VestAndPage, Solastalgic Friction, 2023. Venere in Teatro, Venice (IT), photograph by Lorenza Cini.
Intensive Co-creation workshop with VestAndPage
Sunday 20th - Sat 26th April 2025, Peckham (London)
The workshop is now fully booked; if you are interested in joining a waiting list please email us ~ producing@futureritual.co.uk.
VestAndPage invite you to dive into the transformative world of rites and rituals as performative experiences. This intensive workshop invites artists to explore our time's urgent and vital portals—personally and collectively. How can we artistically (re-)invent rites of passage and rituals for modern society?
Together, we delve into the connections between body memory of sites, soma and matter, symbolism and archetypes to address themes like normativity, liminality, intimacy, identity, and healing. In the alchemy of encounters, we approach practical techniques involving and reinventing formalities (protocols, liturgies, sacraments), repetitions, and time-energy relations. We apply and revert the classic stages of rites—separation, threshold, aggregation—and co-create new, idiosyncratic ritual performances.
Whether driven by research or practice, this intimate workshop offers a unique opportunity to advance your artistic journey through enigmas, hermeneutics, and mysticism and partake in a profound experiential exploration of performative ritual creation.
ARCANE PORTALS is offered as part of CEREMONY, Future Ritual’s year-long programme exploring performance as a mode of gathering and communing amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life. The workshop occurs alongside a public programme of choreographic work, performance actions, ritual offerings and sonic activations. Participants will have access to subsidised tickets for all performance events.
> about CEREMONY
VestAndPage, Though Twin of Slumber, 2013. LIVE! Biennale, Vancouver (CA), photograph by Ash Tuyaksuyk.Participation
Who is this call for?
ARCANE PORTALS is intended for performers, body artists, experimental artists and researchers with experience in performance art, live art, dance, theatre, choreography, and body-based performance practices.Contact
If you have questions around the workshop, please be in touch with Future Ritual (producing@futureritual.co.uk) in the first instance.Logistics
We will begin at 5pm on Sunday 20th April with a welcome gathering. Sessions will begin at 10am Monday 21st to Friday 25th. On Saturday 26th there will be the opportunity to present a collective outcome within the context of the CEREMONY festival.Travel to and from the workshop, food and accommodation in London are the responsibility of the participants. We can connect artists visiting London with others in the group to find accommodation together.
VestAndPage, Still from the film STRATA, 2024. Image by Fenia Kotsopoulou.To Participate
The workshop is priced at £225 (£175 concession). This is a subsidised price and all income goes towards the costs of putting the workshop on. ARCANE PORTALS is supported in part by Arts Council England.A deposit of £75 (plus booking fees) will be required to secure your place on the workshop, with the balance payable by March 1st.
If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please complete this form, which requests a short bio, possibly with web links and a brief artist statement (max. 2500 characters) that includes the core concepts of your performance practice and that quickly addresses the following questions:
- Which (present or lost) rites and rituals are you acquainted with through your culture/s?
- Please propose a rite/s or ritual/s for analysis, recreation and potential futurisation that you can present in the frame of this workshop.
- Which artist/s or work of art has most impacted your experience of the ritual potential of art?
- Do you follow a spiritual, mystic, esoteric and/or religious practice? Can you share your path, practices and insights with the workshop collective? If so, in which form can you imagine this to take place?
- What is your motivation or intention in joining this workshop?
The workshop is now fully booked; if you are interested in joining a waiting list please email us ~ producing@futureritual.co.uk.
Alternative Forms of Submission
Alternatively, the application can also be submitted as an audio file (max. 3 minutes) or a video file (max. 3 minutes). If you would rather send a video or voice recording please note the link and any password in that same space. Please DO NOT send wetransfer or expiring download links.
VestAndPage
VestAndPage are Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes, who have been working together nomadically since 2006 in collaborative performance art and film. Their works are contextual and situation-responsive and embody ecological, philosophical and queer thought.
Focusing on art's ritual and liminal nature, collective memory, imaginings, and transcorporeal and psychoterratic states, they have produced collaborative performance-based art in Antarctic, subterranean, military and other extreme environments. In a psychogeography of symbiotic realms, they move between embodiment and research, the unseen and the unforeseen, the oppressed and unspoken, the forgotten and the repressed.
Focusing on art's ritual and liminal nature, collective memory, imaginings, and transcorporeal and psychoterratic states, they have produced collaborative performance-based art in Antarctic, subterranean, military and other extreme environments. In a psychogeography of symbiotic realms, they move between embodiment and research, the unseen and the unforeseen, the oppressed and unspoken, the forgotten and the repressed.
To create new myths, narratives and archetypes, they activate memory and uncover layers of information and imagery stored in the human body, psyche, spirit, and environment. Their works have been presented at numerous sites and in theatres, museums, galleries and cinemas worldwide, in differing formats from month-long performance walks over 5-days to 24-hour performances.
They are the founders and directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week, and their research and poetic writings have been extensively published and translated for international readers.
They share their methodology on collaborative performance and filmmaking in master classes and have been visiting artists and lecturers at art academies worldwide.
They are the founders and directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week, and their research and poetic writings have been extensively published and translated for international readers.
They share their methodology on collaborative performance and filmmaking in master classes and have been visiting artists and lecturers at art academies worldwide.
VestAndPage, Panta Rhei: Matter, 2011. Mullae Art Space, Seoul (KR), photograph by HeiJi Park.
Future Ritual presents
The workshop is offered as part of CEREMONY, a year long programming cycle curated by Future Ritual, exploring how performance and art making can function as modes of gathering, communion and ceremony amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life.
> about Future Ritual: Ceremony