Ron Athey. Image by Roshana Rubin.Artist Lab with Ron Athey & Michele Occelli
Fri 25th & Sat 26th October 2024, 11am ~ 4pm Battersea Arts Centre (London)
> Update: we are running a 5 day intensive deepening this practice, between 17th and 21st February 2025 in London.
This workshop is for artists working in performance and visual arts, interested in experimenting with esoteric and holistic practices as a way to explore new modes of making and being in the world.
We’ll be working with tools of the trade Athey has used for performance-making since 1995, including: somatic therapy, hypnosis sessions, and a program of spiritualist practices such as automatic writing and drawing, non lingual vocals/glossolalia, walking meditation, scrying, and archetype work. We will storyboard concepts for our performances - often, the process is the work!
This format for teaching and making was developed in 2010 for Athey’s Gifts of the Spirit: Automatic Writing in the Great Hall at QMUL and he has been evolving it ever since. This Artist Lab continues Athey’s collaboration with hypnotherapist Michele Occelli. Movement aspects will be co-led by movement practitioner Lewis Walker.
This is not a mortification-of-the-flesh or post-porn workshop but Athey will give short visual lectures containing sexually and physically graphic material. If you have concerns relating to this please reach out to Future Ritual (producing@futureritual.co.uk) in the first instance.
Constructing Phenomena ~ Esoteric Performance Development 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.
> about CEREMONY
Key Info
Fri 25th & Sat 26th October, 11am to 4pm.Battersea Arts Centre, SW11 5TN
> Update: we are running a 5 day intensive deepening this practice, between 17th and 21st February 2025 in London.
If price is a barrier please write to producing@futureritual.co.uk.
There is step free access to the main foyer, The Scratch Bar and ground floor public spaces. The first floor performance spaces can be reached via a lift.
The first floor has a designated chill-out space that is available whenever the building is open.
More: https://bac.org.uk/access/
Ron Athey, image by Manuel Vason.
Ron Athey
Ron Athey is a Los Angeles-based artist who has been making performance works since 1981s Premature Ejaculation, an actionist/noise duo with Rozz Williams (his partner and front person of the seminal death rock band Christian Death). Self-taught, Athey’s earliest works were inspired by Johanna Went, Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, and electro-punk/queercore pioneers Nervous Gender. By the 90s the HIV/AIDS pandemic shifted response and this work, the “torture trilogy” became passion plays which were presented in spaces such as ICA London; Cankarjev Dom Ljubljana; PS122 NYC; ExTeresa CDMX. Monographs “Pleading In the Blood” and “Queer Communion” were published in 2013 and 2020 on Intellect Press, followed by retrospective Queer Communion at Participant Inc. NYC and ICA-LA 2021.In 2023 Athey and facilitators launched an annual immersive art making workshop in Athens, Greece titled Darkness Visible. Current videowork includes a series of post-porn-mythologies including Asclepius/Acephale, The Hierophant, and Pasiphae, Witch Queen of Crete: A Gloryhole Origin Story. And in various forms, a sacred modular theater, Hierophant Workings. Athey and collaborator Hermes Pittakos are currently showing a two act performance WILLENDORF (shown in September for a performance event honoring Vaginal Davis’ citywide survey in Stockholm). Ron Athey is represented by Murmurs Gallery, Los Angeles.
Michele Occelli
Michele Occelli’s approach to hypnotherapy utilizes a combination of Ericksonian and ideo-dynamic techniques to enable processes of change and self-discovery. After years of academic research in both eastern and western philosophy (SOAS, King’s College and Goldsmith’s College), he trained as a whirling dervish with the Mevlevi Order of Konya. The study and practice of Hypnotherapy came because of a desire to engage both mind and body as a unity, which is the basis for any form of understanding of both self and the world.> www.micheleoccelli.co.uk
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