“How do you meet Mr Right and not Mr Very Very Wrong?” asks Fiona Sprott from touring performance group Unreasonable Adults. Domination, violence, serial murder and corpses are images we may associate with the underworld – dark and something separate from ourselves. But when we add images of transformation, modern myths, painful break-ups, medical examinations, looking for love in the city and stories of great iconic figures, we end up with something closer to our own living room. Enter SPILL Festival of Performance being held in London from 2-22 April and addressing all of the above from a decidedly socially engaged place.
Robert Pacitti, Festival Director and Director of Pacitti Company, hand-picked the live art programme. Talking to Arts Hub, Pacitti explained that every artist in the programme “is working with processes of re-presenting domestically familiar environments”. Pacitti says this is “difficult territory” when we are talking about experiences commonly “spactacularised” in television dramas and glossy magazines. SPILL Festival performances address the familiar from a new angle by cross-examining how we understand our own and our communities’ experiences – whether through the media or real life – and internalise them.
SPILL encompasses performance, live art and experimental theatre. Crossing artforms this weekend sees shows by Forced Entertainment, Unreasonable Adults
and Julia Bardsley (who performed to capacity crowds over the Easter break), along with Pacitti Company’s second of three presentations, Civil, which takes the author and raconteur Quentin Crisp’s autobiography The Naked Civil Servant as it’s starting point.
But what about Mr Right and the serial killers? Fiona Sprott, a writer, and Jason Sweeney, director & technician, are from Unreasonable Adults, a performance/media collective all the way from Adelaide who are performing at the festival with live event, The Last To See Them Alive: Sex, Slaughter and the City, in its world premiere at Soho Theatre. The performance not only poses the fascinating question, “How do you meet Mr Right in an age of Serial Killers?”, but explores what it means to be the victim and/or victor in the game of serial murder and serial monogamy in the big city. The piece is an unsettling mix of monologue, music, song, video confession, direct audience address and live acts of transgression.
As the title suggests, it examines the stories of women’s experience as depicted in the conflicting narratives of the television series ‘Sex and the City’ and ‘Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.’ Herself a crime fiction addict, Sprott asks, “at what point do these narratives become embodied knowledge about women in the city?” The writings of Isabel Cristina Pinedo on recreational terror in regards to horror films, explores how western society is obsessed with turning the inside of the body out, and the outside environments (and media) inside. But it’s the way in which we digest our experience that is brought to the forefront of the SPILL Festival, particularly through Unreasonable Adults – like the creation of mystery stories from real crimes (Jack the Ripper), that results in the “mapping of city spaces through desire and fear”, says Sprott. She reflects that it is interesting that “this mapping has essentially not changed from the Victorian era to the modern era”.
Unreasonable Adults also depicts the variety of the SPILL festival, and examines society’s way of seeing by mismatching content with technology. Jason Sweeney explains that they use familiar forums that audiences can relate to – like the talk show – but combine it with an academic lecture. On this basis, “the audience submit things to us and depending on what choices they make, changes the performance content on the night”. A strangely familiar environment, but possibly out of context. Is it through the framework of live art that an audience-driven analysis is best situated?
As the only current live art festival in London, Pacitti is the first successful initiator in a number of years, after the accomplishments of LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre) which ran until 2004. It appears that the biggest city in the UK is perhaps under-representing this artform. Robert Pacitti agrees that live art, experimental theatre and performance exists in London largely through individual artists’ own practices – and is not currently founded within institutions or organisations in the UK – unlike the good ol’ days at the ICA during Lois Keidan’s directorship.
Why is this an issue? Because there is such an urgency for social dialogue around the issues that SPILL addresses, and Pacitti agrees. Fortunately, there are many other cities in the UK holding live art fests that are in turn fulfilling this need along with SPILL, that do not fit the frame of dance or theatre per se. To name a few: Fierce in Birmingham; The NOW Fest and Sensitive Skin in Nottingham; the ever-building success of the NRLA in Glasgow; and Arnolfini’s Inbetween Time – Festival of Live Art & Intrigue in Bristol. Creative production company Home’s outlandish Church Ale Performance Festival in Suffolk is geographically the closest live art festival to London other than SPILL, and due to be repeated next year and in 2010.
Laura Godfrey Isaacs from Home told ArtsHub that she feels there must be something said though, for the Byte programme @ the Barbican, the Chelsea Theatre and The Place within which live art is included under the greater framework of dance or theatre programming. Pacitti agrees that the fact remains that not only are live art programmes such as SPILL dealing with the identity of our communities within this work, but are dealing with the identity of the artform itself.
Robert Pacitti says it’s a question of how we frame our work, when “we take what we want from political and social culture, and film and music, and disregard the rest. And that’s alright. It means though that we are going to have to come up with new ways of writing and speaking about what we do.” One only need know the range of venues SPILL presents in – Soho Theatre, Shunt (underground vaults), The Barbican, Southbank Centre & Toynbee Studios – to recognise that this showcase of international artists does not sit comfortably on either the fringe, nor in the mainstream: an aim for Robert Pacitti was to have SPILL Festival accessible to a large range of viewers.
As Mary Paterson writes, SPILL is essentially about working with people, art that involves conversations and the working through of conflicts. The festival concludes with a Grand Finale performance, a culmination from Pacitti Company’s workshop processes internationally, whereby artists who have participated in Pacitti’s workshops near their homes are brought to London to perform in the Finale.
The role that public funders have in instilling the frameworks of live artforms through persistent instruction leaves a lot of questions to be answered – as outlined in a new book entitled Nature Of The Beast by Richard Hylton in relation to the visual arts over the past 30 years. But as Pacitti says, it is up to the individual artist to be honest and brave.
