Future Ritual presents a collective performance 

A FELLING

A collective performance initiated by Future Ritual, ‘A Felling’ explores ideas of death, remembrance, transformation, rebirth and the transferrance of energy between bodies and between the body and the environment.

Artists Ash McNaughton, Joseph Morgan Schofield and Marcel Sparmann co-create an immersive work, inviting audiences to step into a space of contemporary ritual, activated through intense embodied practices and characterised by expressions of compassion, vulnerability, strength and ethical exchange. Through this future ritual we may temporarily inhabit time in a different way, engaging in individual and collective experiences of processing and communion.

Premiere: IKLECTIK (London), Nov 2023.

Further performances: Experimentica Festival (Cardiff), April 2024.

Videography and editing by Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi.

Ash McNaughton

Ash McNaughton (b. 1990, Scotland) is an action-based artist currently situated in Folkestone, UK. Their practice is a process-led exploration of materials, gesture, movement, and sound. Site-responsive, durational and ritualisic in nature; Ash implements methods of endurance, repetition, and resistance to access altered states of being while reaching out into the spaces in-between. Their actions encourage a synergetic exchange between their physical, psychological and spiritual body and the environments they inhabit. This practice is an attempt to articulate that which escapes us. A poetics of a fluid presence in a fixed world.

Ash is an independent artist, producer, and project manager. They are co-organiser of SITE - a platfrom for collective site-responsive art interventions - and a member of the international Anam Cara Collective. They are programmes manager at ]performance s p a c e[ and the Folkestone Local Associate Producer for New Queers on the Block.

https://ashmcnaughton.com/

Joseph Morgan Schofield

Joseph Morgan Schofield (b. 1993, Rochdale, UK) uses performance, moving image, writing and curation to create future ritual. Joseph's queer ritual actions foreground desire, grief and wildness in the context of queer and ecological futurity; their acts of gathering and communion articulating a deep yearning - for both that which is lost, and that which is yet to arrive.

This ritual/performance/magic  is relational, emerging through encounters between their sweating, wanting, sensate non-binary body and a host of agents - human and otherwise, including memory, geology, weather and myth.

Joseph has engaged with the South Pennine Moors as muse and collaborator for a number of years, and they also work responsively to other sites and contexts on different time scales. Through practices of channeling, duration, exhaustion and divination, Joseph’s works hold space for acts of mourning, yearning, processing, dreaming and communing.

They are the Creative Director of Future Ritual, a non-profit entity which holds their collaborative contributions to the emergence of new and more attuned cultures.

https://josephmorganschofield.com/

Marcel Sparmann

Marcel Sparmann is a German visual artist, working in performance art, theatre, dance, public art and installation.

“I consider myself as visual based artist, experienced in theatre, dance, installation and performance art. Therefore my understanding and awareness of communication, exchanging and sharing is primarily image and action based. I'm cautious with verbalised language, but like to disintegrate the complexity of language, into poetic artistic expressions. The unfixed metaphors, the fluid mutations in the realm of deconstruction. Surrounded by visuals and their narratives, we think, speak and relate through images, identifying ourselves by codes and navigate them in cultural environments. Change is permanent. Therefore my practice follows the concept of fragility, expanding over various ideas of appearing and disappearing, traces and memories.

My artistic interest focuses on the creation of intense collective situations, compressed and formed in emotional and spiritual landscapes, in resistance. I'm interested in the exploration of a more profound understanding for compassion, kindness and bravery in the light of an unfolding vulnerability. I believe in space as an emotional and ritualistic environment and in the negotiation between the collective and common urgencies and their representations through out performance. A fertile way of manifesting the future. I’m searching for simplicity and actions which carry a pure aesthetic and oscillating temperature, maybe comparable with recent natural phenomenons.”

http://marcelsparmann.com/

Photos: Future Ritual, ‘A Felling’, 2023. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

Funders and support

‘A Felling’ is initiated by  Future Ritual and commissioned by IKLECTIK.

The performance is co-created Ash McNaughton, Joseph Morgan Schofield and Marcel Sparmann.