We are all very excited to tell you about the return of the International Dance Festival Birmingham 2014! You will be able to experience a range of performances from ballet to large non-choreographed social dances. With so many brilliant performances to talk about, the following will just be a selection of my top picks for the festival.

For Starters, ‘Three Short Works’ 24th – 26th April

The International Dance Festival Birmingham 2014 kicks off with ‘Three Short Works’. From the Birmingham Royal Ballet, a selection of performances called Quatrain, Kin, Les Rendezvous and Façade. Les Rendezvous will be available to see from 24th–25th April, with Quatrain and Kin continuing to be shown alongside Façade on 26th April.

QUATRAIN

Inspired by the fantastically exciting and vibrant tango rhythms of Astor Piazzolla’s The Four Season’s of Buenos Aires, Company First Artist Kit Holder creates his third ballet for the Company. Following the success of his previous work, 9-5, which featured in IDFB 2012, these premiere performances of his latest work are keenly anticipated.

KIN.

An exciting new ballet from Royal Opera House Choreographic Affiliate, Sadler’s Wells New Wave Associate and former Birmingham Royal Ballet dancer, Alexander Whitley. The ballet, to music by young American composer Phil Kline, will receive its’ premiere at IDFB 2014. Not to be missed!

LES RENDEZVOUS

A huge hit when it was first performed in 1933, Les Rendezvous was the first ballet in which Ashton put aside the comedy for which he was known and concentrated on pure technique. Loosely based round a group of friends meeting up in a park, the ballet is a series of fiercely difficult divertissements which give the whole cast the chance to show off their virtuosity.

FACADE

Finally, based on Edith Sitwell’s deliciously nonsensical poetry, Façade embraces the fun of it all with whole-hearted and wilful abandon. Be entertained by a series of delightful characters dancing tangos, foxtrots and waltzes, all with their tongues firmly in their cheeks. Choreographed in 1931, Façade was Sir Frederick Ashton’s first big hit, and is full of the gentle comedy he is known and loved for – an enjoyable break from the sanity of everyday life!

World Premier, ‘Headphones’ 30th April – 4th May

Promising to provide us with a fresh organic series of performances, Corey Baker brings us ‘Headphones’. In keeping with Corey Bakers’ ethos of producing engaging and unique productions, ‘Headphones’ will allow the audience to direct part of the dancers’ choreography. Set to hide ‘undercover’, the performances will be surprising and unpredictable with elements of comedy.

You can watch this trailer to get an idea of the fun performance, as well as directly suggest moves by tweeting @IDFB #headphones.

‘Lord of the Flies’ 14th–17th May

Mathew Bourne has invited 24 young people to join his latest hit production ‘Lord of the Flies’ based on the classic novel written by William Goulding. There are 8 professional dancers within the cast, to work alongside the newly recruited dancers to give a unique opportunity to young dancers in each city that the production is set to perform in. Because of this the theatre performance has already gained great publicity. The combination of mentoring and unity has made the project a wonderful success already and should be a great motivational piece, especially for young people who with a passion for dance.

‘Lord of the Flies’ will be performed at The Birmingham Hippodrome over 4 days with tickets available now.

‘Spill: A Playground of Dance’ – 25th May

DanceXchange is housed within Birmingham Hippodrome, both of whom have worked together to produce the 2014 International Dance Festival Birmingham. Owning 3 dance studios and The Patrick Centre (a 206 seat studio), DanceXchange strives to support the dancing community and enable their dancers to showcase the best of their talents. ‘Spill’ was first shown in 2012, and is an outdoor production that will be performed in the beautiful Cannon Hill Park. Choreographed by Australian Artist Shaun Parker, of Shaun Parker & Company, it should be a playful piece using street gymnastics and location based props of swings and roundabouts.

With so many different events and performances there is bound to be something for everybody and you can view IDFB’s 2014 staff picks here to find some first hand recommendations!

