The Fierce Festival returns to Birmingham from 15 to 20 October. It launched in 1998 under the name Queerfest, and since then, it has evolved from a focus on sexuality to a more intersectional exploration of both personal identity and theatrical form. The festival has survived COVID and Birmingham City Council going bankrupt, but, as some theatres have become more conservative in their programming, Fierce has held to its core values and aims to, "disrupt expectations of what art can be, who can make it and where it can happen".
Fierce is a member of the Live Art UK network of venues and promoters. Live Art, otherwise known as performance art, embraces different forms of performance rather than conventional plays. This year’s Fierce Festival includes several Live Art pieces such as MANUAL, which will be performed in Birmingham Library to one person at a time, MIKE, a durational performance in an art gallery, and husbands, which doesn’t have a specified location and time, instead, "a series of micro-performances and interventions" will occur throughout the Festival.
A lot of queer theatre falls into the category of Live Art, so it is a natural progression from Queerfest to Fierce. As the Warwick University academic Cath Lambert says, Live Art, "provides aesthetic resources with which we can build our capacities for resistance". Colloquially, ‘queer’ tends to be used as a shorthand term for a spectrum of LGBTQ+ identities, but in critical theory, it is used as a verb as well as a noun to describe something that challenges and disrupts heteronormative and binary gender norms. Live Art disrupts conventional theatre forms so queer and Live Art go well together.
In the early days of the Gay Liberation movement, there was an emphasis on acceptance into a heteronormative society. Campaigners wanted to reassure the heterosexual majority that homosexuality was ‘normal’ so it would be OK to lower the age of consent, to allow gay men and women to serve in the armed forces, to adopt children and, eventually, to marry.
Private homosexual acts between men over 21 were decriminalised in the UK in 1967, and theatre censorship was abolished in 1968. This led to more plays being staged which dealt directly with the experience of being gay in Britain. Martin Sherman’s plays, Passing By (1975) and Bent (1979), were conventional dramas in which gay characters followed a narrative plot behind an invisible fourth wall. Simon Callow was in Gay Sweatshop’s production of Passing By, and he said, “I had never read another play in which two men have a romantic affair and never once mention being gay”. At that point in the Gay Liberation campaign, a play in which the characters just happen to be gay helped to educate its heterosexual audience and showed solidarity with its gay one.
But as the Gay Liberation movement progressed, a split developed over the objective: is it assimilation within a heteronormative culture or an assertion of difference? Do you want to be absorbed into the system as it exists now, with all its built-in biases and privilege, or change it? No-one would dispute the necessity to extend civil rights to the LGBTQ+ community, but having the right to marry does not imply an obligation to exercise that right. Plenty of heterosexual couples are wary of bourgeois institutions they see as preserving the existing social order, and a lot of LGBTQ+ people are too.
As the gay vs. queer, assimilation vs. difference debate rumbled on, it was reflected on stage. In the 1990s, plays like Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing (1993) and Kevin Elyot’s My Night With Reg (1994) still conformed to established theatre conventions, just as Bent and Passing By had done in the 1970s, but a different, more radical expression of sexual identity emerged in parallel: queer.
Queer theatre is an assertion of difference. It matches a rejection of heteronormative conventions offstage with a corresponding rejection of dramatic ones onstage. The objective is no longer assimilation but disruption.
Radical, queer theatre has a distinguished British theatrical history. The actor, drag queen and political activist Bette Bourne died in August this year, but in the 1980s, his Bloolips theatre company pioneered a camp, queer aesthetic which was subversive and transgressive. Bourne rejected the Stanislavski-based, invisible fourth wall, ‘serious play’ naturalism which had dominated British theatre since the 19th century. Bloolips shows had lurid titles like Lust In Space, Teenage Trash and Get Hur, they drew on drag, cabaret and clown and they were unequivocally political. Bourne wasn’t interested in presenting a ‘same but different’ image of homosexuality, as he said in an interview, “we were looking for a new kind of gay man. Hitting out at the far right, especially the religious right”.
In 1990, Judith Butler published their ground-breaking book Gender Trouble, and in the same year, Bette Bourne collaborated with the New York-based Split Britches to stage Belle Reprieve, which was their deconstruction of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
One of Butler’s key ideas in Gender Trouble is that gender identity is not fixed, it is unstable and performative, meaning that it exists only to the extent to which we perform it. For Butler, gender is not an adjective, it’s a verb, our gendered identity is something we do, it is not who we are. We all perform our identities within the categories available to us within a patriarchal, heteronormative society, but if we can disrupt those, then we will be free to perform who we are in any way we choose. In Belle Reprieve, the characters’ gender and sexuality were as fluid and unstable as the staging, both highlighted their own constructedness and, by extension, their potential for change.
Contemporary queer performers owe a debt to pioneers like Bourne. TalkSmall’s Katherine and Pierre, which I reviewed in June, and piss / CARNATION’s Ugly Sisters and Temi Wilkey’s Main Character Energy, both of which I saw in Edinburgh this year, all reject traditional drama conventions and all three are defiantly queer.
The Fierce Festival provides a vital platform for queer, transgressive Live Art, and I look forward to being provoked and intrigued, and possibly baffled, as well as being entertained later this month.