Even at the beginning of the decade it would have been hard to imagine that London could sustain a three week festival of national and international experimental theatre such as Spill. Who would have thought that a venue such as Forest Fringe could not just survive, but actually thrive in Edinburgh in August and that weekends of scratch performances at BAC would regularly sell out?
These developments are not happening in a vacuum. The long-time work of festivals such as LIFT or the BITE seasons – programmed by the indefatigable Louise Jeffreys – at the Barbican paved the way; in Edinburgh Aurora Nova proved that there were big Edinburgh audiences for visual and physical theatre; the Live Arts Development Agency (now celebrating its 10th birthday) and a raft of new risk-taking young producers have helped support and develop more experimental work. As has been pointed out in these posts before, the UK has a long history of experimental performance going back to 1960s companies such as the People Show and Pip Simmons; it's just that that history has seldom been honoured in quite the same way as more traditional theatre.
I may be being blindly optimistic, but the day when the UK's experimental theatre culture is valued as much as our ability to stage a really good production of Ivanov or King Lear is drawing ever nearer. Back in 2007 when Robert Pacitti, fed up with taking the Pacitti Company all over the globe, came up with the idea for Spill, he probably didn't anticipate just how quickly the festival would become a success. Spill boasts a programme that includes a mix of major international artists such as Romeo Castellucci and Jan Fabre as well new work from Rajni Shah, Mem Morrison, Robin Deacon, Forced Entertainment, Julia Bardsley and Gob Squad. It's a fabulous programme and you can salivate over the entire thing here.
But why is Spill so important? Well, for a start it is artist-led. Secondly it is feeding a real audience hunger to see this kind of work – in 2007's three-week long festival, 91% of tickets were sold. But perhaps most importantly, it establishes a context through a programme that sets the work of Ron Athey and Lee Adams side by side with that of Grace Ellen Barkey's Need Company, of Tim Etchells's extraordinary Victoria project That Night Follows Day, and then allows room to discuss and respond to it through feasts and forums. There is even a thinker-in-residence, the wonderful Kira O'Reilly who will be hosting a number of salons.
There is so much that appeals it is hard to pick out any particular highlights but I reckon Athey's and Adams's Visions of Excess, a 12-hour communion on the themes of death, eroticism and the forbidden featuring an amazing array of artists, will be one of the most unmissable events of the year. If I were you I wouldn't tarry, because a lot of the programme will sell out before you can say Georges Bataille.
