I don’t often write diary posts but sometimes a weekend is so full on, it’s a way to offload stuff and think about them later. So here’s the rather strange collection of activities and oddities that Birmingham presented this weekend.

FRIDAY: Trampolines and New Romantics

1. The 28th Trampoline and Tumbling World Championship, NIA
I’ve never paid to go to a sporting event before but I was fascinated to see what the world’s best offered in terms of sports that basically involved jumping, bouncing and general boinging.

I’d completed a 12-week beginners trampoline course last year in which someone was stretchered off by paramedics in week 1 so I knew it would be nerve-wracking. It was also a challenge on the photographic front with fast-moving athletes against the busy background of a crowd. Suffice it to say, the athletes were incredible, the vibe slightly strange – more on that in Pete’s post – and my snaps quite blurry. Here are a couple of the ones that worked and also some lo-fi phone video of two trampoline routines. Just look at how high they jump!

2. Only After Dark, Air
I go to nightclubs about as often as I go to sporting events. Amusingly, as the trampoline event above finished as 9pm, I had to go to the NIA dressed up (something like this lot) ready to go straight on to ‘ONLY AFTER DARK – a monthly club at Air Nightclub, Birmingham night based on the Bowie nights of the late 70s/early 80s’. The DJ line-up featured Rusty Egan from the famous Blitz Club in London, and DJ Dick from the Rum Runner, where Duran Duran first kicked into life. I was happy because my chum came up from London and because they played four hours of music I recognised and wanted to dance to – including my favourite B-side: Hard Times by The Human League. Spot the DJ in this phone snap…

And here I am courtesy of birthday girl Bev Hislop:

SATURDAY: Vampires and glitches

3. Breaking Dawn Part 2, The Electric Cinema
The final (sort of) movie instalment of the Twilight series, described by various friends as romantic crack for teenage girls up to middle-aged woman. The films are becoming more fun to watch as they take themselves less seriously and deliver the lines with more camp. How else can you deal with a love triangle between a schoolgirl, vampire and werewolf? This one featured rather grim scenes – pregnant women are advised to avoid. Being able to drink wine at The Electric, our lovely indie cinema in central Brum, helped.

4. GLI.TC/H 20111, Vivid
Popped in to a festival celebrating something I’m not sure I can articulate. But then that’s what Wikipedia is for:

“A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system. It is often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, and in circuit bending, as well as among players of video games, although it is applied to all types of systems including human organizations and nature.”

I have friends who do this stuff and make art/sound/visuals out of it. I do not pretend to understand but I do enjoy, and was amused when a Brazilian glitch artist at the festival told his audience how his film was switched off by the projectionist after a minute because he thought it was just that – a glitch.

SUNDAY: Opera and doom tuba

5. Birmingham Opera Company open day, AE Harris factory
Having joined the amazing Birmingham Opera Co’s last two productions (and blogged about the experience: Othello and The Wedding), I was interested to see what their next brand new opera production was all about. Life Is A Dream begins rehearsing in January for performance in March. It’s a newly commissioned opera by Jonathan Dove to celebrate artistic director Graham Vick’s 25 years of working with the company in Birmingham. It’ll be performed back in the industrial warehouse where Othello was performed (see below) and will apparently feature a dream-like maze for the audience to walk about in. Expect the extraordinary.

6. The Sound of Birmingham, Ikon Gallery
I’m not going to make this (after a loooong weekend) but at the Ikon Gallery tonight will be the sound of Birmingham’s industrial metal heritage – in the form of Lash Frenzy, Ore and SoundKitchen. Lash Frenzy blew me away last time I saw them – featuring a 40-minute sonic storm and lightshow assault akin to standing in front of a jet engine and during which I had the emotion wrung from me in the form of tears. This time they will perform a work based around the first three notes only of the song ‘Black Sabbath’. Ore, meanwhile, feature a friend Sam Underwood who took up the tuba earlier this year for the first time to play in a ‘drone doom tuba group’. Doomba? It’s noise as an artform. Here’s a taster. See how long you last…

Coda: Sam, together with Ms Hypnotique, also provided the soundtrack for Hackybeanpouffe – a rather fun game Pete and I invented for those bored people with a floor cushion and no dust allergies.

