Programming Set For FIERCE FESTIVAL 2026

Artists from across the globe, working at the forefront of live performance and interdisciplinary practice, present works never before performed in the UK as Fierce Festival 2026 takes over venues and unconventional spaces across Birmingham from 14-18 October.

As the UK's longest-running live art festival, Fierce continues to position Birmingham as a centre for groundbreaking contemporary performance, presenting internationally celebrated artists whose work is rarely seen in the UK, and creating opportunities for local artists to collaborate and experiment.

One of the most ambitious productions ever brought to the festival, Faye Driscoll's Weathering (14-16 Oct) is an “an enthralling, epically adventurous” (The New York Times) multi-sensory performance sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids, and objects. Ten people enact a glacially morphing tableau vivant on a mobile raft-like stage surging through the Anthropocene, with the audience embanking the performers. This symphonically active, luminously living work is a breathing, leaking choreography of micro-events within a momentum thrusting from just beyond the perceivable. Fierce will co-present this UK premiere with Fabric as part of the autumn 2026 season of THIS IS DANCE, developing Birmingham's position as a global centre for dance.

South African performance artist Steven Cohen returns to Fierce with the UK premiere of People Will People You (17 Oct). Seldom working with the spoken word, Cohen breaks with this tradition and enters into a direct dialogue with his audience, creating an encounter where every person becomes both witness and actor in a shared transformation. With a career spanning over four decades, People Will People You is Cohen's final work for the stage.

Also returning to the festival, Canadian live artist Dana Michel presents YOU CANNOT CAN (17-18 Oct) a new solo performance in a swimming pool. Surrounded by the audience, she wades inside the global histories and socio-economic realities of swimming whilst asking why she still cannot feel at ease in the water despite hailing from an island surrounded by both the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Meanwhile, fellow Canadian artist Justine A. Chambers will make her UK debut at Fierce with the European premiere of The Brutal Joy, an improvised choreography of movement, sound, and light, and a devotion to Black-living.

Fierce presents another trio of UK debuts at this year's festival from Polish dance artists Ewa Dziarnowska, Hana Umeda and Wojciech Grudziński, supported by the Polish Cultural Institute and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. One of the most exciting voices in contemporary European dance, Dziarnowska presents This resting, patience (17-18 Oct), a durational immersive work of seduction, sensuality and striptease. Umeda's RAPEFLOWER (17-18 Oct) draws on the Japanese jiutamai tradition in a solo performance reflecting on trauma, sexual violence and the body as a site of inherited experience. And in Grudziński's hazy posthumous ballet THREESOME (14-15 Oct), he delves into the memory and legacy of three legendary, but little-remembered, Polish dancers.

Alongside major international touring productions, Fierce 2026 creates space for new and unfinished work, inviting audiences to experience ideas in motion and practices still unfolding. A major new local partnership with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) will see SERAFINE1369 and Josh Anio Grigg as well as Dickie Beau and Helen Noir seeding new collaborations with members of the CBSO, imagining how contemporary performance can interweave with the symphony orchestra. Developed over just 24 hours, both collaborations will culminate in a double bill sharing at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire's Bradshaw Hall (17 Oct).

One of contemporary performance's most influential choreographers, Ligia Lewis, previews her forthcoming work The Rant That Can't (14 Oct) in which she explores the limits and breakdown of speech. UK artist and atmosphere-maker n:u (melissandre varin) gathers together artists Ãssia Ghendir, Kelvin Atmadibrata, and Echo Morgan to create FREE(HOLD) (17-18 Oct) a live artwork dedicated to the practice of trying again, and again. And the legendary Shannon Cochrane, who has been instrumental in the development of Canadian performance art for close to 30 years, will present The Recycling Issue (17 Oct), with a soundscape from Canadian filmmaker Mike Hoolboom.

Fierce will also host a series of artist-hosted dinners, showcasing some of Birmingham's most craveable restaurants, and a six-hour performance marathon Fierce Jams 03 (16 Oct) at Highbury Hall, the architectural inspiration behind the board game Cluedo, offering local and International Artists the opportunity to share works in progress with a live audience.

In another major new partnership that will continue through to Fierce 2028, YIRRAMBOI, a First Nations arts festival from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, will take up residency at Fierce Festival 2026, inviting First Nation artists to explore and experiment across this year's programme. As the Festival-in-Residence, artists within the YIRRAMBOI network will host one of the Fierce Feasts (16 Oct), participate in Fierce Jams 04: Highbury Hall (16 Oct), and take over the infamous Club Fierce with BLAX: ACT III (17 Oct).

Following the successful residency with Pro Helvetia's Swiss Connection UK programme in 2024, Fierce Festival welcomes Alina Arshi and Kairaan Kikki as Artists-in-Residence. Across the festival, they will create a shared archive through dialogue, writing and visual documentation, capturing and extending the experience of Fierce 2026.

Fierce Festival 2026 reaches beyond the stage, into the streets of Birmingham and even into virtual worlds. Taiwanese director Tung-Yen Chou presents two virtual-reality experiences exploring queer desire. Both set within a surreal gay sauna, In The Mist invites the audience to drift alone through mist filled rooms shaped by memories and longing, whilst Traversing the Mist offers a multiuser experience in which participants become both witnesses and companions as they navigate a space in which strangers seek intimacy and connection. And in a new collaboration with BUILDHOLLYWOOD, Monnet Design will intervene on billboards across the city, introducing a series of cartoon figures that will equally delight and disrupt the city of Birmingham.

Clayton Lee, Artistic Director of Fierce said, “Across exhilarating performances, works-in-progress, and artist-hosted meals, this edition of Fierce Festival is DELICIOUS, inviting artists and audiences alike into the radical possibilities of more is more. More collaboration, more cross-pollination, more experimentation, more camaraderie, more Birmingham: more pleasure.”

Tom Spurgin, Creative Director – Learning & Engagement, CBSO said, “Fierce Festival and CBSO are two of Birmingham's creative powerhouses. I have so much respect for Fierce Festival's work and I'm really excited about what we might create together. I hope that this can be the start of a long and fruitful partnership between the two organisations, and can offer new opportunities for artists from across the world and audiences here in Birmingham.”

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