Surrender

In this one-off event an exciting line up of artists explore what happens when they surrender themselves to forces they don't control – to the rigours of technique, to an inescapable rhythm, to a secret code, or by tuning in to other powers.

Expect a day of playful experiment and serious entertainment, with food and conversation.

Bradford born & based chef, artist and creative producer Sonia Sandhu will be serving a shared lunch which traces the themes of surrender through her menu – surrendering to the influence of heritage, to the power of time and processes that evolve through fermentation, pickling and slow cooking.

Across the afternoon, see performances unfold throughout the space.

How does it feel to surrender together?

Schedule

12–1.30pm Performances
1.30–2.30pm Lunch
2.30–5pm Performances
5–6pm Bar open

Tickets are Pay What You Can and include lunch and refreshments.

Line up: Åbäke; Gillian Dyson; Tara Fatehi; Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera; Samir Kennedy and Sean Murray; Samra Mayanja and Kathy Gray; POPPERFACE and Richard Pye; Imogen Reeve & Co.; Sonia Sandhu; Nicola Singh; Eve Stainton and Florence Peake.

Read more about the artists below.

About the line up

Åbäke

Fifty words to fairly define twenty years of activities is a truly challenging affair. Solicited or not short self-written biographies predate selfies but somehow follow similar rules of editing a version of oneself until we start to look very attractive indeed. We would start by saying that åbäke is a

Gillian Dyson is a Yorkshire-based solo and collaborative performance artist, academic and teacher. Dyson has over 30 years’ experience of performing and exhibiting nationally and internationally, including performing recently in the International Forum of Performance, Dráma, Greece, 2024; a collaborative online performance for Together Elsewhere: Performance Art Network Switzerland, Performance Art Bergan, 2025, and participating with the Parlour Collective, in the prestigious Kone Foundation/Saari Residence in Mynämäki, Finland 2025.

Tara Fatehi works across performance, voice, movement and text, exploring playfulness, mistranslation, and confusion in times of collapse. She is the co-founder of From the Lips to the Moon music and poetry show, creator and author of Mishandled Archive (365 performances and a book LADA, 2020) and the first ever resident artist at the UN Archives in Geneva.

Samir Kennedy and Sean Murray are ‘a pair of faggots and fools’ brought together by a mutual interest in the filthy and the glamorous, the pathetic and the perverse.

Samir Kennedy is an interdisciplinary artist based between London and Marseille, working across choreography, performance, sound, and video. He explores themes of class, race, queerness, and abjection through archetypal figures like the devil and clown, creating speculative narratives that challenge conventional identities.

Sean Murray is a UK-based artist whose practice centres dance, cabaret, design, and performance. Their work plays on queerness, abstraction, camp, excess, and the absurd, engaging with instability and uncertainty while deconstructing and reforming structures.

Samra Mayanja is a London-based artist and writer. She’s interested in the voice; that part of the body that leaves us and the absurdity of seeking what is inherently lost, ‘a clown-like pursuit of the impossible’. She has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and theatres, including Cambridge Junction, The Oval, Somerset House, Kampnagel and Transmediale.

Imogen Reeve is a choreographer working at the intersection of dance, technology, and feminist thought. Her work radically reimagines the relationship between bodies and machines, creating performances and systems in which humans and artificial intelligences co-create. Rooted in feminist perspective, her practice interrogates the biases embedded in emerging technologies and repositions the body as a site of resistance, intelligence, and transformation.

Eve Stainton is an artist and choreographer born in Manchester, living in London, UK. They create dramatic multi-disciplinary performances that involve movement, live welding, digital collage, manual labour and ways of constructing suspense. Their research is rooted in community, interested in how differently marginalised people come into relationship with power structures and societal conventions. Often working with codes of gender, class and threat.

Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice since 1995, presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and the public realm. By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, Peake creates radical and outlandish performances, which in turn generate temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience.

POPPERFACE disrupts traditional choreographic methodologies, creating performances deeply rooted in working-class experience, queer masculinity, and radical individualism. His practice draws inspiration from MMA, Butoh, horror cinema and opera. His work has been presented internationally in Tel Aviv, Berlin, Melbourne, and Vienna. In 2021, he served as Associate Director for Welsh National Opera and was a Jerwood Fellow. The first instalment of his POPPERFACE trilogy, REVENGE, premiered at Chapter Arts and The Place in 2022 and is set to tour the UK in 2026.

Nicola Singh is a British-Punjabi artist working across improvisational new music, visual art and somatics. Her current research explores esoteric sonic practices. She is currently training in Dhrupad with Pandit Uday Bhawalkar.

Eisa Jocson is an interdisciplinary artist based in La Union, Philippines. Trained as a visual artist with a background in ballet, she came to contemporary dance through pole dancing. Her work explores body politics in the service and entertainment industry as seen through the socioeconomic lens of the Philippines. She studies how the body moves and what conditions make it move – be it social mobility or movement through migrant work.

Venuri Perera is an independent artist, curator and educator from Colombo. Exploring the power dynamics of visibility and opacity, she embodies strategies to destabilize and disorient how we perceive the ‘other.’ Her solo and collaborative works deal with violent nationalism, patriarchy, immigration, colonial heritage, class, and have been invited to festivals/symposia since 2008.

Sonia Sandhu is a Bradford born & based chef, artist and creative producer. Her plant forward menus are thoughtfully prepared, seasonal and vibrant. Inspired by food from her Indian heritage and global travels, storytelling and connection through food informs her creative practice. She is the co-director of Edible Archives CIC – an emerging arts organisation specialising in multisensorial art installations.

Sonia will be serving a shared lunch which traces the arc of surrender through her cooking process and ingredients. Expect a colourful buffet of bold flavours, slow-cooked care and a few delicious surprises. All the food will be vegan with gluten free options.