Milque & Muhle is an independent record shop based in the Custard Factory, created by Nathan Warner and Ellena Donlon,

Milque & Muhle serves as a shop which not only provides adventurous, underground vinyl and cassette, you will also find music fanzines, comics, presses and occasional art prints; with due course Milque & Muhle intend to curate local gigs and music/art based events targeted towards adventurous and curious audiences within Birmingham.

Milque & Muhle are screening an original 16mm print of If… at Custard Factory’s theatre space on 30th January.

Starring Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange), this allegorical tale of the British public schooling system is universally acknowledged as a landmark of British counter-cultural cinema.

The feature will be introduced by a series of shorts starting from around 8pm. It’s £3 on the door and full details can be found here: http://milqueandmuhle.co.uk/news-events/

Film-poster image credit: https://www.cctvcambridge.org/sites/default/files/imagefield/if-2.jpg

Wristbands are only £10 for access to all venues and events, and should be bought in advance.

www.oxjambrum.org.uk / www.twitter.com/oxjambrum / www.facebook.com/oxjambrum

The artwork used on the Oxjam flyers is by Mark Murphy – www.surely.uk.com and Craig Earp – www.craigearp.co.uk. This was one of their 48 sheet project pieces back in May. It’s soon available to buy as a giclee print so if you’re interested then keep an eye on their websites.

OxjamBrum’s next charity event is The Takeover 2011 on Saturday 15th October that puts bands in several city-centre venues throughout the day. I went to last year’s Takeover and it was excellent, so I recommend you check it out. Advance tickets are still available.

As we prepare to bid farewell to Ikon Eastside ahead of it’s April closure, they’re gearing up for a rather special three night music festival, Rites of Spring, from 7 – 9 April.

Celebrating the venue’s five year contribution to Birmingham’s cultural scene, the festival welcomes headliners Modified Toy Orchestra, Martin Creed and his band and Fyfe Dangerfield, along with the first UK video installation from US band Matmos.

The full line up showcases a collection of folk, pop and electronic musical offerings, from local talent along with further afield artists.

Thursday 7 April
Modified Toy Orchestra
epic45
Shady Bard
Poppy Tibbetts
Friends of the Stars

Friday 8 April
Martin Creed and his band
David Cunningham
Matmos (video set)
Is I Cinema
Arc Vel

Saturday 9 April
Fyfe Dangerfield
Lulu and the Lampshades
Boat to Row
Young Runaways
Timothy Parkes

Tickets are £12 (£10 for students), or for the full festival £30 (£27 for students) and can be booked online or by calling O844 87O OOOO

Unparalleled Riches

The comments on the current state of the scene were very encouraging, suggesting there’s more quality, active musicians in the city than ever before and a number of hardworking and creative promoters as well.

So what improvements might be made to encourage some of the many talented and dedicated individuals and groups to progress further on a professional and national level?

Venues and Noise Abatement

We picked out Kings Heath’s Hare & Hounds as an example of what a good local music venue can be (great location, facilities, standard of acts and size of audiences) but felt there’s too few live music venues around for a city and scene of our size.

Recent issues between property developers, the council and independent venues such as the Fiddle & Bone, the Spotted Dog, the Nightingale and most recently the Rainbow and Moseley’s Price of Wales are all situations in which the city and the community have had the opportunity to act clearly in favour of culture over profit – if we are to have the courage of our convictions going forward, common sense prevailing in any similar situation is of vital importance.

Jon Cotton suggests that these issues could very often be solved by small grants for acoustic improvements to venues – possibly around £1000 per venue for simple materials and an hour or two’s consultancy with an acoustician.

Annual Festivals

We are fortunate to have some small, quality festivals such as Moseley Folk and Supersonic and efforts should be made to support them as needed as well as identify other existing and emerging festivals and support them too. On the larger scale, Gigbeth was admired but perhaps fell short of its full potential, whilst the value of ArtsFest is questionable due to its very broad reach and the policy of not paying artists.

