Since its inception in 2007 SPILL Festival of Performance has done a lot to widen the landscape of experimental and radical performance. Year on year curator Robert Pacitti has produced an international programme of work that maintains its integrity while also achieving inclusivity, with over two thirds of audiences coming for the first time. No mean feat.

Run Riot was lucky enough to speak to Pacitti about how the SPILL team have nurtured audience growth within savvy internet communities and through their Think Tank programme in Ipswich. Community also forms the heart of his thinking around making the arts financially sustainable - this year’s focus is ‘on spirit’ and his punchy answers show he’s on suitably spirited form.

It’s a theme that places the festival not only as a force for change but one for good. The programme includes work by seminal performance maker Karen Finley; Zierle & Carter who are exploring the place of dying in our lives; Robin Deacon on how outmoded technologies are being used to revisit previous hopes and dreams; a purging procession to raise spirits by Kris Canavan; with the festival concluding in a spectacular live fire stunt by Cassils at the National Theatre, which will ignite painfully vital questioning about activism and protest.

Pacitti is issuing a clarion call for artists to play a part in reshaping the negative narratives that threaten to take over our modern world. As he says, we can’t just wait for the winds of change: this year is about activism. Let’s get stuck in.

Run Riot: This year's theme is On Spirit and you've said that there is a focus on positivity. I wonder if this a political choice? Where, if at all, does SPILL sit within the matrix of the Politics of Hope espoused by Jeremy Corbyn in direct opposition to a right wing government that promotes fear?

Robert Pacitti: Many years ago a wise friend once told me that she believed the most dangerous time we could live in was one where we had the capacity for collective negative thought. This is a powerful and terrifying concept, one that has stayed with me for over three decades. In that time the advent of the web and latterly social media has enabled us to connect in real time, around the globe, with all the possibilities – and consequences – that affords.

We live in an age of unprecedented technological change, where the fundamental tenets of how we have lived for eons are being put at stake in new ways; our relationships to land, food, energy, shelter, conflict, belief, wealth, health, education – all of these and more are being shaped and dictated at a macro level by undemocratically elected and often unaccountable groups. At the same time the world continues to be an amazing, extraordinary, mysterious place. So I believe a significant role artists can play is reflecting our realities, perhaps in unexpected ways, in order to then offer up new possibilities as to how we might progress. Much like wise women and shamans play key social and political roles in cultures that care enough to still cherish them, so too artists can help us collectively thrive.

At the centre of this are our bodies and minds. That makes performance deeply and inherently political. This surpasses any question as to whether or not I personally support Jeremy Corbyn – I don’t know if I think that is any more important, or not, as to whether I have a particular football team I like. I think we would benefit greatly from escaping binary options that all too often contain our true responses.

So SPILL willfully offers complex, energised, messy, angry, contradictory, ecstatic multiple-choice throughout.

Run Riot: Spirit also evokes faith and belief - to take a chance on something you can't prove and celebrate the ephemeral. Did spirituality play any part in your thinking also?

Robert Pacitti: My impulse to curate around notions of spirit started from something slightly different – foregrounding a spirit of defiance, resistance. I do indeed have a life long interest and engagement with areas that may be considered esoteric, which obviously informs my thinking and my taste. But I am also interested in SPILL being driven by activism. When analysis and clarity and will and action come together, that’s the stuff that really excites me.

Run Riot: You have said in the past that SPILL is curated, not programmed. What to your mind is the difference?

Robert Pacitti: SPILL is put together thematically. This edition is on spirit, whilst others have been on surrender, on infection, on agency etc. These themes are devices that enable us to use SPILL as a prism to think about contemporary issues in hopefully new ways. This happens first and foremost through the performances on show which tend to be a mix of works that have been commissioned or specially made for the festival, and pieces of existing work which either haven’t been seen much elsewhere or are a particular fit with my aims. So the primary curatorial expression is through the actual art. But presenting the festival as a prism also happens through the order you might encounter that work in, so scheduling plays a role; it happens through themed conversations about topics that perhaps at first don’t seem obviously related but which, it becomes apparent, are wholly connected and relevant (an example this year might be the Dress Your Rage salon); SPILL has a Thinker-in-Residence (who this year is Topher Campbell) and a Writer-in-Residence (Diana Damian Martin) and their activity drives additional context to the programme. These are now essential parts of SPILL.

In combination these mechanisms are all part of the connective tissue that maximises the impact of the works on show with meaningful audience experiences, in ways that I hope continue to resonate long after the festival is over. That for me is the difference between curating and programming SPILL.

Run Riot: SPILL is in London this year but it has run successfully in Ipswich also. What would you say to critics like Michael Billington who have decried the decline in adventurous work in the regions?

Robert Pacitti: “Fuck off you ill informed knob.”

We are not waiting for the winds of change.

Run Riot: The festival has an impressive rate of first time audience members. How do you go about welcoming people who might feel nervous about engaging with radical and experimental work?

