BE FESTIVAL have announced a change in this year’s programme and the festival will now open with Ana Borralho & João Galante’s Trigger of Happiness instead of their Atlas Birmingham.
Twelve young adults aged 18 – 23 who have never been on stage before will sit around a table with a prop in the middle to play an exploratory game in search of happiness. The prop is filled with questions about their loves, concerns, anxieties, families and their vision of the future, which each of the twelve takes turns to answer in a game of Russian roulette.
As each question asked sends a cloud of coloured powder over the participants, building a bright and chaotic mess, their answers build and overlap to draw a multicultural and explosive cartography of local youth.
The performance is one of two large scale art works that make up this year’s BE FESTIVAL (Birmingham European Festival of Performing Arts), the final one for artistic directors Isla Aguilar and Miguel Oyarzun after 13 years at the helm.
Garden State (Midlands Arts Centre, 8 – 11 June) will be a durational installation of household plants leant by local residents. Garden State is presented as part of the Birmingham 2022 Festival by Fabrice Mazliah / Work Of Act, formerly MAMAZA (Germany). They will be knocking on doors of residents from across the city to invite them to help transform the MAC’s main stage into an exotic ephemeral communal garden made of their favourite house plants. The stage is transformed into an audience space where they will be hosting performances from artists including Forced Entertainment and Claire Cunningham, as well as workshops and talks about green space in Birmingham.
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BE FESTIVAL (shortened from Birmingham European Festival) takes place annually in the Summer. Inspired by positive experiences touring to European festivals, Isla Aguilar, Miguel Oyarzun and Mike Tweddle were met with great enthusiasm to the idea of a new arts festival in Birmingham and soon fleshed out a plan on the back of a napkin at a Birmingham curry house.
Each year a daring and innovative programme of boundary pushing theatre, dance, comedy, circus, music, visual and performing arts takes place turning theatre’s rarely seen backstages into a den of creativity, discovery and exchange where diverse cultures are celebrated. The youth performance programme, BE NEXT engages and empowers young Birmingham based artists performing a new piece of work on the last night of each festival. BE FESTIVAL has a touring wing, previously taking “The Best of BE” around the UK and Spain.
