gustaf broms. Photo by Irene Arango.

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 Alastair MacLennan, Anne Bean, emilyn claid, Kane Stonestreet,  n:u, Pianka Pärna, Raisa Kabir, Rubiane Maia and SERAFINE1369, along with the UK premieres of works by Marilyn Arsem, gustaf broms, Liz Rosenfeld and VestAndPage. 

The full lineup has now been announced. Final release tickets are available now, along with Weekend Passes for Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Full week passes are sold out.

Alongside the performance programme at Copeland Gallery, there are further conversations and gatherings exploring ideas of memory, time and endurance at Live Art Development Agency and Queen Mary University.

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 and On Practice with Marilyn Arsem.

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

An evening with Marilyn Arsem takes place at the Live Art Development Agency (E2 6LX) and STRATA by VestAndPage will be screened at Queen Mary University of London (E1 4PA).

> Final release tickets available now ~ £20
> NEW: Weekend Passes (Fri, Sat, Sun) ~ £50
> SOLD OUT: Full Week Festival Passes 

If cost is an issue, please write to producing@futureritual.co.uk and we will work something out.

Fri 18th, 7pm
Artist Talk: An evening with Marilyn Arsem 

Sat 19th, 4pm
Screening: STRATA by VestAndPage

Weds 23rd, 7pm
Double bill: kane stonestreet & emilyn claid & co

SOLD OUT

Thurs 24th, 7pm
Double bill: n:u & emilyn claid & co

SOLD OUT

Fri 25th, 7pm
Double bill: SERAFINE1369 & Anne Bean

Book a Weekend Pass and save £10 on Friday, Saturday and Sunday events.

Sat 26th, 11am
Gathering: On Tending & Enduring

Sat 26th, 7pm
Durational performances by Alastair MacLennan, gustaf broms and Liz Rosenfeld

Sun 27th, 1pm
Durational performances by Marilyn Arsem, Raisa Kabir, Rubiane Maia & Pianka Pärna.

Closing ritual by VestAndPage

les ongles noirs, n:u, 2024. Photo by Ayesha Jones.

Accessibility & Pricing

All venues are wheelchair accessible and have accessible toilets.

Discursive events at LADA (18th) and Queen Mary University (19th) will be seated. Performance events (23rd-27th) will have a mixture of floor seating (cushions and no cushions), benches, chairs and standing room.

All events will be relaxed - you are always welcome to come and go from the space as you need to.

Most of the works presented in CEREMONY are new works and are not yet made. Many of the works also involve an amount of improvisation. This means we are not able to share detailed content notes in advance. If you have concerns please be in touch and we can share more general information on the topics of individudal artists’ enquiries.

Because of the independent nature of the festival, ticket sales are really important to us! To incentivise early booking, we have operated a pricing structure where the cheaper tickets were available first. We don't want anyone to be turned away for lack of funds. So please do write to us directly if pricing is an issue for you.

All access and content queries should be sent to producing@futureritual.co.uk

Marilyn Arsem, 100 Ways to Consider Time, Day 95: Black Sand, February 14, 2016. Photograph by Nick Procopi.

Friday 18th April

An evening exploring time and duration in performance art, organised in partnership with the Live Art Development Agency (E2 6LX).

19.00 - 21.00 // Tickets: free or pay what you can

100 ways to consider time: an evening with Marilyn Arsem

Across a 100 day period in 2015-16, Marilyn Arsem created one hundred different six-hour performances which took place daily in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Each of these durational works represented a different inquiry on the nature of time.

For this special event, Arsem will present an artist talk reflecting on this body of work and sharing her research on performance art and time. Following Arsem’s talk, there will be a Q&A chaired by curator Joseph Morgan Schofield.

> https://marilynarsem.net
> LADA: event info

VestAndPage, STRATA, 2024. Still from video. 4k Digital, 16:9, colour, stereo, 75 minutes.

Saturday 19th April

An afternoon screening, heading down into deep time and altered states, organised in partnership with BLOC and Queen Mary University of London (E1 4PA).

16.00 - 18.30 // Tickets: free or pay what you can 

VestAndPage: STRATA

In a film of philosophic poetic action, a collective of performance artists root out the liminal, spectral and ritual of art in prehistoric Ice Age caves. The hybrid of performance art and film shows caves as proto-spaces for altered states and sites of knowledge-making and human becoming.

Following the screening there will be a Q&A with VestAndPage. For further information about VestAndPage, please see information about their practice and new performance BREATHE FEAR IN. BREATHE GOLD OUT below, on Sunday 27th April.

