Fierce Festival 2019 Announces Three Shows in Partnership with Birmingham Repertory Theatre

Following his inaugural festival in 2017, Fierce's Artistic Director Aaron Wright today announces three shows in this year's programme which are being presented in association with Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

Aaron Wright says 'Fierce is delighted to be back at Birmingham Repertory Theatre with three unique productions that push the limits of theatrical convention. Over the years Fierce have hosted some of the world's most important experimental theatre makers in collaboration with Birmingham Repertory Theatre and our 2019 programme continues this collaboration with a trio of works from some of the most distinctive voices working in theatre today.'

Birmingham Repertory Theatre Artistic Director Roxana Silbert says 'I'm thrilled we will be hosting Fierce once more - one of the most exciting and future-looking independent festivals in the country.'

The UK premiere of Belgian Artist Kate McIntosh's In Many Hands invites audience members to test, touch, taste and smell in a series of sensory situations. Participants will experience a sensitizing of nerves, a tuning of attention and a priming of curiosity in this meditative laboratory style expedition.

Following widespread acclaim from performances across Europe and in the US, In Many Hands is the most recent work by McIntosh who is known for experimenting playfully with her audiences through physical interactions with objects and social environments. Inventive and tactile, this is a follow your nose and awaken your curiosities scenario with an off-beat sense of humour.

World Premiere Familiar is a twinset of performances on significant otherness; one authored by Gillie Kleiman and performed by Greg Wohead, the other authored by Wohead and performed by Kleiman. Woven through with references to Twin Peaks and witches, the works in Familiar play out what it means to be companions, where we think we know everything about each other whilst facing the fact that we can't.

This is a completely new evening of performance made by two critically acclaimed UK artists who have never previously worked together.

Commissioned by Dance City and Fierce Festival. Supported by ARC Stockton, Wainsgate Chapel, Shoreditch Town Hall, Northern Stage, Northumbria University and Roehampton University.

Melbourne based, award-winning Australian artist Nicola Gunn's Working with Children (UK Premiere) is a performance essay that looks at the problem of intimacy and exposure. In a narrative that spins around a central core without ever getting at it, without ever naming it, you are invited to wonder about the effect of language on the body with an apparently unconnected collection of anecdotes, which may or may not be true. Through these accumulated fragments, there is a tension between insistence of making narrative and resistance or impossibility of finding one, playing with the idea that we can find a different way of behaving, a different way of living, by finding a different way of inquiring and of listening.

Nicola Gunn says of the work 'The idea for this work came a few years ago when I noticed a lot of contemporary performances had young people in them, and the works were being made for an adult audience. I started out thinking about the moral and ethical minefield of working with children and about how the adults who worked with them perhaps behaved very differently in private.'

The full Fierce Festival 2019 programme will be announced in June.

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