Artists from five continents come Together in Birmingham this October as Fierce Festival 2026 presents its 5 Day Programme

PROGRAMME ANNOUNCED FOR FIERCE FESTIVAL 2026

Artists from five continents come together in Birmingham this October as Fierce Festival 2026 presents five days of bold international contemporary performance, transforming the city into a stage for UK premieres, new collaborations and live experimentation (14–18 Oct)

Faye Driscoll presents the first UK performance of her internationally celebrated multi-sensory human sculpture Weathering

A new local partnership with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra invites live artists to reimagine what an orchestra can be

South African performance artist Steven Cohen returns to the festival with the UK premiere of his final stage work People Will People You, a rare direct dialogue with his audience, merging art and life

Polish dance and performance artists Ewa Dziarnowska, Hana Umeda, and Wojciech Grudziński make their UK debuts

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.”

Paul Russ, Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Fabric said, “Our partnership with Fierce reflects a shared belief that collaboration can achieve more than any one organisation alone. Through co-presenting, we expand the possibilities for artists, attract work that might not otherwise be seen in Birmingham, and create richer experiences for audiences by bringing together complementary artistic perspectives and expertise.”

Fierce is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation.

LISTINGS

Residency Artists (Alina Arshi & Kairaan Kika)

14th - 18th October

The Rant that Can’t (WIP) (Ligia Lewis)

14th October

Eastside Projects

Weathering (Faye Driscoll)

14-16 October

Midlands Arts Centre

Threesome (Wojciech Grudziński)

14th - 15th October

Midlands Arts Centre

In the Mist (Tung-Yen Chou)

14th - 18th October

House of Beorma

Fierce Feasts with Justine A. Chambers

14th October

House of Beorma

Traversing the Mist (Tung-Yen Chou)

15th - 18th October

BCU Lab

Fierce Feasts with Ben Kulvichit

15th October

House of Beorma

Fierce Jams (Various)

16th October

Highbury Hall

Free(HOLD) (n:u (melissandre varin))

16th - 17th October

The Drop Inn

The Brutal Joy (Justine A.Chambers)

16th - 17th October

ACE Dance and Music

Fierce Feasts with Yirramboi  

16th October

House of Beorma

The Recycling Issue (Shannon Cochrane)

17th October

The Edge, Friction Arts

This Resting, Patience (Ewa Dziarnowska)

17th October

Eastside Projects

Rapeflower (Hana Umeda)

17th - 18th October

Midlands Arts Centre

You Cannot Can (Dana Michel)

17th - 18th October

Beeches Pool & Fitness Centre

CBSO & Fierce Festival (SERAFINE1369  & Josh Anio Grigg / Dickie Beau & Helen Noir)

17th October

BCU Bradshaw Hall

People Will People You (Steven Cohen)

17th October

Patrick Centre

Club Fierce & Yirramboi

17th October

House of Beorma

Fierce Feasts

18th October

House of Beorma

About Fierce
Fierce Festival is a youthful and joy-filled festival of international theatre, performance and experiences which takes place in and around Birmingham (UK) every two years.

Fierce transforms the city and the way we feel about it: populating theatres, galleries and hidden, unusual or out-of-the-ordinary spaces like disused warehouses, swimming pools and car parks. You might see theatre, dance, performance art, music, installations, activism and parties or a combination of all those things in a programme of memorable experiences and events.

We see the festival as a utopian space: a temporary community where new ideas and approaches are played with, tested out and broadcast. It is this space of experimentation which creates surprising, provocative and even primal collective moments. As an antidote to this digitally saturated age, we bring people together in real life, space and time.

Our approach is intersectional: reflecting the diversifying society in which we live. In particular we seek to amplify marginalised voices and stories. We disrupt expectations of what  art can be, who can make it, and where it can happen. The work we present can be  outrageous with a punk or camp sensibility, or, equally, exquisite and sublime.