Future Ritual Presents CEREMONY: A Festival of Performance, a new 5-day festival taking place this April 23-27 at Peckham’s Copeland Gallery in South-East London.
April’s rich offerings include The Trembling Forest, a live art ballet created by Emily Clad in collaboration with Martin O’Brien on 23 & 24 April, where a forest of queer people, each painted with clay, crack, shiver, tremble and decay. The Trembling Forest evokes a macabre, surreal, grotesque and beautiful world also featuring artists and participants, including Eve Stainton, Azara, Adrienne Ming and Orrow Bell with original sound by Lottie Poulet, known for their work with Test Department and the reformed Throbbing Gristle. Designed by Shanti Freed and co-commissioned by Wysing, Bourne and Future Ritual.
The prolific Anne Bean presents What is that damned beast? Anatomy of performance on 25 April. Encountering works from across Bean’s five decades of practice, this new performance lecture explores what performance could be and why we keep doing it. Anne will also contribute to the free discussion event Gathering alongside Emilyn Claid, Marilyn Arsem and others on the afternoon of Saturday, 26 April.
SERAFINE1369 presents (my body / running wild / this animal) glorious group work in the process also on Friday, 25 April. Their choreographic practice deals in intensities and atmospheres created by the tensions between things that make meaning, underpinned by their interest in the invisible systems and structures that choreograph bodies in life.
International artists include a rare opportunity to experience Sweden’s Gustaf brooms. In the early 90s, after having worked primarily with installation and photography, brooms burned his work and, in doing so, realised that the intensity of this action and the residual ashes outdid anything that he had previously made. Ensuing works included performances with immovable objects and a collaborative 18-month walk around Eastern Europe. Currently, broms lives and works in Sweden’s Vendel forest, the evening of Saturday 26 April marks his UK premier.
Also on Saturday, 26 April, include Berlin-based Liz Rosenfeld, who fuses performance with film in Tremble. Furthering themes of queer desire historically explored by the artist, Rosenfeld was granted access during the pandemic to one of the oldest cruising bars in Berlin. Its enforced closure prompted Rosenfeld to think about spaces defined by the bodies that use them. Tremble invokes questions relating to the past, present and future of queer public space, relevant to the questions of erasure that queer bodies presently face. Tamm Reynolds and Temitope Ajose will be joining Rosenfeld.
Esteemed live artist Alastair MacLennan has lived and worked in Belfast since 1975. His achievements have significantly influenced performance art, and his body of work is extensive. From the National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, to Le Lieu, Quebec and Bone International Performance Art Festival, Bern, to representing Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1997, He presents I N PAEAN on 26 April. He is an auspicious addition to the festival.
Marilyn Arsem from Boston returns to London on the festival’s final day, 27 April, and has performed for more than forty years, presenting work in over thirty countries and establishing the Mobius Artists Group in 1975. Arsem performed in London in 2024 as part of CEREMONY’s inaugural event, and Future Ritual now welcome her back on a larger scale to conclude their programme.
On the same day, multidisciplinary artist Rubiane Maia, originally from Brazil, makes an auspicious appearance. Her work, which has been presented internationally for many years, is a hybrid of performance, installation and other forms such as writing, photography, video and painting,
VestAndPage, the artist duo who founded Venice’s annual International Performance Art Week, concludes the festival with BREATHE FEAR IN. BREATHE GOLD OUT a participatory closing performance on the evening of Sunday 27 April, conceived by the artists in collaboration with Ash McNaughton and Joseph Morgan Schofield, intertwining alienation with intimacy.
Artists just added to the festival programme include Kane Stonestreet, who describes their practice as ritual actions and queer esoteric traditions, appearing on April 23 and n:u on April 24 with their piece On Substance, interrogating situations where healing, intimacy and altered embodiment can be experienced. Artist and weaver Raisa Kabir performs at CEREMONY on April 27. Kabir’s performances and tapestries use queer entanglement to complicate structures of power, global networks of production and extraction and the relationships between craft and industrialised labour.
Pianka Pärna presents Mother, don’t Forget Me Yet II on the festival’s final day from 3-6 pm. Pärna is a non-binary post-Soviet artist from Estonia, exploring Baltic and Slavic mythologies, queer grief & gender non-conformity through performance.
Future Ritual’s work fosters spaces of sensitivity and attunement to think and feel through ideas of land, desire, belief, mystery and death. Founded by artist Joseph Morgan Schofield in 2017, Future Ritual are interested in performance rituals as a way of producing community, a sense of belonging, and a way of experiencing our time in the world differently.
Says Morgan Schofield: “There is a desire and urgency for these kinds of experiences – for processing the challenges of the contemporary world. We find performance art a potent way to offer this kind of experience to audiences, particularly those outside of normative religions and cultures. We are interested in things that feel transgressive, taking us towards a more raw edge of experience where we can think and feel differently.”
The festival is Future Ritual’s most ambitious programme to date and follows sell-out programmes at Whitechapel Gallery and Norfolk and Norwich Festival (2023), the ICA London (2022) and Kunstraum Gallery (2019). Alongside this curatorial work, Future Ritual also acts as a producer for some of the UK’s most distinctive performance artists, including Anne Bean and Martin O’Brien, both of whom are present at this festival. Recent programmes have included the co-curation of the prestigious Venice International Performance Art Week (Dec 2024) and Whistling as the Night Calls, an exhibition of collaborative photography by O’Brien and Zack Mennell, in Deptford’s VSSL Studio (Nov 2024). Copeland Gallery is a spacious and striking gallery in Copeland Park, in the heart of Peckham.
Top Photo: Pianka Parna by Artur Aizikovich
Bookings and timings via https://futureritual.co.uk/CEREMONY-a-festival-of-performance-2025 Tickets: £14/£17/£20 Festival Pass: £50/£60/£75 Gathering, on Saturday 26 April is from 11 am until 4 pm, free but RSVP
Some exact performance times are TBC if not detailed above or online
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