Fierce Festival: The Body as Material

The 2024 Fierce Festival had something to say. The almost week-long biennial – self-defined as an amalgam of performance, parties, politics and pop – brought together artists from a variety of disciplines, including live art, dance and video, from all over the world. At the heart of the festival is always the body and an exploration of what it offers – as a canvas, a site of political intervention and a living, breathing entity – that no other material can. 

Harald Beharie’s Batty Bwoy (2022) presented a body at war with itself and the meanings with which others brand it. The title is an act of reclamation, taking the homophobic Jamaican term (literally meaning ‘butt boy’), along with the stereotypes of otherness and monstrosity associated with the Black queer body, and trying to transform those negative connotations into something new. Beharie, who was nude throughout the performance, started by placing a hand in their mouth. Moving in an animalistic way, they stalked around the space on all fours, slowly coming to life as they exuded sweat, spit and gagging sounds. Beharie’s body was constantly on the cusp of transformation, some internal part of them trying to break out from the weight of the external stereotypes that present queer sexuality as perverse and, somehow, inhuman. 

The violence in Batty Bwoy was impossible to ignore. Beharie leapt on a red metal platform (the only object in the space), grabbing it and pulling it up as if it could come to pieces at any moment. The dynamics of this movement, oscillating between slow and cowed to explosions of anger and violence, showed the body fighting to express something. The gagging sounds emerged as potential words on which Beharie seemed to be choking. These words – whatever they might have been – were never uttered, leading to rare moments of stillness, and allowing the audience to catch its breath as much as the performer, who appeared simultaneously spent and statuesque. Refusing to end with a concrete answer, in the final moments Beharie, still nude, simply wandered out of the space and into the streets of Birmingham. The audience, unsure how to respond, wondered whether the artist would return and what their own bodies might now mean after this shared experience. Beharie’s shocking yet uncertain parting gesture was an act of defiant representation, taking the Black, queer, naked body out into the world. It felt like a microcosm of what Fierce Festival and its new artistic director, Clayton Lee, wanted to offer by bringing together explicit, queer and explicitly queer performances from a global majority-led line-up. 

This sense of defiance also echoed in Ramona Nagabczyńska’s Silenzio! (Silence, 2021), which interrogated the relationship between the body and the voice in opera, and examined the role of women in the centuries-old art form. The work was at its most compelling when an operatic voice, played on a soundtrack, was disembodied, out of sync with the movements of the four performers, possessing them as they repeated the physical gestures of operatic death and suicide ad infinitum. Initially, the performers appeared on stage in simple outfits. As the work progressed, however, the conventions of opera – elaborate historical costumes, the gossiping chorus – were brought onto the stage as the singing voice began to fade. Ironically, the more Silenzio! engaged with these conventions in a way that felt explicitly sly and subversive, the less convincing it became. While jokes about Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata (1853), death and STDs were funny to begin with, the performance ended up feeling like an overlong improv sketch, the sheer literalism of it causing some of the more nuanced parts to become lost. 

A new form of embodiment, a new language for the body and what lies beyond it

Steven Cohen’s Put your heart under your feet… and walk! (2017) saw the artist enacting ritualistic movements around the stage in elaborate outfits, including shoes with impossibly high platform heels fashioned like miniature tombstones and a belt containing four independently functioning wind-up record players, each playing a different track. The costumes served as symbolic manifestations of the artist’s heavy grief for a deceased lover, which was also indicated in the accompanying text. While the performed vignettes were tense and tender, filled with the uncertainty of how to move on in the face of loss, the intercut filmed sections – footage of Cohen gesturing in an abattoir and bathing in the blood of cattle alongside the real-life, graphic slaughter of animals – offered an unexpected counterpoint. The decision to present images of violence and death in tandem with the grief that the artist brought to the stage seemed designed to push the audience to its limits. However, it also undercut the power of Cohen’s more delicate performed moments. Towards the end, Cohen recited the Shabbat blessing, Kiddush and Hamotzi, before harrowingly ‘becoming the grave’ of his partner – referred to only as Elu – by consuming a spoonful of his ashes. This moment captured what makes the performances at Fierce Festival so compelling: a desire to move towards a new form of embodiment, a new language for the body and what lies beyond it.

Keioui Keijaun Thomas’s Come Hell or High Femmes: The Era of the Dolls (2023) opened with a video of the artist in a waterfall within a rocky landscape, as a voice-over narrated the details of brutal, visceral histories of slavery and anti-trans violence. The pastoral, elegiac videos were in stark contrast to the artist’s appearance and energy when she forcefully emerged from an upstairs door above the audience, who sat around a central arrangement of objects, including a curtain comprised of strands of blue cleaning gloves, the stump of a tree and a series of metallic balloons filled with the artist’s breath. With explosive dynamism, Thomas interacted with members of the audience by getting as close to them as possible, lap dancing and placing their hands on her body. It felt like the audience would follow her anywhere. Moments of intense dance existed in tandem with a slow tenderness, as Thomas spoke alongside a recording of her own voice, moving in and out of perfect sync with it – the imperfection only adding to the work’s magnetism. 

Fierce Festival was a collection of performances united by their relationships to the body, to possibility and to what we can make from our histories and the futures available to us. Adam Kinner and Christopher Willes’s MANUAL (2022) – a one-to-one performance that guided participants walking, talking, listening and reading through the Library of Birmingham – rendered the institutional building simultaneously a profoundly intimate and overwhelming space, full of strange sounds and free associations. In the final moments of the performance, participants listened to a live feed of their own voice amplified through headphones, before watching the recording, made on an old mp3 player, get deleted. It was a profound experience, felt within the body yet ephemeral all at once. This final moment went to the heart of Fierce Festival’s aims, providing an understanding of how fleeting performance can be. Yet, by rooting so much of it in the sensations of the body – from the echo in MANUAL to the visceral discomfort and grief of Put your heart under your feet… and walk! – the programme channelled the transformative power of live art.

^{Main image: Ramona Nagabczyńska, Silenzio! (Silence), 2021, performance documentation, 2024. Courtesy: the artist and Fierce Festival, Birmingham; photograph: Manuel Vason}