> www.stratafilm.de 

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

Weds 23rd & Thurs 24th April

emilyn claid’s new work The Trembling Forest in double bill with kane stonestreet on Weds 23rd and n:u on Thursday 24th.

19.00 - 22.00 // SOLD OUT

emilyn claid & co: 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 directed by emilyn claid and devised in collaboration with Azara, Eve Stainton, Martin O’Brien, Ming and Orrow Bell. 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, including ‘the Liminals’ (Anno Bolender, Claudia Palazzo, and Lavinia Co-op), 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. 

Design by Shanti Freed
Sound Design by Lottie Poulet
Lighting Design and Production Management by Rachel Shipp

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

kane stonestreet, Live Art Club (London). Photo by Henri T.

Wednesday 23rd only

kane stonestreet

kane stonestreet is a transdisciplinary artist. Their work seeks to pervert time, dilated through altered states. By attuning to a drip from a block of ice or touching a single frond of moss, kane uncovers slower ways of being. Their actions take place in the city time but their mind is in techtonic time.

kane’s practice is based in collaboration. They have established connections with strangers, friends and lovers, through which they find new entanglements. Their performances are containers for collective creation, built on an invitation for witnesses to act as interpreters. Their ritual actions are a process of survival.

> https://kanestonestreet.com/

n:u, Dirty nails. Image by Ayesha Jones.

Thursday 24th only

n:u: On Substance

The stool of a chief, a statue used for worship, an ancestor’s image, a pipe with tobacco still in it, a comb, a vessel to contain food
YOU HIDE ME by Nii Kwate Owoo (1970)

At the border of the land flowing with milk and honey* discourses around acquisition, conservation, patrimony and their definitions that are torn in a personal and global tracing of lineages of substance (ab)use. Staple food elements such as butter and flour - echoing extractivism - are juxtaposed with some of their ancestral, ceremonial, and ritualistic usage. Consumption of culture, gender, spirituality, race, religion, and food is questioned in this offering. With vulnerability and complicity, n:u interrogates healing as destruction and destruction as healing.

*Here referring to spiritual justifications of expansionist and genocidal governments.

n:u, atmosphere-maker, interrogates situations where healing, intimacy and altered embodiment can be experienced and what those co-created moments allow. Collaborating with space, companion-materials, and witnesses, n:u breaks what is understood as active or passive agency creating sculptural scenes -  growing new meaning and purposes, away from binary and linear processing. Power is constantly re-positioned as something malleable and fluid that could be used to repair if we were present to different choices.

> https://www.atmosphere-maker.org/about

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 // INDIVIDUAL TICKETS: SOLD OUT // Final Weekend Passes: £50

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.

“This is a search, a hunt, for the beast that has plagued and soothed me, seared me and haunted me, filled me with unease and with tenderness,  with fear and quietude, with disturbance and focus, with bewilderment, with perplexity, with astonishment. It has offered me doorways to transcendence and banishment. This fire-spitting, shape-changing, teeth baring, ecstasy inducing beast will be encountered in some of its manifestations in my lifeworks.”

> 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.

Performed by Steph McMann, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Eve Stainton, Darcy Wallace and Natifah White
Light Design by Jackie Shemesh
Sound Design by Josh Anio Grigg with SERAFINE1369
Concept and Choreography  by SERAFINE1369

(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: On Tending & Enduring

A free day of conversation and sharings exploring performance and ritual, collaboration and endurance.

We’ll hear from Marilyn Arsem and Anne Bean in conversation with Joseph Morgan Schofield (Future Ritual) and then emilyn claid, Martin O’Brien in conversation with Martin Hargreaves (11.00, 90 minutes).

There’ll be a collective performance by participants in Arcane Portals workshop, looking at the (re)invention of rites of passage and rituals through performance art (12.30, 90 minutes).

Finally,  Live Art Development Agency and Future Ritual will facilitate ‘On Tending’, a group conversation about endurance of practice through a challenging landscape, and what we might need from one another as collaborators in this work (14.00, 120 mins).

11.00 - 16.00 // Tickets: free but RSVP

gustaf broms; photo by Thomas Reul.

Evening Performances

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

19.00 - 22.00 // Final Tickets: £20 // Weekend Pass: £50

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: I N   PAEAN

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.

In 2021 a monograph on Alastair MacLennan's pioneering performance art work was published by Intellect press. The publication is called: Actional Poetics - 'ASH  SHE  HE' The Performance Actuations of Alastair MacLennan, 1971 -  2020.
           
