After successfully taking The Flyover Show to South Africa earlier this year Soweto Kinch brings it back to it’s Hockley roots.

Also tomorrow Six Summer Saturdays continues with NoFit State Circus, If Only I Could… and The Caravan Show.

Today see the deadlines for the Eye Candy visual art commissions & inkygoodness‘ beer mat illustration. The deadline for Open West Midlands is tomorrow.

And you can follow these links for week two and week one.

Listings for all the craziness happening around the city centre are on sixsummersaturday.com.

UPDATE: I’m planning to be down in the Arcadian/outside the Hippodrome at 5pm this afternoon for music, queueing and speed portraiture. Say hi if you’re down there – I’ll be the tall guy who looks like me.

More Hippodrome-backed craziness in the streets of Birmingham this year, from 9 July to 13 August.

Giant lobsters, a scary ice cream van and a man with a big red balloon over his head. There’ll be some extra stuff on Fridays this year too. Splendid. I’ve also just learnt that the area outside the Hippodrome is called the ‘Hippodrome Piazza’. Now there’s fancy.

Link: Six Summer Saturdays

Pete kicked off discussions about how to follow on from the CiB Shop, The Little Chill looked like fun and involved pretty much every promoter in town and Supersonic’s line-up started coming together.

There was a lot of kerfuffle around the filming of Turbulence, with lots of people getting involved in that too, and people seemed to be printing big flyers for things. I didn’t make it to Taste of Birmingham but people tell me it was pretty good. We also flagged up the work of Sweaty Eskimo.

BARG announced some fun and games at the Mac, Haji Noor Deen visited The Hubb, the Cut Out Shop folks made The DIY Times and I did a bit of a write-up from the BE Festival. New Art Gallery Walsall hosted the Taylor Wessing Photography Prize for a while and the entirely excellent-looking Six Summer Saturdays started.

There was news of cuts from the new government and I tried to wrap my head around the mess that was being made of sorting out a LEP for Birmingham/West Midlands. The flyering/postering issue got another run out too.

Birmingham didn’t get the nod for City of Culture 2013. Ah well.

Six Summer Saturdays Week 2 from Birmingham Hippodrome on Vimeo.

If you’ve been in and around Birmingham for the past four weekends you’ll have seen all sorts of shenanigans going on as part of Six Summer Saturdays. Shows and highlights from the best outdoor theatre have been organised by the Hippodrome, which are free to catch all over the city.

There are only two Saturday’s left in the series, but still plenty of performances to catch on 21 August and 28 August.

Now, in a pleasingly similar vein, an email about the Hippodrome’s Six Summer Saturdays programme (website coming soon) has dropped into my inbox. There’s a brochure you can read too.

Blurb:

Over six consecutive Saturdays, free scheduled shows will take place at venues across the city including the piazza in front of the theatre on Hurst Street, Arcadian Centre, High Street and Cathedral Gardens.

The programme starts on Saturday 24 July with Vogue Ball, a day and evening of showing off and celebrating the performer in everyone. Audiences will be challenged to step up and step out onto the catwalk, release their inner diva and perform to their heart’s content.

The following weeks will welcome raving grannies on souped-up shopping trolleys, giant kangaroos bouncing around the city, classic puppetry, contemporary mime and international acrobats.

I’m dead excited about this so well done to Sarah Allen, the Hippodrome’s Creative Programme Manager, who I believe was brought in to put this together.

Congratulations are also due to the designers of the marketing materials who’ve had to cope with so many logos.

Also, giant kangaroos FTW.

While we’re on Hippodrome stuff – Liz Leck, their Education and Audience Development Manager, has put up a blog post about a typical week for her. Fascinating stuff and the sort of thing most people wouldn’t know goes on in that building.