Robert Pacitti: We (the SPILL team) are generally a pretty welcoming and friendly bunch, which I hope comes across in the materials we put out about the festival in advance. I personally am really uncomfortable in snobby or elitist spaces and I hope people attending SPILL will find us smiling and having a good time bringing you the festival.

As for the nature of the work: I think experimental live work is seeing an upsurge of audience support because it has come of age in terms of literacy. What I mean by this is that the majority of people, especially young people, navigate online spaces without any difficulty. In this way we build cumulative knowledge and experience. We piece it together as we go, collecting, sharing and retaining bits of stuff that interests us. We increasingly form cluster communities around hybrid stuff that excites us and our engagement is even sometimes directly in the first person. This is fundamentally different from book based learning or traditional narratives with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Spending time with performance can be similar. Our new ways of experiencing knowledge transfer mean we are already literate in non-linear work, maybe without even realizing it. That’s so exciting as it means radial work can be a hugely enriching, real time experience that lots of people can enjoy. Which is why SPILL continues to grow audiences year on year with people that may before have felt it wasn’t for them; and why it can work in a place like Ipswich as well as London.

We also price SPILL to be as genuinely accessible as possible. This year a third of the entire festival is free, elsewhere tickets start at £10 which buys you up to 5-works, a massive bargain. So it’s really easy to take a punt on.

Run Riot: One of the central tenets of SPILL is  the National Platform and Showcase, which profiles new makers and lesser known artists. This is a fantastic opportunity but I feel it must be a responsibility too. How do you make sure you are supporting artists from as diverse a source pool as possible?

Robert Pacitti: The SPILL National Platform and Showcase, which are generously supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, presents the work of early makers and those whose work may have been overlooked. These are a fundamental part of SPILL and are open to artists resident in the UK and Ireland. The SPILL National Platform is open-submission and the SPILL Showcase is an invite-only follow on progression pathway.

To help us make sure the SPILL National Platform call-out reaches as far as possible we work with the Live Art Development Agency and a network of around 40 recommenders across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. These people are fundamental to how we spread the word. This is in addition to all the usual stuff you would expect us to do to online and offline, through artist networks and colleges and the like. When shortlisting we invite a panel of experienced peers to help us and together we make decisions that put the work first. These folk span other festivals and artist support spaces in the UK, ensuring that SPILL really does offer the UK’s truly national platform for radical work. How the opportunity would impact on an artist is also a significant part of our questioning, but really it's all about foregrounding work from the most promising makers we can.

Run Riot: The Think Tank is designed to encourage public discussion. How has this manifested itself in the past and have you seen a wider understanding of live art within your audiences since you began in 2007?

Robert Pacitti: SPILL Think Tank events offer context and are essential to the festival programme. But this work is also year round and helps us determine what happens next.

SPILL is made and produced by Pacitti Company, which works out of our bespoke building based resource in Ipswich which is also called the Think Tank. We set the site up for the ongoing public exploration and study of live performance and associated industries. We welcome broad audiences to a rolling programme of local, national and international events that activate thinking and discussion around live art, performance and wider cultural projects. The programme is accessible and affordable and is led by artists and experts from a range of diverse fields. The Think Tank is also an incubator space that enables artists to spend time in residence, investigate crossovers with radical art practices and culture at large, and to engage with peers and members of the public.

Certainly as live art and performance have become more popular there is greater potential for the work to reach people in places and spaces it wouldn’t have before. But we should remain mindful to respect what has gone before and certainly in Ipswich there is a rich past of radical sound and music that still influences current experimental activity.

So I don’t know if I could say I can chart a wider understanding of live art, but rather that the vital signs for an increased, engaged and up for it audience continue to be good.

Run Riot: As we all know public funding is increasingly in decline, what to your mind are alternative models of financially supporting artists to make exciting work? How do you make the festival pay?

Robert Pacitti: It is hard to make anything like SPILL pay without adopting a much more commercial model. It isn’t my vision for the festival to pay artists considerably less and charge audiences considerably more. So right now we are working hard at plotting how we continue offering what we do, in the ways we do, maximising the support we receive for maximum public benefit and impact.

But make no bones about it, things are going to remain very challenging for some time to come and I am yet to meet anyone who isn’t rich with answers that might work long term under the current Government system. We need to work together and not start fighting because there is increasingly less to go round. I despair of people in the arts who knock others as if somehow we cause each other’s problems, especially when they do it under the umbrella of being ‘more grassroots’ or somehow worthy. Whilst I definitely believe in calling out bad practice or anywhere that money is being squandered, if we can’t respect and support each other I fear for the arts in this country. That seems a big cultural threat across the next decade – that we won’t be able to unite and pull together now we need to, because of petty squabbling and personal ambition, or because ‘they’ve got that and I don’t’. Get over yourself – link arms and care. That’s what SPILL is all about and yes, it’s fucking political.

SPILL Festival of Performance

28 October – 8 November

Various Locations