From Gay Saunas in Virtual Reality to the Gothic Crowds That Inspired Cloudo: Festival Storms

Venues across Birmingham are gearing up for the return of the UK's longest-running live arts festival, with late-night artists' suppers, a poolside performance, and Fee Driscoll's incredible disintegration while spinning. Hmm, is this performance bafflingly self-indulgent or deeply profound? Sometimes it can be both. In fact, it's not just two of them.

The phrase "two things can be true" is a recurring phrase in popular psychology, and I think it's a frequent response to watching live art from a distance. Hmmm, is this performance confusingly self-indulgent or downright profound? Sometimes it can be both. In fact, it's not just two things that can be true, but as many people as the audience, because it's all about living mental experience in the moment. Presence and communication

Launched in 1998, Fierce is the UK's longest running live arts festival. For a week, it takes over conventional Birmingham theaters alongside unconventional spaces, notably in former industrial Digbeth, which is fast becoming a creative hub. Also on this year's bill: late-night artist dinners, a pool show, and a six-hour performance in a large Gothic hall that apparently inspired Cluedo.

There is a focus on sensuality and sensuality. It's all about the physical body. But the first piece I experienced was actually in virtual reality: Through the Fog, by Taiwanese artist Tong-Yen Chu. The setting is a gay sauna and the VR technology is impressive. You walk through gray concrete hallways, changing rooms, showers, cubicles, pulling aside curtains you know aren't really there. You can open doors, pick up items, press elevator buttons. You are the observer of a strange scene run by men with odd faces. There is a sense of seeking, but there is zero pleasure or enjoyment to be found

This experience is a combination of immersive and isolated. It's fascinating and yet terrifyingly lonely – and also unnerving when the ground disappears and messes with your sense of depth. You feel, but what you feel is precisely the lack of connection. (Chu also shows a short, sit-down VR piece called In the Mist, which was a precursor to a longer work, but is essentially sad porn.)

What you miss in VR is the smells, the heat, the sweat. But don't worry, there are plenty of these elsewhere. Wojciech Grodzinski's sweaty, hairy, all-human body is front and center in his solo trio, as he performs inverted wings on a shoulder stand and other yoga moves wearing bottomless hooks. In her voiceover, she tells of three Polish ballet dancers who were shamed for their homosexuality, and the trio is her attempt to reclaim her true identity and make peace with her "terrible" body. Is a series of declination contractions followed by a lunge jig and repetition the best way to do this? Well, that's the Grodzinski method. And it's strangely compelling, kind of cathartic, with the light and the music and the defiant mood.

The artist Melissandre Varin goes by the name n:u and calls himself "atmosphere maker", which is an interesting brand and perhaps modifies the audience's expectations. Fierce is a thoroughly international festival, but n:u used to be based in Birmingham, although the act is rooted in its Congolese, Guadeloupe and Benin heritage. I caught part of the rehearsal of the FREE(HOLD) piece, an opaque ritual in which performers loop ropes around their ankles and long for the sky. Endurance, suffering, slavery and colonialism all came to mind.

It's a festival full of fascinating topics and conversation starters, but American choreographer Faye Driscoll blows everyone out of the water with her acclaimed and award-winning piece Weathering, which makes its UK debut here. Driscoll's work is several levels higher in concept, commitment, execution and scale. It's basically 10 performers on a rotating platform, a living tableau, or perhaps less of a living tableau than a living tableau, slowly distorting and decaying under the gravity of life's pressures or just the passage of time.

It's a piece full of jumbled bodies – when the performers enter in puffy jackets and crossbody bags and glasses, it's immediately clear that these are human beings, not 'dancers', layers that are gradually shed because this is, after all, living art. But these objects also exhibit incredible control, with the multiplayer moving so slowly at first that it's almost imperceptible. It's intense and impressive, and above all, it grabs your attention and the imagery is ready for extrapolation - especially the sense of instability, of humans clinging to their unstable home as things begin to spiral out of control.