This coming weekend sees the famous St Patrick’s Festival. The fun kicks off with a Festival Launch Party at The Irish Centre on Friday night, ‘a free evening of entertainment, dancing and a buffet’. To request tickets for the event email stpatricksbirmingham@gmail.com.
A Saturday of The Reel around The Bullring leads into the big Sunday parade, which starts with Mass at St Anne’s Church before the street parade and dancing around the St PatROCKs stage in South Birmingham College.
Post-weekend, the celebrations take a cultural turn with Irish film, literature and theatre events. NLP Theatre perform Singin` I’m No a Billy, He’s a Tim on Monday 15th March in The Paragon Hotel. On Tuesday 16th March you have a choice between an Irish Film Night at The Spotted Dog or a St Patrick’s Literary Festival at The Old Crown Inn. On St Patrick’s Day, Weds 17th March, Irish Storyteller Katrice Horsley will be weaving her magic at The Irish Centre, as will musicians John McNicholl and John Kiernan. Rather amazingly, all of these events are free.
We Are Eastside
Friction Arts' The Edge - part of We Are Eastside
Once you’ve recovered from the St Patrick’s festivities you’ve a little time to pause for breath before the launch of We Are Eastside on 27th March, ‘an online and printed guide to the artists, collectives, promoters and spaces helping to transform Birmingham’s industrial heartland into a thriving creative playground’. The weekend will be jam-packed, with the Flatpack Festival being joined by local arts organisations showcasing their wares.
On Friday there’s a Curtain Show at Eastside Projects whilst The Lombard Method goes all Cinematic on us. I personally will be striving to catch Monuments at Ikon Eastside and mischievous audio-visual antics Synth Eastwood: Fast Forward at The Rainbow Warehouse.
Supersonic 2009 - Capsule are leading We Are Eastside and I get to post a picture of someone's bum
Saturday promises to be rather magical, with the new Rhubarb East gallery opening with The Uses of Enchantment, ‘inspired by fables and fairy stories, nostalgia and psychology’ and Laterna Magicka at Ikon Eastside, which later hosts the new concert film Burning, featuring Mogwai. VIVID will be providing the late-night space to let your hair down, with an Eastside Plasticine Party of ‘Psychedelic claymation’ by Bruce Bickford, which I think I’ll need to see to understand.
If you’re still standing on Sunday there’s plenty going on, with Paul Sharit’s 70’s Flicker films at Ikon Eastside and Belbury Youth Club’s evening of haunted audio and creepy telly at VIVID. I love a good scare…
So there we have it – we can finally see an end to the long, bitter winter and taste spring in the air, with lashings of Guinness and culture in equal measure. Swap your winter coat for a fetching emerald green number and enjoy!
Artist Liam Gillick is giving a free talk at Eastside Projects tomorrow, Sunday 20th December at 2pm, with a matinée performance of his two plays at 3–5pm
Liam will be talking about the two plays currently being performed at Eastside Projects: ‘Lapdog of the Bourgeoisie’ 2009, a murder mystery set in Eastside Projects and a restaging of ‘Mirrored Image: A “Volvo” Bar’ 2008 set in the “Volvo Bar” a notional Scandinavian workers bar on August 8, 1993, the day before the Volvo car plant closed. The talk will be followed by a matinee performance of the plays by actors who have been involved in the production so far.
Currently on at Eastside Projects is a solo of exhibition of Two Short Plays by Liam Gillick, ‘one of the most significant artists to emerge from the UK in the last twenty years’. The first play, Lapdog of the Bourgeoisie, is a one-act murder-mystery play based on an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch (short extract above):
Staged as a visit to a critical culturemystery exhibition the shifting set of characters includes The Museum Director, The Art Collective, The Curator, Collector A & B and Liam The characters are caught in a reality loop only broken by solving the murder that has taken place in the gallery.
The second piece is Mirrored Image: A “Volvo” bar, which uses Eastside Projects as:
…a stage on which social phenomena of a post-industrial society are played out, presenting a core aspect in Gillick’s work – the negotiation of models of community. The parallel with the closing of car manufacturing in Birmingham over recent years adds an extra reality check to Gillick’s contingent mise en scene.
The plays will be performed at 2pm and 3.30pm Thurs-Sat until 23 Jan, and a Special Resolution on Sun 20 Dec with Liam Gillick giving an artist’s talk at 2pm and matinee performance 3-5pm. The gallery is closed for Christmas 20 Dec-6 Jan.
On Friday 21st & Saturday 22nd August the artist Helen Brown will be exhibiting some new sound works at the Eastside Cafe, Coventry Rd, Digbeth. Join her for brunch between 10.30am & 12.30pm to experience the works and enjoy some good food. The recordings are available on Helen Brown’s website.
This exhibition, which covers the Film and Video Workshop movement 1979-1991, was by far the most interesting for me because I got to see a little film by Yugesh Walia called African Oasis (1982), featuring Kokuma Dance Company. Kokuma, a traditional African and Caribbean dance company which folded in 2000, was where Ian and Gail Parmel met and left to start up ACE dance and music, who live just behind the VIVID gallery (disclaimer: it’s where I work). ACE uses much more contemporary techniques with African and Caribbean movement style. I was gobsmacked to see a film of them back in the day, it made me realise what a long dance journey they’d been on. It was a real-opener.
