emilyn claid and Heidi Rustgaard, Skinned, 2024. CEREMONY [II], Future Ritual at Venice International Performance Art Week 2024. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

Future Ritual is excited to announce CEREMONY, a festival of performance art, choreography and ritual action taking place in London this April.

Amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life and the ossifying effects of capitalism in the metropolis, this five-day programme is imagined as an invitation to cross a series of thresholds, to awaken desire, and to rekindle enchantment.

The festival will feature new works by Anne Bean, emilyn claid, Alastair MacLennan and SERAFINE1369, along with the UK premieres of works by Marilyn Arsem, gustaf broms, Liz Rosenfeld and VestAndPage. 

The full lineup will be announced in the Spring. Early Bird tickets for all events are available now.

CEREMONY is the culmiation of a year long programme of activites curated by Future Ritual, exploring art making as a mode of gathering and ritual in this fragmented age.

Alongside these performances, we are pleased to be offering two intensive artist development workshops: Arcane Portals with VestAndPage (now fully booked) and On Practice with Marilyn Arsem (deadline for applications 3rd March).

Contact & Enquiries

Curation & Producing: producing@futureritual.co.uk

Press: abstrakt@abstraktpublicity.co.uk

Venue & Tickets

Copeland Gallery, Unit 9, Copeland Park, 133 Copeland Rd, Peckham, London SE15 3SN

> Early bird tickets available now
> Festival Passes also onsale

April Schedule 

Weds 23rd, 7pm ~ emilyn claid & more TBA
Thurs 24th, 7pm ~ emilyn claid & more TBA
Fri 25th, 7pm ~ SERAFINE1369 & Anne Bean
Sat 26th, 11am ~ Symposium
Sat 26th, 7pm ~ Alastair MacLennan, Gustaf Broms & Liz Rosenfeld 
Sun 27th, 1pm ~ Marilyn Arsem, VestAndPage & more TBA

emilyn claid, The Trembling Forest, 2025. Still from video by Baiba Sprance and Marco Berardi.

Weds 23rd & Thurs 24th April

Performances by emilyn claid, with further works TBA.

19.00 - 22.00 // Tickets: £14/£17/£20 // Festival Pass: £50/£60/£75

emilyn claid: The Trembling Forest

“Turn your face towards the tombstone blues of left over time, forever, nowhere, nothing time, the crumbling perpetual of graveyards and ashes. Step lightly into long time, still time. Turn up the music and begin a slow dance. Welcome the pale grey, the shivering grey of a longed-for landscape, cold, silent, beautiful, like snow on hills under a darkening sky. Connect with me here, embrace me there, enmeshed, in a dance of twists and turns, like the underground roots of a trembling forest.”

The Trembling Forest is a live art ballet created by emilyn claid, in collaboration with Martin O’Brien. The work draws on the spontaneous physicality of live art practices together with the scenic, choreographic structures of balletic traditions. Encounters between this company are staged amidst a forest of queer people, each painted with clay, who crack, shiver, tremble and decay. The Trembling Forest evokes a macabre, surreal, grotesque and beautiful world, where life force and death drive intertwine. 

The Trembling Forest is co- commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, Bourn, and Future Ritual. The project is supported by Arts Council England and Knotenpunkt.

> Future Ritual: The Trembling Forest

Anne Bean, All communication is translation, 2024. Future Ritual at Venice International Performance Art Week. Photo by Lorenza Cini.

Friday 25th April

An evening of performances including a new group work by SERAFINE1369 and a performance lecture by Anne Bean.

19.00 - 22.00 // Tickets: £14/£17/£20 // Festival Pass: £50/£60/£75

Anne Bean: What is that damned beast? Anatomy of performance 

In a monograph on Anne Bean’s work, Self Etc., 2018, the writer Dominic Johnson wrote that: Bean is a noted international figure who has been working actively since the 1960s. The art of Anne Bean makes strange our sense of time, memory, language, the body, and identity, particularly through solo and collaborative performances along a vital continuum between art and life. 

Encountering different works from across Bean’s five decades of practice, her new work What is that damned beast? Anatomy of performance will explore what performance could be and why we keep doing it.

> http://annebeanarchive.com/
> Future Ritual: Anne Bean

The Ways, the Fortune, the Fall (solo fragment), SERAFINE1369, 2024. Venice International Performance Art Week. Photo by Lorenza Cini.

SERAFINE1369: (my body / running wild / this animal) glorious 

I cannot escape it, dancing is always there, the calls of my body, the calls of all bodies compelled by the weather of the cosmos and its directions.

A group work in process.

SERAFINE1369 is a choreographer. They work with/in the context of the hostile architectures of the metropolis towards moments and states of transcendence. Cycles, time and haunting are recurring themes in their work which they describe as being an oracular practice. Their current research is thinking of the intimate technology of dancing as a form of dowsing.

SERAFINE1369 makes work that deals in intensities; atmospheres created by the tensions between things that make meaning, implicating the bodies of audiences as well as performers.Their work is underpinned by their interest in the invisible systems and structures that choreograph bodies in life.

(my body / running wild / this animal) glorious is a Making Waves R&D Commission by Battersea Arts Centre. Made possible with funding by Arts Council England and Cockayne Grants for the Arts

> Basic Tension
> @SERAFINE1369

Anne Bean, All communication is translation, 2024. Future Ritual at Venice International Performance Art Week. Photo by Lorenza Cini.