After donating my teenage memory of ‘being flashed’ to the Secret Stirchley crew at the pop-up arts tearoom, this weekend my embarrassing memory became the stuff of a Stirchley promenade street theatre narrative.

Performed by three actors as part of the Inhabit programme of pop-up tearooms, the stories they had collected from Stirchley residents over the past five weeks were woven into a narrative, relived and professionally delivered by actors as we wandered around the local streets. In this environment, it was hard to tell who was part of the show and who was incidental.

We listened in on the story of a grandmother and her grand-daughter, as well as other characters who overlapped with their lives, from the ghost of a father who went to war and came back shellshocked…

to the grunge boyfriend met in the British Oak…

to a street mugger re-enacting a bag-snatching…

– and to a young girl who was once flashed by a man standing in the reeds of the River Rea, followed by the ensuing police visit asking for rather intimate details and distinguishing marks.

While I enjoyed the show, however, I’m not sure Stirchley is quite ready for such artiness – a feeling which was underlined by two events ahead of the opening Friday performance.

1. The neighbouring solicitor had apparently thrown quite a wobbly about a bit of chalk saying ‘Sweet shop’ on the pavement outside his shop (which was, you’ve guessed it, formerly a sweet shop).

He told them he was trying to conduct a ‘proper business’ and was insistent that they remove it, which they did despite this being a public pavement. His uncompromising reaction seemed unwarranted – especially since the passing promenade didn’t even raise the two front-room workers’ heads as we passed by. And yet his over-reaction forms another B30 tale as I had been to see them the day before and now feel quite disinclined to do business there. Stirchley may be strong in community spirit, but at the same time it has always had its bullies, though maybe that is too strong a word – perhaps he was just having a bad day.

2. The second incident happened when a passing young mum with a pushchair had to be reassured that the mugging wasn’t real, just in case she didn’t spot the unconcerned crowd and phoned the police.

But the show must go and after 40 minutes or so it circled back to the tearoom for the final scene, followed by tea and delicious cakes…

Personally, I think the show would have worked better for me as a direct documentary of Stirchley memories, flowing between characters but without the narrative hook. I suppose I wanted to focus on Stirchley and wanted to hear other people’s memories. I don’t think they needed the plot device, or perhaps I was slightly distracted by the fictionalised performance, which made the memories seem less real somehow.

Still, I have very much enjoyed the tearoom over the past few weeks and I think it will be missed in Stirchley, which is a high street of diverse businesses but none of which offer a particularly sociable stop-off or gathering place (unless you like to go to the pub in the daytime or the ‘Society Cafe’ in the Coop, that is).

The tea-room now moves to Hodge Hill. Lucky things. But I hope that it – or someone else with community spirit – moves into our empty shops soon.

If you want to catch a performance of Secret Stirchley, there is one day left to see it – at 1pm and 4pm tomorrow (Sunday 13th March). Performances are free and start at the shop, on the corner of Ivy Road and Pershore Road.

One of the great things I did last year was join Daz Wright’s Moselele group, aka ‘the second best ukelele group in Moseley’.

Sometimes it ain’t pretty, sometimes you need to sing songs by Spandau Ballet or Bonnie Tyler, but it is always entertaining.

Occasional extras include bongos, saxazoo, bass acoustic, sleigh bells and shakers, but tonight it was just us, the music, a single kazoo and the lowest fi mobile phone video known to man. It had to be done…

PS. The Moselele Facebook group is here!

Today was one of those chilled blue Sunday afternoons, perfect for going walkabout with cameras: destination, the concrete jungle of central Birmingham. Scenes from Black Swan, which we saw yesterday at the Electric, must have embedded themselves inside my mind but when I uploaded the images I found out just how much I had focused on windows, reflections, shadows and mirror images.

Here’s the full set of photos from today’s photowalk on my Flickr. Pete was on an FM2 so will have to await processing in the good old-fashioned way.

I took a photowalk down my local Stirchley High Street on Friday to log the growing diversity of shops I’d been noticing there of late, including a new pop-up tearoom…

There are lots of independents in Stirchley Village (as it now seems to be have been renamed), such as: P Browell Tobacconist, Wards greengrocers, Pandora’s Music Box, Skinnys Ink tattoo parlour, Music Exchange, Maginnis Opticians, Wolseley Sausage Company, The British Oak pub and others.

