ABOUT FATT PROJECTS
Fatt Projects is a Birmingham based queer performance company.
We are a queer and neurodiverse-led arts organisation creating queer performance, events, workshops, development programmes and cultural projects.
We are champions of dancefloors, drag, DIY, high-camp, and low-budget low-culture, working nationally and rooted locally: supporting the conditions for queer culture, creativity, connection and community-building in Birmingham and the West Midlands.
Our approach is thoughtful, methodical & reflective, and we work to meet our communities with care at the intersections we find them, and to address the barriers placed upon them head-on.
Our work advances community freedom, capacity, and healing, through collective acts of joy, learning or resistance. In this, we are unapologetic, loud, and “full-fat”.
Our work is guided by our core values of possibility, invitation, purpose, reciprocity, and foundation.
POSSIBILITY - We want more for our communities than to be defined by the way others have treated us. We believe it is our right to imagine and shape our futures on our own terms with curiosity, care and experimentation. We want our work to be open to all those who need it, and commit to offer accommodation, flexibility, and accessibility wherever we can. Only together can we build the bright, rich, hopeful, passionate, tender, chaotic, transcendent, and indefinable futures we long for.
INVITATION - We want to do more inviting in rather than coming out now. Invitation creates the space and permission for imagination and participation. We want our work to offer agency and kinship to those who see something of themselves in it. We recognise the value of specificity about who the work is for, which allows us to prioritise and protect the communities we work with. We also recognise our responsibility to care and accountability when inviting others in.
PURPOSE - We see our queerness as a gift and our compass. It offers a way to understand and navigate the world. It gives intention and shape to our work, ensuring clarity, direction, and a sense of purpose in everything we do, and to honour our vision and integrity without compromise.
RECIPROCITY - We want relationships built on mutual exchange and collaboration rather than extraction. We recognise the energy, care, knowledge and labour that others contribute to our work. We aim for the relationships and projects we develop to have positive impact and lasting value. We welcome dialogue - we want others to invite us to learn, rethink, and grow with them.
FOUNDATION - We invest time and rigour in listening and consultation. We recognise that success will only be achieved if our work is built on trust, understanding and responding proactively and with meaning to the needs and values of the communities we work with, and are part of. You can’t put on a good face without the right foundation.
Fatt Projects’ work has been supported by Cambridge Junction, Birmingham Hippodrome, Without Walls, Birmingham Commonwealth Games 2022, DanceXchange, Home Live Art, Appetite Stoke, Greenwich Docklands International Festival, Marlborough Productions, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Esmee Fairburn Foundation, Jerwood Arts, and Arts Council England.