In Search of the Miraculous

Curated and convened by Anne Bean
Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2023

Anne Bean, Drop and Flame, 1990

The village of Walsingham in North Norfolk, known for a miraculous happening, provides a unique context for artists. Across the Spring Bank Holiday works of painting, moving image, installation and sculpture will appeared at sites in the village. Seekers and curious folk were invited to join us as ‘pilgrims’ led through Walsingham, encountering performances, actions and demonstrations. This special event sought to create a basis for shared dialogue, conviviality and reflection ‘in search of the miraculous.’

The event and exhibition featured works and offerings by Anne Bean, Anna Brass, Ansuman Biswas, selina bonelli, Oona Grimes, Poppy Jackson, Joan Key, Scilla Landale, Helen McIlldowie-Jenkins, Reverend Gyoro Nagase, Holly Slingsby, Filipos Tsitsopoulos, Candide Turner Bridger and Richard Wilson RA. Further information on participating artists and their work can be found below.

Ansuman Biswas, Before, During, After, 2023. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

Videography and editing by Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi, 2023.

Oona Grimes, Wool and Water, 2023. Still from video. Image courtesy of the artist.

Joining the pilgrimage

Our day-long pilgrimage ‘in search of the miraculous’ took place on Saturday 27th May. We met roadside, by the 14th century Slipper Chapel, located within the Catholic National Shrine and Basilica of Our Lady.

We embarked on the Pilgrim Way, a one mile path between the Shrine and the village of Walsingham, led by Reverend Gyoro Nagase and his walking drum. Along the way we encountered performances by Holly Slingsby, selina bonelli and Poppy Jackson.

Arriving at the end of the Pilgrim Way to St Seraphim’s Chapel, an Orthodox chapel housed in an old railway cottage, we explored the works of painting, ceramics, installation and moving image by Anne Bean, Anna Brass, Candide Turner Bridger, Joan Key, Filipos Tsitsopoulos and Richard Wilson. These were to be found in Walsingham’s religious and civic spaces, as well as in the windows of houses and shops in the village.

Refreshments were available from St Seraphim’s beutiful Quiet Garden, in which ‘pilgrims’ also found a performance by Ansuman Biswas and a demonstration of Icon Painting by Elenis Icons. St Serpahim’s Icon Gallery will be open, alongside an installation in the Chapel.

We reconvened at the Parish Hall for ‘The Miraculous Story of Walsingham Seen Through Glass’, a talk by Scilla Landale, and films by Oona Grimes and Anne Bean. From 6.30pm there was food, drink and conviviality in the Parish Hall. Some aspects of the programme remained open acoss the weekend.

Closing Event

We held a reflective closing event, hosted by England & Co at Sotheran Building in London, on Thursday 7th September. The documentation by Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi was shown alongside films by Anne Bean and Oona Grimes, and further works by Joan Key and Richard Wilson.

Credits

‘In Search of the Miraculous’ is convened and curated by Anne Bean. The project is produced by FUTURE RITUAL, and funded and supported by Arts Council England, East Anglia Art Fund, Norfolk and Norwich Festival and Norfolk County Council.

> annebeanarchive.com
> eastangliaartfund.org.uk
> nnfestival.org.uk

Image: Haukebodde Hacoud Hacwod Aukud, Anna Brass, 2022. Still from video. Image courtesy of the artist.

Bios and Works

In Search of the Miraculous -

Anne Bean

In 1973, Anne Bean cut through the book 'In Search of the Miraculous,' by the philosopher, P.D. Ouspensky who was writing on the early teachings of the seeker George Gurdjieff. This rectangular void that she created inside the covers, allowed one to peer through the entire book to see two halves of a photo that she had glued in, as though looking at both ends of a tunnel simultaneously. That photo related to her thesis 'what is art and what am I doing in it?' Ouspensky wrote: "the undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us. The ’miraculous’ was a penetration into this unknown reality.” Fifty years after the original intervention with the book, Anne Bean's film and action 'In Search of the Miraculous,' probes this penetration

Her ceramics, 'the visionaries', shown in the window of 'Read and Digest Tearoom', partly arose from seeing a small bust of a three horned Roman deity, found at the Walsingham Roman temple site. This deity’s horns brought to her mind the notion of antennae reaching backwards and forwards, probing the world, whilst concurrently emitting ideas and visions into it. The horns also strongly suggested the jester, a word derived from the Anglo-Norman word 'storyteller.' The jester could tell the truth that could not otherwise be told. The Pilgrim badges, available for this pilgrimage, are based on this Roman deity.

Haukebodde Hacoud Hacwod Aukud - Anna Brass

Anna Brass is an artist and filmmaker based in Norwich. Set in late medieval Italy and Essex, Brass’ short film explores earthly bodies and celestial realms. Brass draws on a diverse imagery to depict a world populated with strange objects: an oversized pilgrim badge, talking maiolica pots, and a dazzle camouflaged cathedral. Shot on 16mm with a cast of non-actors, the film presents a rich series of tableaux dense with the artist’s sculptures, backdrops and makeshift constructions. ‘Haukebodde Hacoud Hacwod Aukud’ is supported by Stuart Croft Foundation.

