The phrase \u201ctwo things can be true\u201d is a frequent refrain in popular psychology and it\u2019s also a frequent response, I find, to witnessing the farther reaches of live art. Hmm, is this performance confusingly self-indulgent or utterly profound? Sometimes it can be both. In fact, it\u2019s not just two things that can be true, it\u2019s as many things as there are people in the audience, since this is all about the live subjective experience, in the moment; presence and connection.<\/p>\n
Launched in 1998, Fierce is Britain\u2019s longest-running live art festival. For one week it takes over Birmingham\u2019s conventional theatres alongside unconventional spaces, especially in ex-industrial Digbeth, which is fast becoming a creative hub. Also on the bill this year: late-night artist dinners, a show in a swimming pool, and a six-hour performance jam at a grand gothic hall that was apparently the inspiration for Cluedo.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a focus on the sensuous and sensory; it\u2019s all about the physical body. But the first piece I experience is actually in virtual reality: Traversing the Mist, by Taiwanese artist Tung-Yen Chou. The setting is a gay sauna, and the VR tech is impressive. You walk through the grey concrete corridors, locker room, showers, cubicles, pushing aside curtains that you know aren\u2019t really there. You can open doors, pick things up, press buttons in the lift. You\u2019re an observer of the uncanny scene, which is peopled by identical blank-faced men; a sense of searching pervades, but there\u2019s zero joy or pleasure to be found.<\/p>\n
Lack of connection \u2026 Tung-Yen Chou, In the Mist at Fierce festival, 2026. Photograph: Kris Kang<\/p>\n
The experience is a combination of immersive and detached. It\u2019s engaging, and yet eerily lonely \u2013 and also unnerving when the floor falls away, messing with your own proprioception. You feel, but what you feel is exactly the lack of connection. (Chou is also showing a short, sit-down VR piece called In the Mist, which was a precursor to the longer work, but is basically a sad porno.)<\/p>\n
What you\u2019re missing in VR is the smells, the heat, the sweat. But don\u2019t worry, there\u2019s plenty of that elsewhere. Wojciech Grudzi\u0144ski\u2019s sweaty, hairy, all-too-human fleshy body is front and centre in his solo Threesome, his bum in the air as he does upside down pli\u00e9s in a shoulder stand and other yogic moves wearing bottomless frilly knickers. In voiceover he tells us of three Polish ballet dancers who were shamed for their homosexuality, and Threesome is his attempt to reclaim their true identities, and make peace with his own \u201cghastly\u201d body. Is a series of bum-bearing contortions followed by a ravey, repetitive jig the best way to do that? Well, it\u2019s Grudzi\u0144ski\u2019s way. And it\u2019s strangely compelling, building to a sort of catharsis, with lights and music and defiant mood.<\/p>\n
Artist Melissandre Varin is known as n:u, and calls themself an \u201catmosphere-maker\u201d, which is interesting branding and perhaps modifies the expectations of the audience. Fierce is a thoroughly international festival, but n:u was previously based in Birmingham, although the work is rooted in Congolese, Guadeloupean, and Beninese heritage. I caught part of a rehearsal for the piece FREE(HOLD), an opaque ritual, in which performers drag ropes around their ankles and keen to the sky. Endurance, suffering, slavery and colonialism all rushed to mind.<\/p>\n
Front and centre \u2026 Wojciech Grudzin\u0301ski in Threesome at Fierce festival, 2026. Photograph: Manuel Vason<\/p>\n
This is a festival full of intriguing, conversation-starting stuff, but American choreographer Faye Driscoll blows everyone else out of the water with her acclaimed, award-winning piece Weathering, which gets its UK premiere here. Driscoll\u2019s work is a few levels up in terms of concept, commitment, execution and scale. It\u2019s essentially 10 performers on a rotating platform, a tableau vivant, or maybe less a living tableau than one that\u2019s slowly distorting and decaying and caving under the gravity of life\u2019s pressures, or just the passage of time.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a piece full of wayward, messy bodies \u2013 it is indicated immediately that these are humans rather than \u201cdancers\u201d when the performers arrive in puffer jackets and cross-body bags and glasses, layers that will be gradually discarded, because this is live art after all. But these bodies also demonstrate a phenomenal amount of control, this multiperson sculpture moving at first so slowly it\u2019s almost imperceptible. It\u2019s intense and impressive, and importantly it sucks your attention and its imagery is ripe for extrapolation \u2013 especially the sense of precarity, of humans clinging to their unstable home as things start to spin out of control.\n <\/p>\n