Other highlights include Giro – Is this the modern world? (1982) by Johnnie Turpie/Dead Honest Soul Searchers. It features an unbelievably posh government minister telling one of the thousands of young, bright, unemployed people at the time, “Society doesn’t owe you a living.” No wonder there were riots, it’s 25 years on and I still feel like hitting him.
VIVID are holding a series of film screenings as part of the Participation exhibition. The next one is a trio called Amber on Thursday 9th, Friday 10th and Saturday 11th July, all at 2pm. This is followed by Black Audio Film Collective at 2pm next Saturday 18th July.
Our next stop was Eastside Projects, which had a rather serious message for us. Just say no, kids:
Walking through the bright pink tunnel was rather disorientating – it’s pure, brilliant white inside:
Another fun topic of conversation was trying to work out what was part of the current exhibition and what was left over from previous ones. I really like that about Eastside Projects, it’s like moving into an old furnished flat – you end up with odds and ends of the previous tenant’s things but assimilate them with your own stuff to make it home.
There were Bloody Marys, girls in pretty, blood-red dresses and a bloody noisy band. I’m told the party picked up during the evening but I wouldn’t know because I had to leave early with slightly ironic bloody period pain. Pah.
The answer to both questions is YES. Belfast does have quarters. Seven of them because, “We’re Irish and we can’t count.” (Titanic Boat Tour Captain Derrick Booker’s words, not mine). The one in line for the biggest overhaul is the Titanic Quarter, which Derrick and Colin Cobbs tell us all about. It kind of reminds me of Eastside – not too much there at the moment but big talk of many ‘mixed-use developments’ (are there any other kind these days?).
It’s even got its own creative community website. It’s not quite not quite Created in Birmingham but the Community Arts Forum gave a fantastic collective response to proposed plans to develop the soul out of the area (sound familiar?). The Cathedral Quarter – Let’s Get It Right campaign ‘aimed to push forward the sensitive and successful development of the area’ by voicing the neighbourhood’s concerns and publishing alternative visions. What’s even more impressive is they succeeded:
In October 2004, in a move that was applauded by the Let’s Get it Right campaign, the Department of Social Development announced that Cathedral Quarter would have its own regeneration masterplan. This would push forward development of the area, while protecting its unique built and cultural heritage.
Go on.
In answer to Michael Grimes’ question, Belfast has The Belfast Metropolitan Area Plan 2015 (BMAP), which is ‘a development plan being prepared under the provisions of Part III of the Planning (Northern Ireland) Order 1991 by the Planning Service, an Agency within the Department of the Environment (DOE)’. I’d tell you more, but attempting to download one of the huge PDF’s the plan is made up of almost killed my computer.
So there we have it – both cities have more than four quarters christened with pet names by city planners and a city plan seemingly written for developers rather than residents, with a website that Could Do Better. It’s just too close to call, I declare this #brumvsbelfast round a draw.
It’s all gone a bit wild, wild west at Eastside Projects. As you walk in you’re hit with what looks like the set of a spaghetti western. Feature: Architecture is anchored around artist’s Sezad Darwood’s full-length film Feature, which seems to delight in merging genres. I’d never seen a cowboy zombie before.
Beyond the dusty ghost town was the One Day Comic exhibition of art comics (a definition which has in itself caused some debate). Artist Henrik Schrat has developed a comic strip over one day with twelve artists. The twelve comic books created are laid out to read with copies on sale. The far wall is covered in large-scale drawings by Schrat (the one above caught my eye, for some reason) and original pages are displayed on boards. My favourite was Product Clearance:
I was having a kind of arty afternoon yesterday so afterwards I went down the road to see Katarina Zdjelar’sThe Perfect Sound at VIVID. It consisted of the ’single channel video work which investigates the concept of producing the ‘perfect sound’ within the English spoken language’. It did look quite interesting but required some time and concentration, which I just couldn’t hang around and give because the gallery was so freakin’ freezing. I am a bit of a pussy but it really was too cold to sit down and pay attention to the piece – please whack the heating up!
Feature: Architecture and One Day Comic is on display at Eastside Projects until 31 January 2009. Katarina Zdjelar’s The Perfect Sound is at VIVID until 20 December.
Here’s Bill Drummond reading from his book 17, about The 17 choir project he’s been working on for the past several years. He was very well received despite a late entrance, but he did put £200 behind the bar for the waiting audience. What a lovely man. He described The 17 in layman’s terms as ‘a bunch of guys standing in a darkened room and going EEEEUUURRRGGGHHHH.’ The actual philosophy around it is this:
He then introduced a new score about manholes for a Birmingham 17 choir and there was a practical rugby scrum for the email list to get in it. I of course fought my way to the front to get on it. I can’t wait. Now all Eastside Projects have to do is find a suitable manhole cover – for some reason it has to be a round one, which are pretty rare these days. Speak up if you know of any!
I’ll just copy and paste the email because I’m feeling lazy:
‘Tomorrow it’s Quiz Night at The Lamp Tavern, Barford Street, Digbeth (follow Alcester St, pass Paragon Hotel on your left, come to Lamp on your right). Charity Quiz – General Knowledge. £1 per player, teams of any size. Start 8.30pm. proceeds to charity. Prizes “Smarties” for the winners, wooden spoons for the losers. John Tighe of The Spotted Dog is questionmaster.’
