• SPILL FESTIVAL OF PERFORMANCE

• ON SURRENDER

• (2014)

Live • International •  Artist-led • Ipswich

SPILL Festival 2014 - On Surrender took place at sites across Ipswich over a very full five days. For this festival, we took over the recently vacated Ipswich Police Station as a site-specific location. 105 live events included the mesmeric Incorruptible Flesh: Messianic Remains by the legendary Ron Athey, the deeply moving Bone Library by SJ Norman, and the fierce The Poetics of Trespassing by Keijaun Thomas. The programme presented the fifth edition of the SPILL National Platform, alongside gigs, parties, a SPILL Cafe, SPILL Thinker in Residence (Cassils), SPILL Onscreen programme, SPILL Think Tank programme, SPILL Writing, SPILL Feasts, and SPILL TV & Photography.

For SPILL's sixth edition - and its second in Ipswich - SPILL 2014 presented over 100 events in theatres, galleries, civic buildings, cinemas, an old church, and inside a nuclear bunker. A full festival takeover of the recently vacated Ipswich Police Station also added a sweet thematic air to the general proceedings. Artists in the curation hailed from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the USA. The theme of Surrender was explored through lenses of physical surrender, surrender to law, sex, power, death and dying, religion, economics, and the impact of mass culture. But also resistance too - from the clarion call of Ray Lee's Siren, to the charged howl of Scout Niblett, the smash of bodies against hard surfaces in the work of Mehmet Sander and John Bowers, to the charge of cultural trespass in that of both Keijaun Thomas and S.J. Norman, from the transformative brilliance of Ron Athey to the sheer guts of Mouse, this festival amplified its contempt for an increasingly homogenised world.