Welcome to Spill: Overspill 2009

In 2007, as part of Live Art UK’s Writing From Live Art, Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson wrote responses to the Spill festival. For 2009 Mary and Rachel Lois are back, collaborating as Open Dialogues, with a new and improved Spill: Overspill.

Spill: Overspill
is a tailor-made critical writing programme, designed by Open Dialogues and produced in association with Pacitti Company. The programme is located at the heart of the Spill festival and explores the event of criticism in relation to performance.

The aim of Spill: Overspill is to respond critically to the work shown, and to create a realtime discursive context for the Spill festival: one that spills out of the usual confines of a festival to a diverse UK and international audience.

The methodology


Open Dialogues works from a position of reciprocity with art and artists in which criticism or critical writing is an intellectual encounter between writing and art. It is writing on, for, about, and as art. Spill: Overspill is produced within this methodology and is overtly embedded, collaborative, critical and located in close proximity to performance. The Spill: Overspill programme will explore this relationship and its critical implications.

The community

The Spill: Overspill community consists of 7 London based writing and performance practitioners. Together, the group will gain access to behind the scenes and rehearsal sessions, develop collaborations with individual festival artists, devise textual interventions, take part in Spill Think Tank activities and publish writing in response to the festival. This writing will appear on this blog, in the forthcoming Spill Festival publication and in a range of UK and international journals.

The Spill: Overspill writers are David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Mary Kate Connolly, Alex Eisenberg, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Mary Paterson and Theron Schmidt.

More details about the individual writers and their particular research interests are forthcoming. Meanwhile, we look forward to meeting you at the festival if you are coming to London. And if you are not making the trip, we hope you enjoy the Spill: Overspill writing and invite you to post your responses to it here.

Mary Paterson and Rachel Lois Clapham