SPILL Festival of Performance

SPILL Festival of Performance is an international festival of live art, activism and performance presenting the work of exceptional artists from around the globe. For its eighth edition over 100 events will take place at 22 great locations across Ipswich, Suffolk from Wednesday 26 to Sunday 30 October.

This edition’s overarching festival theme is EN MASSE, exploring ideas of being together, as a group, all at once. SPILL Commissions this year include work from Mem Morrison, Mike Challis, Shabnam Shabazi, Shaun Caton, and Martin O’Brien working with Sheree Rose.

The UK & Ireland wide SPILL National Platform returns with 35 works from early makers and on Wed 26 Oct the SPILL Symposium will take place at the University of Suffolk – a day long gathering taking the pulse of where radical, activist and politicised performance is at. The full session line-ups produced by Pacitti Company and developed in dialogue with Live Art Development Agency can be found below.

Opening keynote
Jude Kelly (Artistic Director, Southbank Centre) (on screen)

Session 1: whose institutions? How can we reimagine and reassign cultural power structures?
Adelaide Bannerman (Curator and project manager), Jordan McKenzie (Artist), Sonya Dyer (Artist, writer, curator), Chair: Diana Damian Martin (Critic, curator and academic)

Session 2: please, after you … New models of stewardship
John McGrath (Artistic Director, Manchester International Festival), Nancy Groves (Commissioning editor, culture, The Guardian), Roger Wright (CEO, Aldeburgh Music), Chair: Lois Keidan (Co-director, Live Art Development Agency)

Afternoon keynote
Ria Hartley (Artist, Researcher, Educator)

Session 3: free radicals - New models of community practice
Leisa Shelton (Artist), Rosana Cade (Performance maker, co-founder Buzzcut), Shabnam Shabazi (Artist, maker, enabler), Chair: Matt Fenton (Artistic Director, Contact Theatre)

Session 4: I Have a Dream - Models + tools for the future
Joon Lynn Goh (Senior Producer, In Between Time), Larry Achiampong (Artist), Martin O’Brien (Artist), Chair: Johanna Linsley (Artist, writer, producer)

Access is something we take very seriously as makers of SPILL Festival and we work year round on how to best serve the diverse needs of all our guests and visitors. All venues in the festival have step free access or easy-to-use lifts to relevant floors. Over a third of all events are free with top price tickets just £10. Day and All-Seeing passes offer the best value for those wanting to see lots across the Festival. Much of the work in SPILL is highly visual and lots of it is sensory in a number of ways. This year we have selected ten events that use more spoken word for British Sign Language interpretation.

This SPILL Festival includes three new branded strands of work that aim to attract and appeal to new broader audiences. Sound + Music, Kids + Families and Heritage + Place all cater to specific interests.

SPILL Think Tank events will take place at the SPILL Dome; a friendly pop-up place to gather, from daily coffee mornings and kids events in the afternoon, to spoken word and live music and DJs - all completely free. Taking the form of daily coffee mornings, How To Be Together is a series of public conversations hosted each morning of the festival by SPILL Think-in-Residence Johanna Linsley. On Fri 28 October, a Producer Gathering will be hosted by Sally Rose and Xavier de Sousa and is offered to connect independent producers, artists, and anyone interested in the practice of producing.

We look forward to sharing an incredible line up with you and creating a special SPILL atmosphere together. Be sure to take a risk – it’s good for the soul.

Categories: Featured Activity

Date Posted: 20 September 2016