Laura McDermott: 'Fierce is promiscuous – there’s almost no arts organisation we haven’t been with'

One of the significant joys of running a city-wide festival like Fierce Festival is the freedom you have as a curator to choose just the right context for a piece of work. At Fierce we are well-known for using the city itself as an inspiration for our curatorial choices – Birmingham is full of unusual sites and spaces and we have worked in old metal factories, under Spaghetti Junction and in the old slipper baths at Moseley Road Baths – an Edwardian Swimming Pool.

As well as off-site projects in found spaces, we work in partnership with the huge range of art organisations in Birmingham. Brummies are good at that – when we arrived in the city we received an open-armed welcome from the arts sector here – from an institution like Symphony Hall to a regional theatre like Birmingham REP or the multiple independent galleries. We often talk of Fierce as being promiscuous with our partnerships and since the festival was founded in 1998 there’s almost no arts organisation we haven’t been with at some point.

The other interesting thing about a live art festival is that the work we invite often sits in the gaps between traditional art forms, but brushes up against them. A layer of our programming process is a sort of matchmaking exercise, where we think about the organisations in the city and consider what we could present together that expands their programme – connecting with their regular work whilst also introducing audiences to something new.

We’ve just had our first festival warm-up event, presented with mac Birmingham as part of the Birmingham Weekender – a programme of outdoor art across the city. We showed Of Riders and Running Horses by Stillhouse. This work (a dance performance which culminates in the audience spontaneously dancing together on a car park roof) was an outdoor performance that still represented the essence of Fierce. We found a beautiful location – the roof of the NCP Newhall Street car park at sunset – and the work’s connection to street dance and underground rave culture felt true to the countercultural spirit of Fierce. The work will be showing in London soon, opening the Dance Umbrella Festival.

We’ve had a very successful collaboration with DanceXchange over the years, looking at the place where dance and performance art meet. We showed Iona Kewney – in her performance collaboration with guitarist Joseph Quimby, we presented the first solo performance of Australian choreographer Atlanta Eke (who went on to win the Keir Choreographic Award), Dana Michel (whose work Yellow Towel won the specially created ImpulsTanzXPreis at the Implustanz festival in Austria the same year), and New York based choreographer Miguel Gutierrez (who returns to Fierce this year to present Deep Aerobics). These artists are really pushing the boundaries of what dance can be and it’s fantastic that DanceXchange continue to support that. This year we are presenting Supernatural by Simone Aughterlony, Antonija Livingstone and Hahn Rowe – a performance that has been well received across the world (it premiered at American Realness festival in New York earlier this year). The work can also be seen soon in London as part of Chelsea Theatre‘s Sacred season.

On the Sunday of this year’s festival, the whole day’s programme will be taking place at The Drum – an intercultural arts centre in Aston that has a proudly diverse programme. We have co-commissioned a new piece by Season Butler called Happiness Forgets, with partners in a network we belong to called Live Art UK. The work uses The Cosby Show as a jumping off point to examine issues of "race, sex nostalgia and what happens when you look at something familiar in a whole new light". You can read more about Season’s research here or read an interview with her that was published in The Guardian here.

– Laura McDermott

Fierce Festival takes place from Wednesday 7 – Sunday 11 October at venues across Birmingham. More information at www.wearefierce.org