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Venues across Birmingham
At Birmingham's Moor Street station, the wonders of karaoke currently allow you to sing a duet with a soldier serving in the British army. I enter a small wooden booth, select a song and find myself face to face with a warrant officer called Sean singing Angels very badly. He's on screen, but it feels as if he's in there with me, singing for me, just as people say he fights for me, too. Should I join in his recording? I surprise myself when I do: our tuneless voices rise and fall in the dark.
Soldier's Song, an installation by the company Quarantine, is just one of the events in Fierce, a festival of live art and performance in streets and spaces across the city that make you see it differently – and hear it differently, too. In the Old Library, there's a red carpet covered in small speakers. Take off your shoes, move closer, and you can hear Birmingham at prayer, in this installation by James Webb. Recordings of traditional Greek Orthodox prayers mingle with Eckankar ones (it's a new religion of light and sound); they curl around each other, sometimes in competition, sometimes in harmony.
Most extraordinary of all is Lundahl & Seitl's Symphony of a Missing Room, at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. In this exhilarating immersive piece, six people at a time are blindfolded, given headphones, and then invited to have a private dream in a public space. It's like falling into your own personal fairytale, finding that secret garden, or going through the wardrobe into Narnia. You are seduced by the gentle voice in your ear, and by the hands that flutter around you like birds. Yet never for a moment do you feel out of control – it is, after all, your own imagination that gives this work its wild power.