This is NOT a homogenous high street – and all the more interesting for it. For example, how many other Birmingham high streets can boast a European consulate?

There are quite a few clusters of businesses, too: hairdressers, hydroponics shops, carpet stores, junk shops, nail bars, balti restaurants, Chinese takeaways and a growing number of estate and letting agents – a sign that things are changing for Stirchley.

But the most interesting shop for me was the pop-up tearoom on the corner of Ivy Road. It’s only open for another month or so before it moves on like a magical moveable feast to Hodge Hill – but it’s a lovely little place to go and hangout for a bit.

There is free tea served in bone china cups, free biscuits, art, craft and storytelling projects, community conversation and someone to reminisce about Stirchley with – in my case a former lollipop lady, who summed up Stirchley as having it all – except for parking spaces.

The tearoom events progamme is here. Some evening events are also in the pipeline, possibly a film screening and more tea-tasting sessions with Karen (pictured top).

I intend to revisit Stirchley’s high street evolution in more detail in a future post, namely because I wrote my first ever published article on the breakdown of shops here. But for now here’s the slideshow, or see the full set on Flickr.

Last night Karen Strunks introduced me to the world of hula hooping for fitness, taking place in a church hall in Moselely and taught by possibly the smiliest person I’ve ever met, Julia Higgins, who runs Birmingham Hula Hoopers.

As you can see from the awkward jump through the hoop, it flexes the parts other exercises don’t ordinarily reach. But we learnt lots of tricks in just one hour and I was quite chuffed to even be able to do this.

Also much fun was Hula Hoop tig (tag?). Being ‘It’ was hard work but picking up dropped hulas every minute gave both the heart and the gluteus maximus a very good workout indeed!

Original video source: Twitvid/Karen Strunks

Sessions every Wednesday in Moseley St Columba’s Hall on Chantry Road, £3, followed by Julia’s ace zumba class (£5 for both). You’ll probably have to register you’re going on the Facebook group, though, as space is limited.

These are some of the handmade Christmas tree decs I bought from the We Are Birmingham shop last week (while attending KTB’s acoustic gig). Only £2 each. Ain’t they lovely?

Go do your Christmas shopping – it’s only a few mins walk from the Bullring and full of unique and unusual gifts!

For a shop and a gig, I think the last Friday of the month is going to be a regular music night showcasing local talent.

I never thought I would see the day that I put on a brocaded wedding gown (with train, tiara and veil) but somehow it finally happened last weekend. Here I am…

This is why I’ve been absent from my blog (and social life) for so long. There are few things in life that involve such commitment. Two whole months of preparation every Tuesday evening, every Saturday afternoon, then every Sunday too, and finally every day leading up to the big day, or rather weekend. But at least I wasn’t alone.

It all started a year ago when I fell in love with Birmingham Opera Company after joining the cast of Othello, their nationally lauded contemporary version of Verdi’s Otello, set in a warehouse in Digbeth, carpeted like a mosque and featuring a community chorus of volunteer amateur singers. When they started rehearsals in September 2010 for Stravinsky’s Les Noces – aka the Wedding – I was there like a shot for another season of ‘tra la la’…

Stravinsky’s ballet was a far more difficult piece to learn, though, despite two months of rehearsing and note-bashing with choirmaster Jon Laird and despite having a CD with our parts sung for us.

As the publicity reads: “The Wedding is a screaming, shrieking, flat out masterpiece with its rhythmic drive and unique sound world- 4 virtuoso pianists on grand pianos, a dazzling array of percussion, 4 soloists and a chorus. Written as a ballet in 1923 for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, Stravinsky drew on Russian traditions to conjure up a vivid and intense depiction of the old ways, and the not so old!”

I suspect most of the chorus found the musical soundscape of Les Noces quite anarchic with every part seemingly at odds or out of sync with each other. But since Birmingham Opera’s director Graham Vick had said that he wanted space to play and experiment (more so than usual), it seemed the perfect piece. Here are the tenors and basses, by the way, instructed by Graham to act like baboons behind a cage sign saying “Please do not feed the grooms”…

The setting was the AE Harris factory in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter – home of Stan’s Cafe theatre company. ‘Just Married’ was daubed in giant red letters across one wall, the paint dripping like blood. Bouquets and wedding photography were poked into factory fittings. The grooms were in their cage, the brides prepping in one of the four main performance spaces (it’s a walkabout opera). In the centre were the percussion instruments and four grand pianos. Meanwhile, Frankincense filled the air scenting it like a church.

