Artists from Tokyo to Rio de Janeiro as well as the West Midlands will take part in Fierce, the Birmingham biennial festival of international performance.
The 2022 programme will be the biggest ever for Fierce, celebrating the festival’s 25th anniversary. It will embrace “the outlandish and the new, presenting more than 20 fresh and feisty productions of the kind that the festival has become acclaimed for”.
Fierce will stage works in unusual places and there will be world premières and UK debut performances by “acclaimed” international artists as well as a number of homegrown commissions.
Fierce artistic director Aaron Wright said, “postponed from 2021, this programme has been three years in the making and represents some of the most exciting performance being made in the world today. We can’t wait to bring this world-class programme to audiences across the West Midlands.”
The festival will begin with the UK première of French director Philippe Quesne’s Farm Fatale, a post-apocalyptic scenario in the not-so-distant future. It will be performed at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry on Tuesday 11 October.
Cade and MacAskill (Glasgow) will return to Birmingham with The Making of Pinocchio, a new trans version of the famous tale, at Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham on Thursday 13 and Friday 14 October.
Alice Ripoll and Cia REC (Rio de Janeiro) will present the UK première of Lavagem on Saturday 15 and Sunday 16 October at Midland Arts Centre. Portuguese for washing, Lavagem uses buckets, water and soap to explore the action of cleaning as a performative and political gesture.
At the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, Demi Nandhra (Birmingham) will stage the world première of The Trauma Show, exploring how trauma manifests in our bodies and consequently our everyday lives, on Wednesday 12 and Thursday 13 October.
Clara Furey (Montreal) will present the UK première of dance production Dog Rising at the Crescent Theatre on Thursday 13 October.
The full programme is available at the Fierce web site.