Dorothy Max Prior spends a whirlwind 24 hours in Birmingham, enjoying a taster menu of the 10th edition of BE FESTIVAL  We’re onstage at Birmingham Repertory Theatre – not performing in a show, although you could describe it as a performative event. It’s a communal dinner – long tables laid with white tablecloths, vases of […]

The Un-knitted Lives of Young Girls is part of a long collaborative relationship between visual and performance artist Anne Bean and young Iraqi performance artist Poshya Kakl. The performance was a screening of Kakl’s film Knitting Iron on two large screens hung on either side of a long industrial space in Birmingham’s AE Harris factory. The film documents […]

THINK FISH by the Austrian company cieLaroque/helene weinzierl was the final performance of what had been a tense Friday evening at the BE Festival, and so its light energy and easygoing comic style was well received. CieLaroque/helene weinzierl are described in the programme as Austria’s most prolific dance touring ensemble, demonstrating BE Festival’s success in importing […]

A lone woman in a blonde ‘Marilyn’ wig and slick black dress stands at a tall microphone. She speaks to us directly but with an accent that’s hard to place and poetic text that, like a dream, starts in one place and ends in another. The blonde woman talks about black and white movies and […]

André & Dorine, by Basque company Kulunka Theatre, was a mask theatre performance with an impressive set design – an offering that appeared gleamingly polished among BE Festival’s mixed programme of work-in-progress and finished pieces. The full-face masks were very impressive and endearing, depicting an elderly couple with caricature large heads. An old man sat […]