A curated festival of cross-artform, stop-you-in-your-tracks live art events and performances, shaped by Birmingham, returns after a two-year hiatus.

The 2011 edition is the first since the appointment of Fierce Festival’s new Joint Artistic Directors - Laura McDermott and Harun Morrison. True to Fierce Festival tradition, spectacular projects and public interventions will collide with the kind of agenda setting performances and wild parties on which the festival’s ten-year reputation rests. Artists from the Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden and South Africa will feature alongside local and national UK practitioners.

Works have been developed, restaged or commissioned specific to Birmingham and will take place in venues and unusual sites across the city during the week. 

Festival highlights include a spectacular opening night performance from The Irrepressibles at the Town Hall, a large-scale temporary architectural structure and social hub on disused land in the city, designed by the French collective EXYZT (who recently worked alongside MUF architects on the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale); ‘The Commentators’ a project by Birmingham-based Stan’s Café providing 1970’s sports pundit-style commentary on daily life in the city’s iconic locations, including Broad Street on a Saturday night, the M6 motorway, the Central Library and a day in the life of a local department store; the UK premiere of Symphony of a Missing Room, a new work by Lundahl & Seitl – a blindfolded, multi-sensory, interactive audio tour of the real and imaginary spaces of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. There are also studio shows in the newly refurbished mac, a performance in the dramatic environment of TROVE (the site of the old Science Museum) and other parties and performances in pop up venues amongst the warehouses and found spaces of Digbeth, Birmingham's creative Eastside quarter.