Venues across Birmingham As Britain’s longest-running live art festival returns, get ready for late-night artist dinners, a show in a swimming pool and Faye Driscoll’s incredible rotating disintegration The phrase “two things can be true” is a frequent refrain in popular psychology and it’s also a frequent response, I find, to witnessing the farther reaches of live art. Hmm, is this performance confusingly self-indulgent or utterly profound? Sometimes it can be both. In fact, it’s not just two things that can be true, it’s as many things as there are people in the audience, since this is all about the live subjective experience, in the moment; presence and connection. Launched in 1998, Fierce is Britain’s longest-running live art festival. For one week it takes over Birmingham’s conventional theatres alongside unconventional spaces, especially in ex-industrial Digbeth, which is fast becoming a creative hub. Also on the bill this year: late-night artist dinners, a show in a swimming poo...
Volodymyr Zelenskiy tells Guardian that permission needs to go further; Putin labels as ‘foreign agents’ wives who want their husbands back. What we know on day 829 Air raids were declared in Russia’s Belgorod city on Saturday morning. It comes after the White House approved strikes using US-supplied weaponry into border areas of Russia used for attacks on Ukraine. Belgorod lies north of Kharkiv , which has been under intensified Russian attack. In an interview with the Guardian , Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said he still needs to be able to use “powerful” long-range weapons that could hit targets inside deep Russian territory – which the White House has refused to approve. Shelling killed five people and wounded others in the Russian-controlled Ukrainian city of Donetsk on Friday, the Russia-installed local regime said. Independent verification was not possible and there was no immediate comment from Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia exchanged 75 prisoners of war e...