Organisational issues aside, a Festival lives or dies on the quality of its curation – there is a lot of experienced promoters in Birmingham and they are a resource that should be tapped as much as possible by any future large scale efforts. As valuable as good intentions might be, its quality that ultimately counts.

Media Support

It seems bizarre that our local radio stations do so little to engage with the local music community. This is both our loss and theirs, since, as little more than pale imitations of much bigger national operations, their audience figures are dropping rapidly. So its to the grass roots that we might best look to the future. Rhubarb Radio is steadily expanding with well programmed and sequenced automated play lists offering a variety of moods at different parts of the day combined with programmes presented by fast developing local talent and all using West Midlands music. Support for Rhubarb and the likes of South Birmingham Community Radio should be encouraged and need not be financial.

Likewise in the world of print media, the Birmingham Post is down to a weekly and the Evening Mail, whilst its news coverage is ultra local doesn’t seem to cover local talent until they are proven on the national stage. Fortunately, we have Indies such as Area, Brumnotes, Radar and Night Times taking up the slack.

Focal Web Presence

There’s good stuff going on the web such as Live Brum (for listings), review and photos from Brum Live, long running bloggers such as Russ L, The Hearing Aid, the directory and blog at Birmingham Music Network, a terrific playable online library of music at the Pilot Project and archive projects such as the Birmingham Music Archive and Home of Metal.

That said, I still feel something is lacking which could be well filled by something modelled on Created in Birmingham. CiB rarely mentions music for the good reason that if it covered every decent new album, gig or video, music would completely swamp the other content. Is there a case for a sister Music in Birmingham site?

Facilitation, Not Control

Its very tempting to try and fix things with big, top down initiatives, but often they fail to deliver and given the current financial climate, there’s not likely to be much public money around for a while. Andrew Dubber suggests that the smartest thing that could be done now is to identify and support already existing and naturally forming scenes and connections, and draw goals and strategies from those communities’ own ambitions.

Proud to be Independent

A lot of very exciting music and events are happening through the efforts of people taking initiative and responsibility for their own success. We should be proud and encouraging of this rather than waiting for an authority figure from either the public or private sector to come along and validate our efforts with an official seal of approval. John Mostyn goes so far as to suggest that a small pot of public funding should be used to encourage the term ‘Unsigned’ to never be used within the City in any way, shape or form by anyone… ever.

Cherish Diversity

The diversity of our music and culture may have slowed progress towards a cohesive and structured scene or community, but maybe that very diversity has the capability to power us forward to a time of unparalleled musical output and cultural harmony.

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By Rich Batsford

Rich Batsford is a booking agent and a composer/performer of meditative solo piano music and reflective songs www.richbatsford.com

We are lucky to live in city so diverse that there is music and art of all types so readily available to us. In the music scene, some artists aren’t just available, they are begging for audiences to experience their music. I have sourced some excellent music that is being performed in Birmingham in the next month, alone. This is just a tiny snapshot into the world of music and performance that is not achieving quite the audience members that it rightly deserves.

With the news of the cuts happening in the next few years in Birmingham, it is now that we should be celebrating what we, as artists, have to offer. The best way, I feel, to do this, is to see everything. Go to concerts and experience what has been provided to us, show the people in charge of money in this city what, we, as music fans need.

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – contemporary, classical, dance, technology

One of the the CBSO’s (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra) biggest projects of the 2010/2011 is it’s performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. A formidable and excellent piece in it’s own right, the creators at the CBSO and Symphony Hall have fused together music, dance and technology :

Experience an astonishing interplay between reality and fantasy as dancer Julia Mach’s extraordinary live performance interacts, through the magic of digital wizardry, with real-time, computer generated stereoscopic projections, translated into a virtual reality space with the aid of 3D spectacles for the audience.

– THSH

The 30-minutes piece is preceded by Varese’s Tuning Up and Ligeti’s Lontano for large orchestra, a distant and warm piece which plays with with the make-up of unconventional diatonic harmony.

