering space for West Midlands voices, too, in pieces such as James Webb’s Prayer , an exquisite sound installation featuring recordings of prayers from 40 different faith groups from across the city. There are showier and more high-profile festivals, but Fierce understands that it’s not just the party itself that matters, but the traces it leaves behind. Those traces change our relationship with the city, not just for the duration of the festival but for ever. Festivals Dance Theatre Communities Lyn Gardner guardian.co.uk

Posted by on March 24, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.