Saturday 26th April

Gathering

A free day of conversation, screenings and sharings exploring performance and ritual, collaboration and endurance. Speakers include Anne Bean, emilyn claid and Marilyn Arsem. Full line up to follow.

11.00 - 16.00 // Tickets: free but RSVP

gustaf broms; photo by Irene Arango.

Evening Performances

The daytime gathering is followed by an immersive evening of performance hauntings including works by Alastair MacLennan, Liz Rosenfeld (DE) and gustaf broms (SE).

19.00 - 22.00 // Tickets: £14/£17/£20 // Festival Pass: £50/£60/£75

gustaf broms

gustaf broms works in the borderlands between performance, video and installation. He was born in Sweden in 1966, currently lives and works in the Vendel forest. gustaf’s practice is engaged with the exploration of the nature of consciousness, the dualistic concept of Being NATURE (the biological process of body), and being MIND (as intellect interprets experience). In his practice, he started off working photography and installation, but two works in particular led him to work with the more formless processes of performance.

In 1991, broms burned all of his work, and in doing so realized that the intensity of the action and the remaining ash far out did anything he had previously made. In 2005, he completed a series of works entitled “5 Faiths for a Brave New World” in which he worked with objects that were physically too heavy for the body to move. These two experiences created a longing to explore the formless and led up to the project entitled “A Walking Piece” made with Trishula Littler, in which the two artists spent 18 months walking across Eastern Europe. The result is considered a drawing. Currently, broms’ continues to work with his own body as the tool for examining what this living thing is.

> http://www.orgchaosmik.org/

Alastair MacLennan, BERTH AN EARTH, Actuation for Hospitalfield Arts, 2015. Photo courtesy of Alastair MacLennan Archive, DJCAD, University of Dundee.

Alastair MacLennan

Alastair MacLennan was born in Scotland and has lived and worked in Belfast, N. Ireland, since 1975. His achievements as an artist have had a significant influence on performance art, nationally and internationally.

Performing in diverse contexts, his works convey political, social and cultural conditions. His Actuations (performance/installations) seek to fuse interrelations.

His works have (also) been presented as part of Black Market International (in Europe, America, Canada, Asia, Mexico, etc.),  by Trace Gallery, Cardiff, by the National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, by Le Lieu, Quebec, by Bone International Performance Art Festival, Bern and through NIPAF in Japan. He represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1997.

He has works in private collections in America, Canada, Italy, Poland, Germany, Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales and in the public collection of the British Arts Council, England.

Liz Rosenfeld; photo by Christa Holka.

Liz Rosenfeld: Tremble

Flutter. Shutter. Quiver. Throb. Vibrations oscillate between all the holes and all the folds. This is not a memorial to what was once possible, but rather, a proposal to what this space can still become. Always an infinite hole. Always a threshold. The vibrant material of fat and flesh rock in service to ecologies and bodies not yet known.

Liz Rosenfeld is a Berlin based transdisciplinary artist who works with performance, moving images, drawing and experimental writing practices. Liz addresses the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, past and future histories in regard to the ways in which memory is queered. Liz's work deals with flesh as a non-binary collaborative material, specifically focussing on the potentiality of physical abundance and excess, edging questions regarding the responsibility and privilege of taking up space.

Marilyn Arsem, Voices, Future Ritual: Ceremony [I], 2024. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

Sunday 27th April

A day of durational performances on memory by artists including Marilyn Arsem (USA). The festival will close with a final death/rebirth ritual performance to tresspass alienation, presented by VestAndPage (DE/IT).

13.00 - 20.30 // Tickets: £14/£17/£20 // Festival Pass: £50/£60/£75

Marilyn Arsem

Marilyn Arsem (1951) has been creating and performing live events for more than forty years and has presented her work in thirty countries around the world.  Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, she also teaches performance art workshops internationally. In 1975 Arsem established a collaborative of artists now known as Mobius Artists Group, who create experimental art in all media.  From 1987 to 2014 Arsem taught performance art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  A book on her work, Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, was published in 2020 by Intellect Books of the UK.  

> https://marilynarsem.net.

VestAndPage, Under Scars, 2022. Photo by Lorenza Cini.

VestAndPage: BREATHE FEAR IN. BREATHE GOLD OUT

This participatory closing performance, conceived by VestAndPage in collaboration with Ash McNaughton and Joseph Morgan Schofield, intertwines alienation with intimacy.

Longing for visions of critical utopianism, we create a space where individual and collective experiences converge. We are guided by the transgressive energy of breath, a form of communication and communion. Bodies are suspended in surging, viscous substances emblematic of our epoch—accumulative, smelted, hard coagulate, bound together by a stickiness that remixes the natural and the synthetic in grotesque, poetic hybridity. The audience participates in an immersive unveiling through guided participatory acts, embracing transformation through vulnerability. BREATHE FEAR IN. BREATHE GOLD OUT evokes a collective process of imagining, becoming, and nurturing tender connections.

Peal, reveal, uncover. Breathe.

“VestAndPage show us that the need to exist as an individual willing to open up and exorcise all fears is more acute than ever in the twenty-first century, despite all the cultivated illusion of the cocooned global village.” – Dana Altman

Funders and support

Future Ritual: Ceremony is supported with public funds by Arts Council England. Further support towards the programme has been given by Mayor of London.

Credits

Curated and produced by Future Ritual.

Joseph Morgan Schofield, Director
Regina Agard-Brathwaite, Programme Coordinator
Rachel Shipp, Production Manager
Abstrakt Publicity, PR Manager

Future Ritual presents

The performances are 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