For more info and for the special Rite of Spring micro-site, please visit http://riteofspring3d.thsh.co.uk

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group – contemporary, classical

The BCMG is the city’s orchestra dedicated entirely to the performance of contemporary and new music. Made up of players from the CBSO, the flexible organisation has grown in the one of the world’s most fore-thinking ensembles of new music. They play regular concerts at the CBSO Centre on Berkley Street, B1, as well as touring all over the city.

The percussion players are performing what promises to be an excellent concert of Varese and Xenakis on the 25th March at Yardley Old Church as well as this Sunday (13th March).

Oliver Knussen conducts his own memorial work Requiem – Songs for Sue as well as pieces by Morton Feldman and Harrison Birtwistle

Steve Reich and Thomas Ades. – contemporary, classical

This week, Friday 11th March, Symphony Hall have also included another excellent performance of contemporary. The London Sinfonietta, one of the world’s leading orchestra for contemporary classical music are visiting Birmingham, performing Steve
Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, complete with 4 grand pianos and 5 marimbas. The minimalist style of Steve Reich is used in many sources of media, films, adverts and television, purely for the fact it is accessible to both musician and audience alike. Conductor Thomas Ades? starts the concert with his own In Seven Days, a collaborative project with filmmaker Tal Rosner and is based on the Creation.

Tickets start from £10 (or £5 on the day for U25s)

The Irrepressibles: Mirror Mirror – contemporary pop, performance art, collaboration, crossover

Another gig at the heart of Birmingham, the Town Hall, The Irrepressibles are a 10-piece orchestra committed to stretching the boundaries of conventional performance. Lead by singer, Jamie McDermot, they perform hearty indie music with a set up of orchestral musicians as accompaniment.

This show is in conjunction with Fierce Festival and is at Town Hall, 22nd March, £15

SOUNDkitchen – contemporary, sound, experimental, collaboration

SOUNDkitchen is a new group made up of music graduates from the University of Birmingham. Their “STONEsoup” concert at the MAC was met with rave reviews and are following up with a collaborative event with Balkanic Eruption, promoters of Klezmer and Balkan music within the city. Playing at the Hare and Hounds, B14, the concert focuses on expanding sound using technology and live instruments, it will be followed by a live laptop performance from Garfield Benjamin.

Birmingham Conservatoire – classical contemporary, premieres, fusion

Like the Uni of Birmingham, the Conservatoire has one of the most developed composition departments in the country. The students are exceptionally talented and lucky for us the concerts are generally very cheap and on a regular basis. This month as well as a student showcase of new music (held on the 18th March and conducted by the great Edwin Roxburgh) we see the Frontiers department of Conservatoire play host to world-renowned electronic violinist, Barbara Luneberg. This young talent has worked with some of the world’s best contemporary composers. On the 14th March, Luneberg is to perform works written for her by young composers from all over Europe, this will also include a premiere of work by VT of the Conservatoire, Ed Bennett.

For more info on any of the above please visit
www.thsh.co.uk
www.bcmg.org.uk
www.soundkitchenuk.org
www.theirrepressibles.com
www.bcu.ac.uk/pme/conservatoire/events-calendar

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The programme offers numerous voluntary opportunities, which enable a diverse group of young people to work with others and get involved in their communities. Volunteers will also be provided with specialist training, induction, support and advice throughout, plus the chance to gain an Arts Award and attend music masterclasses and workshops.

Opportunities available on the scheme include peer music advisers, apprenticeships, shadow artists, office volunteers, youth advisory board, youth consultants and event volunteers.
For more information about VOLume, contact Tim Jones at Sound It Out on 0121 772 8655

Topshop

Topping the bill are my old Cardiff University chums done good Los Campesinos!, with support from I Blame Coco, Eliza Doolittle and Summer Camp, as well as DJ sets from Broken Hearts, Blonde Ambition and special guests.

Tickets are £10, with all profits going to the Trust, and are available from this link here and the Bullring Topshop store. They’re limited to 500, so get your skates on if you want to go.

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