Nicole Blackman with Janice Connolly and Women &Theatre
A self-guided audio tour can be downloaded at anytime at:
www.fiercetv.co.uk as part of Architecture Week 2007. For more information please visit www.architectureweek.org.uk.
There are two kinds of history of the city – the dusty facts we learn from school, books and official guides, and the secret stories we tell each other in the dark. Stories about the places we grew up, fell in love, got in trouble, learned the truth, lost our way, and sometimes found ourselves. Fierce!, of course, has always been more interested in the latter. These are the places that left a mark on us, the pubs where we took a chance, the taxis where we confessed something, the dirty street corners where we were dumped, and the strange neighbourhood alleys where we met ourselves for the first time.
Like the lifelines on your hand, city maps can chart your life in unexpected ways. How well do you really know your neighbourhood? What secrets does your city hold about you? Are you in anyone else’s stories? And when it comes to history, whom do you believe? Memories are notoriously unreliable – are you sure you know the truth?
In an absolute antithesis of an architectural tour Fierce! invites you to a most unusual recorded audio tour around Digbeth with New York
performance/spoken word artist Nicole Blackman (whose Courtesan Tales have stunned Fierce! audiences with sold-out performances for the last
three years) in collaboration with award-winner Janice Connolly (aka Barbara Nice) of Birmingham’s own Women & Theatre.
With stories about the Hell’s Angels, a lost ring, tea smugglers, and a drowned little boy, Stay Away From Lonely Places is an evocative and sensory tour exploring the secret histories hidden in some of Birmingham’s most overlooked architectural spaces and places.
The title of this project is taken from Stay Away from Lonely Places, a work by Ron Terada.
