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.

It’s great to see The Flyover Show becoming a regular item on the city’s events calendar. The third Flyover Show will take place under the Hockley Flyover on 29 May 2010. Details are still coming but it’d worth saving the date now.

The Facebook event has some info:

For the first time this show explores the specific theme of black female identity. The headline artists, include current Mercury Prize winner Speech Debelle, Eska Mtungwazi and Bridgette Amafoh, all successful and highly original creatives, achieving widespread recognition without compromising their art or femininity.

There’ll also be the usual vignettes, poetry, dance and graffiti all corralled together by award winning saxophonist and rapper Soweto Kinch.

Friday is funny light show and parade day

Saturday is fireworks day

Sunday is Kerrangfest day with the Levellers

Which is pretty good but, although the official programme’s not out yet, I’ve been having a bit of a rummage about to see what’s on.

Friday

I’ve already mentioned Light Night.  One of the buildings to be illuminated is the Town Hall which will be hosting a free event from 8pm on the Friday featuring Manga, Soweto Kinch, The Sub Ensemble and Maylight.

Also on Friday there’s the free Reggae Rockz Festival 2008 from 8pm to 11pm in Centenary Square.  Unfortunately on the Facebook event page the organisers spend all their time bleating about a lack of promotion from Artsfest and don’t get round to telling us much about what they’l be doing.  The Beat are playing, that much is sure.  The Reggae Rockz website manages to be even less informative.  Ah well.

Saturday

It looks like Dholfest 2008 is the biggie here – an attempt to break the world record for the most dhol players in one place (currently 314 players in Sandwell in 1999).  They’re aiming for 500 this time.  This one will be held in Victoria and Centenary Squares.

Meanwhile, the Custard Factory will be hosting a day of hip hop with Mylz from Heducation and Madman the Greatest down to perform.

Sunday

Sunday is Kerrangfest day with This Beautiful Thief and The Levellers the only bands I’ve spotted so far.

Across the weekend

Spaghetti Gazetti has info about the weekend’s poetry performances.

This year the ShortCuts film programme will be extended slightly, with “a more relaxed, experimental programme of films made by local and international film makers” on the Sunday and a set of fims programmed in conjunction with Deaffest across the weekend.  There’s more about those in this post from the Artsfest blog.

There’s much more to come and I’ll let you know when I see a full programme lying around the internet somewhere.

The twist is that

Young people aged under 21 from the northwest Birmingham postcode areas of B8, B18, B19, B20 and B21 can collect 2 free tickets per person by quoting ‘Soweto Ticket Offer’ at the Town Hall Box Office. The offer is subject to availability, to secure tickets reserve in advance on 0121 780 3333.

For everyone else, ticket prices are £12.50.

Ok, so it’s easy to be cynical about these things (and it’s open season on the Birmingham Post site – all the winners’ profiles are commentable), but there’s little sense in detracting from the recognition given to the following folks who work hard on the city’s arts & culture scene.

So, from CiB (hating the game, not the playa since 2007) hearty congrats go to:

• 18. Dorothy Wilson, Midlands Arts Centre
• 25. David Bintley, Birmingham Royal Ballet
• 26. Amajit Talwar, Punch
• 29. Graham Vick, Birmingham Opera Company
• 30. Soweto Kinch, Musician
• 35. Mark Ball, Royal Shakespeare Company and Fierce!
• 39. Sarah Gee, Indigo
• 43. Sandra Hall, Friction Arts
• 49. Stuart Griffiths, Birmingham Hippodrome

While I’m at it, the Birmingham meeja luminaries who would like to thank their friends, family, deity of choice, etc and so on are:

• 7. Sir Michael Lyons, BBC Trust
• 14. Jon Bounds, Blogger
• 15. Suzie Norton, Screen West Midlands
• 20. Steve Dyson, Birmingham Mail
• 28. Ian Squires, ITV
• 31. Jonnie Turpie, Maverick TV
• 41. Gurjeet Kaur Bains, The Sikh Times

The big list of movers and shakers is on the Birmingham Post website which, like I say, they’ve made an effort to do all nice so you can comment on how brilliant and deserving everyone is.

But feel free to vent your spleen in the comments here if you feel the need.

A testament to the passion and drive of Soweto Kinch, the award-winning jazz saxophonist/MC/producer/poet/writer/whatever he wants:

For one day only the entire area beneath the Hockley flyover will be alive with inspiring sights and sounds, ground breaking art and music.

For the line-up see the flyer, for other info see the Flyover Show on Myspace.

Soweto can explain the motivation behind the Flyover Show much better than me and that’s exactly what he does in this video:

For a taste of how much he’s putting into the project, check the second video where we takes he message to the (Broad) streets: