Club Fierce: xxx
Review by Arike Oke
Fierce Festival is 15 this year: the precipice of the age of consent. When you’re 15 you think that you’ve done your growing and you’ve done your learning and you just want to get on with being a grown up already and being able to do all those things that you’ve been told that you’re too young for. But - you don’t know everything, not really, you’re too young to realise that you never will, no-one ever will. Your lack of knowledge won’t stop you having opinions, though. It’s a good age and a difficult age. It’s an age when you’re noticing that peer pressure is a thing and when you start to fear: maybe you’re not cool; what is your body becoming’ But 16 is around the corner with all the answers. At least you hope it has the answers.
The second part of Club Fierce, titled ‘XXX’ looks ahead to Fierce’s coming of age. The performers ask questions about body image, negotiating sex and sexuality. While they do not perform works directly addressing adolescence, there is a seam of angst running through each performance.
Club Fierce: XXX took place in the warehouse district of Digbeth in a tall and slender building called Club PST. At 2012’s Holy Mountain party Fierce had commandeered the entire building, showing flipout film Holy Mountain in the roof’s smoking area. This year the roof is open for Fierce smokers, but the club’s normal reggae night is still taking place. The Club PST regulars step back with some amusement as they are invaded by Fierce party-goers who wriggle around on the dancefloor in between Club Fierce’s downstairs programmed performances.
The bar for XXX is in the basement, and beside it a teasing glimpse of bright colours and winking eyes is just visible. The adjacent room to the bar is the venue for a selection of KINO 10 film screenings. In them young black men vogue and flirt on catwalks in all the neon of the past. It’s an intimate space and being underground seems to add an illicit edge to the showings as though we have come across a fierce and fabulous fashion speakeasy.
In the main, ground floor, room the performers take to the stage. First is Quilla Constance. She is, in her words, a performance artist who now uses music to transmit her message. There is no room for interpretation in Quilla’s performance: she explains her costume (sparkles, lurex, Burberry plaid) and each song before and after she performs them. The Quilla Constance alterego is born from the artist’s disillusionment by the way in which women are marketed and market themselves in the music industry. She’s angry about the weird sexualisation mixed with infantilisation of female celebrities and lampoons them in her part-comedy part-art set. Less exposition would have helped her set flow more smoothly but, as Quilla is passionate about her message, she probably felt that she could have been even more explicit.
Roxxxan performs next, seeming abashed that Fierce have adopted her XXX for the name of this part of the festival. Roxxxan is an MC; she tells us that like Quilla, she is from Birmingham, and with charismatic warmth she encourages the audience to just carry on having a nice time and not to pay her too much attention.
‘You don’t even need to look at me,’ she says. ‘I’ll just be doing my thing up here.’ While not seeming to be falsely modest, Roxxxan underestimates her effect. Her set is stridently angry and relentlessly powerful. The audience are mesmerised by her and are enthusiastic in their dancing and whooping appreciation. Roxxxan is touched: ‘I never do this,’ she says, before inviting audience participation. One sweaty punter climbs behind the sound desk and selects songs for her to rap to. Her raps are angry, but they’re also positive. She is rebellious and forthright. She welcomes the accusation of being ‘too fucking facety’, an accusation that all Fierce performers must have heard in many various dialects .
Last to perform for Club Fierce: XXX is rapper Cakes Da Killa. He has been seen taking in the other sets during the evening and eventually when his turn comes around he mounts the stage and blasts straight into a performance that brings the Fierce audience close to tears. There is chest-bumping, contorted bodies and teeth bared in the audience as they frantically dance to Cakes’ furious yet tongue-in-cheek songs. Cakes states that he ‘runs this fucking club’ and the evidence of the dance floor seems to back this up. Cakes’ subject matter is based in a great part on gay culture and his raps are suitably X-rated for this triplex evening.
Over the course of the night Club Fierce: XXX has winked at us with angst transformed into glitching, gyrating, sexy, affirmatory fun. If this is growing up, then growing up is cool.
