SPILL Festival of Performance

Published: 26 October 2014
Reporter: Sandra Giorgetti

The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas Credit: Ludovic des Cognets

The SPILL Festival of Performance starts this Wednesday in Ipswich, running for five days.

The programme, put together by Pacitti Company artistic director Robert Pacitti, includes live performance, installation, film and discussion around the theme of ‘Surrender’, with events in various venues across the city.

Pacitti says “This festival seeks radical artistic alternatives for how we might move forward together with regard to art and society and art in society.

"We are honoured to present a truly diverse programme which explores the theme of surrender—physical, law, sex, power, death—with an outstandingly talented group of artists from across the world that over the 5-days will allow us to address the way we interact with art in the present-day.”

Amongst the Festival's highlights are Pacitti commissions and European and world premières reflecting its signature highly-experimental exploration of live performance concepts:

  • Animate Objects in Sonic Action from sound artist and technologist John Bowers and choreographer Mehmet Sander
  • It’s Up To Emma – singer-songwriter Scout Niblett supported by Nathanial Robin Mann
  • The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas the musical reworked by GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN exploring exertion, desire, cliché, the epic and promising to be unlike any musical
  • Bone Library, an evolving work by indigenous Australian performance/installation artist Sarah-Jane Norman on so-called “dead” languages
  • Kinbaku from dance theatre artists Esteban Fourmi and Aoi Nakamura merging immersive experimental physical theatre, digital, Japanese bondage and audio to create an abstract narrative
  • The Poetics of Trespassing from New York/Chicago–based artist Keijuan Thomas, which investigates the histories, symbols and images that construct notions of black identity within black personhood
  • Naked Boys Reading: On Surrender, a special literary salon providing a unique and intimate performance on what it means to give of oneself for the favour of another
  • Siren, award-winning spectacle of mechanical movement, electronic sound and light by artist Ray Lee
  • Are You With Us? an improvised performance, part group therapy, part nightmare, by Gob Squad Art Collective
  • The Machine Legends, a living installation: a performer encased in an airtight latex structure creating a figure that explores the ideals of fictional mythology and the human body

In addition to these and other performances there is a book launch and three SPILL salons: Put Your Hands Up!, The Safe Word Is… and On Death & Dying.

Spill Festival of Performance runs from 29 October to 2 November.

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