Alastair would like to acknowledge the support of members of the Bbeyond Performance Art organization and charity, from N.Ireland and beyond.

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.

Performers: Tamm Reynolds and Temitope Ajose

Cinematography: Imogen Heath
Sound Design : Neda Sanai
Set photography: Christa Holka
Set assistance: Kiki Mager

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), Raisa Kabir, Rubiane Maia and Pianka Pärna. The festival will close with a final death/rebirth ritual performance to tresspass alienation, presented by VestAndPage (DE/IT).

13.00 - 20.30 // Final Tickets: £20 // Weekend Pass: £50

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

Raisa Kabir, Utterances, 2023. Liverpool Biennial. Image courtesy of the Artist.

Raisa Kabir 

Raisa Kabir is an artist and weaver based in London. Kabir uses woven text/textiles and performance to materialise multiple concepts, concerning the interwoven cultural politics of cloth. Kabir’s work draws on textile mobilities, embodied archives, and geographies of anti-colonial resistance.

Kabir’s (un)weaving performances and tapestries use queer entanglement to complicate structures of power, global networks of production/extraction, and the relationships between craft and industrialised labour.

Kabir has exhibited work internationally at The Whitworth, Liverpool Biennial, Arnolfini, Whitechapel Gallery,  British Textile Biennial, Glasgow International, Australian Design Centre, Asia Art Now Paris, HH Art Spaces Goa, India. Yorkshire Contemporary. The Craft Council Gallery London, CCA Glasgow, Archive Berlin, Ford Foundation Gallery NYC, Textile Arts Center NYC, and the Center for Craft Creativity and Design U.S.

Rubiane Maia, The Tongue Bends Whenever It faces Whats Is Unquestionable Or What Has Been Cursed, Book- Performance, Chapter VI, 35th São Paulo Biennial. Photo by Levi Fanan / SP Biennial Foundation.

Rubiane Maia

Rubiane Maia is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist based in Folkestone, UK. Her work is a hybrid between performance, installation and other forms of expression, such as writing, photography, video and painting. In general, she is interested in the body, language, memory, phenomena and organic matter, being attracted by different states of perception and synergy through the relationships of interdependence and care between human and non-human beings, as minerals and plants. She often develops research in site specific contexts, always considering the elements, the landscape and the environment as guide and co-creators of her artworks.

> www.rubianemaia.com

Pianka Pärna, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.

Pianka Pärna: Mother, don’t forget me yet II

“An uncanny echo permeates. Hanging dolls, hollow yet clinically aligned, awaiting their turn to scream. Wooden planks like carcasses along the hard stone-cold floor. A gentle hum of a folklore story welcomes the astray visitor. The crimson red hue of the Matryoshkas dance with the greens, blues and yellows of their glistening lacquered shells, adding speckles of light among ominous and alluring shadows. A pervertedly poignant stew of sweet nostalgia, foreshadowed by an occult presence emanating a sense of gender(less), childhood, home, and crackling skulls in the firepit. A haunting safe yet summoning, unsure of its possibility to belong but aware of its embodied becoming of something other than.”

Pianka Pärna is a non-binary post-Soviet artist from Estonia, exploring Baltic/Slavic mythologies, queer grief & gender non-conformity through performance. Their body-based practise intertwines folklore, ritual, mythological storytelling, and endurance to challenge hegemonic heteronormative narratives & post-Soviet cultural silencing while engaging in un/worlding—balancing creation, disintegration & collective transformation.

By often incorporating elements of body piercing and modification, their performance practise further examines ideas of control and reception of pain/pleasure modalities to acquire agency to the existence within the self(ves) among others.

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

Transdisciplinary artists and curators of the tender collaborations in the ephemeral and immaterial, VestAndPage are Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes. They have been working together nomadically since 2006, using performance art, film and installation centred around critical bodies and sites to express philosophical and ecological thought. They have produced site-responsive, performance-based art in polar, subterranean, military, clinical, volcanic, megalopolitan and other critical milieus, focusing on art's ritual and liminal nature, and collective imaginings.

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. The programme has been organised in partnership with the Live Art Development Agency and BLOC (Queen Mary University of London).

Credits

Curated and produced by Future Ritual.

Joseph Morgan Schofield, Director
Regina Agard-Brathwaite, Programme Coordinator
Rachel Shipp, Production Manager
Ash McNaughton, Artist Liaison Manager
zack mennell, Artist Liaison 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