One of this year’s Fierce festival events is the nocturnal wandering performance Wolf Safari by the Other Spaces (Toisissa tiloissa). In the performance, the civilised urban space collides with untamed nature. The participants encounter the city from the perspective of a wild, social predator. The protagonist, the wolf, embodies more than a metaphorical conflict. On one hand, we know that it is one of the most socially developed and organised creatures, on the other hand, it is one of the most feared and controversial animals, onto which humankind has projected all its undesirable traits.
Wolf Safari is a participatory performance based on a collective exercise in which the participants form a pack of wolves that wander around the city space at night. The transformation from human to wolf is based on a simple set of behavioural patterns borrowed from wolves and adapted for humans. In the performance the participants howl like wolves, search each other, create a pack and go hunting for an animal of prey. After the hunt, the participants participate in a final discussion to share their experiences and findings.
Read more about tickets and preparing for the event here.
Fierce has been putting Birmingham and beyond on the map since 1998, when its first festival of theatre and performance originally launched as Queerfest. The following year it was renamed Fierce! Festival, ‘the festival that bites’ – partly in response to a desire to be inclusive to an audience who craved the unusual, the edgy and the spectacular and also to reflect a more intersectional politic.
Wolf Safari (premiered on 16.-18.10.2014 at NordWind Festival, Hamburg, Germany) is one of the most popular performances by Other Spaces. It has been performed in several noted festivals in Finland, Italy, Russia, Denmark and UK. Performers: Outi Condit, Minja Mertanen, Heli Mäkinen and Helena Ratinen.
The Other Spaces collective is one of the most influential and international Live Art groups in Finland. The group’s artistic work is based on collective bodily exercises and participatory performances that enable an experiential contact with non-human forms and phenomena, in other words “visits into other spaces”. The collective’s goals include facilitating more sustainable and collective ways of thinking and behaving and to increase our understanding of the mutual equality and interdependence between all kinds of living beings.
Wolf Safari has been funded by The Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland and TINFO.
