Surrender
Surrender
Wednesday 22nd October 2025, 12-5pm @ The Warehouse in Holbeck
Book your ticket here
Surrender is a one-day mixed bill event with an exciting line up of artists exploring 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.
How and when can performance become an act of surrender?
What is surrendered, and to whom?
In the act of giving something up are you issuing an invitation for something unasked for to appear in its place? An unwanted gift that turns out to be more than you might have bargained for. You take your chance.
Artists include: åbäke, Gillian Dyson, Tara Fatehi, Eisa Jocson + Venuri Perera, Samir Kennedy + Sean Murray, Samra Mayanja + Kathy Gray, POPPERFACE + Richard Pye, Imogen Reeve & Co., Nicola Singh, Eve Stainton + Florence Peake
Curated by Orlagh Woods + Transform
Lunch by Sonia Sandhu
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, collaborative online performance for Together Elsewhere: Performance Art Network Switzerland, Performance Art Bergan, 2025, and participating with the Parlour Collective, 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 + 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 independent artist based between London and Marseille working at the intersections between choreography, performance, sound and video.
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.
Samra Mayanja + Kathy Gray
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’. The theme of searching — futile yet hopeful — runs through Samra’s work. She has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and theatres, including Cambridge Junction, The Oval, Somerset House, Kampnagel and Transmediale, among others.
POPPERFACE + Richard Pye
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.
Richard Pye is a performer, based in London.
Imogen Reeve & Co. 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. Through a distinct choreographic lens, Imogen challenges dominant narratives around gender, agency, and embodiment – offering audiences encounters with new performance languages.
Nicola Singh is a multi-disciplinary artist, researcher and pedagogue based between the UK and India.
Singh’s work explores the embodied act of surrender through experimental vocal improvisation, and in her study and praxis of vocal devotional forms. She plays with and on the idea of mantra, using repetition as a ritualised tool to create lucid states of receptivity in herself and for the audience. She is interested in philosophies surrounding the directional motion of energies cultivated through a range of metaphysical and spiritual contexts.
Eve Stainton + Florence Peake
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.
Eisa Jocson + Venuri Perera
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.