The performances went off differently each time – some electric, some a bit lacklustre, some more musically correct, some all over the shop. As Jon Laird, conductor and choirmaster, said: “We’re riding the wave of uncertainty – again.” It’s the nature of working with enthusiastic amateurs I expect, and part of the challenge to all those involved.

(Jon also said a few other things during note-bashing – his entertaining approach to learning is one of the main reasons the amateurs show up again and again despite all the hard work. His encouragements veer between backhanded compliments, screeching impressions of the sopranos, perfect analogies and random metaphors: “It’s hell – and then it suddenly makes sense”; “Good. Good and terrible”; “You’re flailing around in a sea of pain”; “Can we have less wicked witch of the west and more heavenly angels please ladies”; “This is a beautiful tapestry of joyous Russian STUFF”; and so on.)

Here are the sopranos being obedient while trying to read the repetitively rhythmic words and also watch Jon for cues.

Apart from feeling like you’re in a real-life version of Faking It, joining the Birmingham Opera Company is a real social event for the participants. The Wedding had 120 in the company; Othello more than double that. Here are my fellow brides and I milling about ahead of the opening scene.

The after-parties are pretty great too… it’s where the temporary bar gets drunk dry.

I did keep a diary during the making of Othello until it got too busy and manic. I must get around to posting that here or somewhere because I really would encourage anyone who enjoys singing to get involved (next production is in spring 2012). It’s a long time to wait though. And at the moment I am full of post-performance MEH! So until then I may as well wallow in these photos of my big fat fake mass wedding and my lovely Sop 1 bridezillas, such as Annabel and Judith pictured here, who got the best dresses by far. Sadly for us the honeymoon is now over.

Pictures: © Pete Ashton, Nicola Duke, Birmingham Opera Company and Judith Holt.

Why Birmingham Flickrmeets rawk and possibly create an opportunity local adventure tourism – check out the full story over on my travel blog. Meanwhile, here is a slideshow of yesterday’s concrete loveliness – or view the full set on Spaghetti Junction Flickrmeet:

Whose Line Is It Anyway - screenshot by Skitzitilby/Flickr

After a week of unusual nights out– featuring trampolining, Balkan and Israeli folk dancing and ukulele to name three – tonight had the potential to be the weirdest yet.

The Box of Frogs theatre impro workshop is held in Moseley, Birmingham’s arty, crusty and eclectic postcode, every Tuesday evening. For just a fiver, you can revisit your inner child for two hours of pretend, singing, mirroring, general making things up on the spot and playing games called things like ‘Zip Zap Boing’.

Now let me just say, I am not the dramatic type and hate being put on the spot. I used to be very shy and hid behind my mother’s skirts when people came to the house. I also hated acting at school and found it false, stressful and humiliating. As an adult I can hardly breathe when speaking in public. Oh and being a ginger, I blush to the roots.

And yet… I admire people who can perform naturally, who can wing it at a talk or who can give a confident or charming presentation. And there is something (megalomania?) within me that drives me towards taking the lead. I also seem to have an occasional exhibitionist streak and have sung/played on stage (for Gordon Brown) in what now seems like another lifetime.

Finding an improv session in Birmingham was part of my SXSW Interactive follow-up, after feeling particularly inspired by the fun, games and confidence-building at a session called Improv Lessons for Freelancers.

Box of Frogs featured seven players and was fascinating, supportive and not at all embarrassing. This was unexpected considering that tonight I have had to perform a contemporary dance about dog walking, sing in fluent nonsense and play a bank manager so obsessed with a potential loan customer’s spectacles that she just had to touch them and get them for herself.

Because the great thing about improv is that nothing you do is wrong! For once, the brain can take a day off from fretting about getting it right.

Which was a particularly good thing – because I spent the first 10 minutes in the church next door doing vocal exercises with the local choir.

Now that’s what I call improv!