14 – 18th October 2026 | Tickets: PURCHASE HERE

Fierce Festival

A biennial international theatre and performance festival based in Birmingham, UK. It transforms the city by staging bold, immersive events in both traditional venues and unexpected spaces such as warehouses, swimming pools and car parks. Showcasing theatre, dance, music, installations, activism and more, the festival creates shared, live experiences that encourage experimentation and connection. Fierce champions diverse and marginalised voices through an intersectional approach, challenging ideas about what art can be, who creates it and where it belongs. Its programme ranges from provocative and playful to beautiful and thought-provoking.

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.

Ewa Dziarnowska: This resting, patience

17-18th October 2026 | Eastside Projects

Tickets: HERE

One of the most exciting voices in contemporary European dance, Dziarnowska presents This resting, patience, a durational immersive work of seduction, sensuality and striptease.

Part ghostly repository of unconsumed sensuality, an installative kinetic fadeout, part somatic (strip)tease, This resting, patience addresses attraction, voluntary objectification, proximity and the aesthetics of bareness. Employing an experimental format, it upsets the passivity of installation and the time-delineation and dramaturgical resolution of performance and steps away from the tradition of viewing dance as an alienated spectacle to instead emphasize its immanent sociability. In its devotion to the body, This resting, patience proposes sensuousness and dancing as timeless and democratically available technologies of undoing the world and projecting the continuous present into a future that lasts, quintessentially tender, infatuated, attentive.

Find out more about Ewa Dziarnowska HERE

Hana Umeda: RAPEFLOWER

17-18th October 2026 | Midlands Arts Centre

Tickets: HERE

Umeda’s RAPEFLOWER draws on the Japanese jiutamai tradition in a solo performance reflecting on trauma, sexual violence and the body as a site of inherited experience.

RAPEFLOWER is an investigation conducted within one’s own body. It is in the body, not in the discourse, that the experience of sexual violence – both one’s own, inherited and learned – is intertwined with defense and survival strategies. This is a story about rape understood as a condition, not just a single event.

Identifying oneself as a survivor often entails silence. In order to avoid becoming an object of pity, one becomes invisible. Avoiding confrontation with the experience of rape can lead to a compulsion to repeat the traumatic situation in search of lost control.

Find out more about Hana Umeda HERE

Wojciech Grudziński: THREESOME

14-15th October 2026 | Midlands Arts Centre

Tickets: HERE

And in Grudziński’s hazy posthumous ballet THREESOME, he delves into the memory and legacy of three legendary, but little-remembered, Polish dancers.

In Threesome, Wojciech Grudzinski shares the dance space with spectral figures from the past as he grapple with their legacy. In this exercise in phantasmagoric choreography, he goes cruising through the biographies of the legendary dancers Stanisław Szymański, Wojciech Wiesiołłowski, and Gerard Wilk. Brought up in post-war, communist Poland, two of them eventually emigrated, while one chose to stay in his native country.

Find out more about Wojciech Grudziński HERE

Additional Information can be found @https://wearefierce.org/