SPILL Festival is an artist-led biennale of theatre and live art in the UK which takes place in a variety of venues in London and Ipswich, England. The festival was produced as 'SPILL Festival of Performance' by the Pacitti Company under Artistic Director Robert Pacitti until 2021. Robin Deacon, the current Artistic Director, took over in 2021.
Launched in 2007, SPILL Festival brings internationally significant and ground-breaking work to Ipswich and the UK. [1]
SPILL Festival also runs year-round events and activities in their SPILL Think Tank venue, which is located next to Ipswich Museum in Ipswich. They also have a large artist development programme, which includes artist residencies, associateships and mentoring.
The festival has been held in various venues and spaces in London and Ipswich, including, The Barbican, Southbank Centre, The National Theatre Studio, Soho Theatre, Shunt Vaults, Shoreditch Town Hall, Greenwich Dance, Laban, Soho Square, and Toynbee Studios.
In addition to the Festival, SPILL National Platform and Showcase takes place every two years in Ipswich and presents artists in the early stages of their career working in the fields of live art, performance and experimental theatre, selected through an open submission process. [2]
This section needs to be updated.(March 2020) |
Productions have included: [3]
At SPILL Festival 2009 there were approximately 100 live performances by artists from Australia, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the U.S. and from across the UK.
Spill Festival 2009
Spill Salons are a public space which bring groups of people together along with a ‘Thinker-in-Residence’ to look at some of the over-riding themes within the Festival. The public salons are where experts from a range of different territories discuss relevant issues affecting performance.
Puppet Animation Scotland, now known as Manipulate Arts, is a Scottish organisation that promotes and develops puppetry and animation as art forms. They hold an annual festival, the Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival, and formerly held the Puppet Animation Festival (1984–2022). In November 2023 the organisation became known as Manipulate Arts. 2024 was the body's fortieth year. As of 2024, Puppet Animation Scotland/Manipulate Arts is supported by Creative Scotland with an annual grant of £180,000. It has three full-time employees; the artistic director is Dawn Taylor.
Glyn Cannon is a British playwright.
Scott Gibbons is an American-born composer and performer of electroacoustic music. His work is notable for its rigorous use of single and unexpected objects as sole instrumentation. Gibbons has also created many works for large-scale spectacle with Groupe F to accompany fireworks, which embraces the sound of pyrotechnics as a part of the musical arrangement.
Malachi Bogdanov is a theatre director. He was Associate Director of the English Shakespeare Company (1997–2000), and directed international tours of productions including A Midsummer Night's Dream, A Threepenny Opera, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus and an award-winning production of Richard the Third. Currently a freelance artist, he has directed over 70 professional shows and works all over the world.
The London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) is a biennial festival of theatre, performance and cultural events. The organisation also supports year-round activity in London. The organisation was founded by Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal, with the first festival in 1981 hoping to ‘challenge British theatre and open a window on the world’.
Robin Deacon is an artist, writer and filmmaker. His interdisciplinary practice has spanned a variety of disciplines and themes, including explorations of performer presence and absence, the role of the artist as biographer, the possibility for journalistic approaches to arts practice, and the mapping and ethics of performance re-enactment. He graduated from Cardiff School of Art in 1996, and went on to present his performances and videos at conferences and festivals in the UK and internationally in Europe, USA and Asia. His work has been commissioned and programmed by venues such as The ICA, London (1996), The Young Vic, London (2000), CCCB, Barcelona (2006), Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna (2007) and the Centre d'art Scenique Contemporain Lausanne, Switzerland (2009), Tate Britain, London (2014) and the Barbican Centre, London (2015). He has also been artist in residence at MacDowell, New Hampshire, USA (2017) Sophiensaele, Berlin (2005), Camden Arts Centre London (2006) and Robert Wilson's Watermill Center, New York, USA (2009). He has received a variety of awards and fellowships from organizations such as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Delfina Foundation, British Arts Council, Live Art Development Agency and Franklin Furnace Inc. Between 2003 and 2012, he was an Associate Artist of contemporary artists producing organization Artsadmin. From 2004, he was Course Director of the Drama and Performance Studies program at London South Bank University before relocating to the USA in 2011. After ten years spent as Professor and Chair of Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Robin returned to the UK in 2021 to take up the role of Artistic Director and CEO of the Spill Festival of Performance.
Duckie is a collective of performance artists that describes itself as "a Post Gay independent arts outfit." They produce a mix of so-called "cultural interventions", such as club nights, new-mode pop, burlesque and performance events, as well as anti-theatre experimentation. They have described their work as "mixing the arthouse with the dosshouse" and putting "highbrow performance in backstreet pubs and lowbrow performance in posh theatres".
WildWorks is an international site-specific theatre company based in Cornwall, England.
Non zero one are an artist collective formed of Sarah Butcher, Iván González, Cat Harrison, John Hunter, Fran Miller and Alex Turner. They also work with other artists in association. The collective formed in early 2009, after meeting one another via their undergraduate studies at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Bryony Kimmings is a British live artist based in London and Cambridgeshire. She is an associate artist of the Soho Theatre, and, in 2016, was commissioned to write The Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer for Complicite Associates.
Romeo Castellucci is an Italian theatre director, playwright, artist and designer. Since the 1980s he has been one part of the European theatrical avant-garde.
Forced Entertainment is an experimental theatre company based in Sheffield, England, founded by Tim Etchells in 1984.
Rajni Shah is a British performance artist, writer and producer. Their work ranges from interactive works that involve the public to large-scale performances. They have performed in the UK, Europe and USA, including the National Review of Live Art, Alternate ROOTS, Tanzquartier Wien, Arnolfini Bristol, Nuffield Lancaster, SpielArt Munich and the Chelsea Theatre.
The Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (SRS) is an Italian experiential theater company founded in 1981. Its initial development was part of movement in Italian theater which did not require a background in theater but was influenced by rock, poetry, comics, television and more. By the end of the 1990s, the work done by this group had influenced a number of newer groups, winning awards for various works. The performances of this company shuns conventional coherent narrative and focuses more on visual and auditory impact, using silences, word fragments and even animals and machines as performers. The company is based in Cesena, near Bologna, Italy where it has its own theater, but it has performed in various venues in Europe, Asia, Oceana, and the Americas.
Verona Verbakel is a Belgian actress.
Jackie Wylie is a Scottish cultural event organizer. She has been the artistic director and chief executive of the National Theatre of Scotland since 2017. She founded the Glasgow-based international performance festival Take Me Somewhere, and was artistic director of The Arches from 2008 to 2015.
Sarah Grochala is a British playwright. Her plays have been performed at the Finborough Theatre, Theatre503, Hampstead Theatre, Arcola Theatre and Soho Theatre in London. Her plays have been produced internationally by the Griffin Theatre, Sydney, Tiyatro Yan Etki Istanbul, Turkey and on the Toronto Fringe Toronto Fringe Festival, Canada. Her book on playwriting, The Contemporary Political Play, was published in 2017.
Marisa Carr, who performs as Marisa Carnesky, is a British live artist and showwoman. She uses spectacular entertainment forms, including fairground devices and stage illusion, and draws on themes of contemporary ritual, to investigate social issues from an ecofeminist perspective. Time Out declared that Carnesky's 'unique niche of interactive end-of-the-pier esoterica has fused ghost trains, anatomical models and tattoo culture with religion, feminism and class consciousness in ways both playful and rewardingly demanding.'
Julia Bardsley is an artist working with performance, video, photography, sculptural objects and the configuration of the audience. Her work challenges definitions of theatre and has been described as 'a major force in British experimental theatre and live art'.