Before, During, After - Ansuman Biswas

Ansuman Biswas works in a wide variety of media, but his central concern lies between science, work and religion. He is interested in traversing, transposing and translating across many different kinds of border. To paraphrase the 13th Century Zen philosopher Dōgen: “Before my search mountains are mountains and streams are streams. During my search mountains are no longer mountains and streams are no longer streams. After my search mountains are mountains and streams are streams.”

Biswas’ performance “Before, During, After” reflects on Spiritual Materialism within practices of pilgrimage and on the search for the miraculous as a kind of yearning for something out of the ordinary, something more than mundane.

"They do come to you, but you do not hear them. You have not sat in the field in the evening listening for them. When the angelus rings, you cross yourself and have done with it. But if you prayed from your heart and listened to the thrilling of the bells in the air after they stopped ringing, you would hear the voices as well as I do.”
George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan (1923)

covered, dys-covered, re-covered :: a process of gaps and revelations - selina bonelli

selina is currently exploring abandoned post-conflict architecture through performance and sound. they hope to develop an affective trail of embodied witnessing of marginalized voices through the borders drawn into the landscape around these structures. they seek to explore the spaces outside of language by expanding on a listening through what touch could be to uncover the resonances trapped in ruins, utterances and hauntings.

"i will not have the words for a type of loss that is so distant it is intimate."
ALOK, funeral in Femme in Public (2017)

Wool and Water - Oona Grimes

Oona Grimes is a London based artist, primarily a chaser of language through drawing, clay making & film. During Grimes’ 2018 Bridget Riley Fellowship at The British School at Rome she segued from thieving Lorenzetti tartans and cartoon detail from Etruscan paintings, to the appropriation of neorealist films - mis-remembered, imitated and low tech re- enacted: a physical drawing of herself captured on i-phone.

Grimes’ interest in the The Miraculous stems from a love of medieval manuscripts and early Italian votives, depicting the supranatural in the everyday.

“Wool & Water” is a Norfolk Miracle which introduces Lewis Carroll to Pasolini. The Sheep (a metamorphoses of the White Queen from 'Through the Looking Glass’) undertakes a quest for transformation and is finally granted sainthood.

Holy Marys - Poppy Jackson

Born in Norfolk, Poppy Jackson views performance as a potential entranceway to the transformative, divine, or miraculous. Through use of creative intent in sacred site, the artist works with ritual action, charged material, duration as a means towards altered states of consciousness, and pilgrims, artists and audience as witness and collective energy.

The native ladybirds of this performance have been raised by the artist from young larvae. In becoming an abject female body through their interaction today; the work addresses Christianity’s complex views of, discomfort at, and influence upon the mother’s body. These are exemplified by the paradoxical figure of The Virgin Mary - a traditional mother figure sinless of sexual experience.

Ladybirds were named after the Virgin Mary in Medieval times when farmers prayed to Her to save their failing crops and ladybirds miraculously saved the fields from pests. In early religious paintings, Mary was often shown wearing a red cloak; the spots of the seven spot ladybird were said to symbolise Her seven joys and seven sorrows. Worldwide, cultures attribute ladybirds with luck, connection to the divine, protection of faith, and as a bringer of gifts, messages or even children (being called ‘little midwife' (commaruccia) in some regions of Italy). In Christianity they are symbolic of the soul of Our Lady, standing for the Virgin Mary’s selfless compassion and sacrifice, and act as a mediator between earth and heaven, carrying prayers to the skies.

This mother’s body, barefoot along the ‘flight path’ of the Pilgrims Way, presents to us ladybirds’ cultural stand as a visual totem for the efficacy of prayer and connection to larger forces. ‘Marys’ encompasses the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, and also refers to the artist's matriarchal lineage through her Irish Catholic Grandmother, Mary Hennessy, who survived Tuberculosis and gave Poppy and her mother their middle names of Mary. The work takes inspiration from the performativity of intent of the walkers of this ancient path at the site of a Mother Mary Miracle, whose footsteps span centuries of searching for the miraculous.

16 Small Shrines - Joan Key

At first there was an interest in exploring the colours of red paint. This produced an association with Pompeian painting in which figures, now on the verge of ruin, can hold a cool presence, both mythic and fragile. That fleeting sensation of figural movement was more important than narrative recognition. It belongs to deep roots: what Abe Warburg refers to as ‘the fossil impressions of ancient energies’.*

In the studio, the cardboard shrines emerged during lockdown, which created enormous amounts of packaging for dispatch. Card was folded to protect contents, but once un-folded its shape was reminiscent of icons or altar pieces and their protective apotraic usage. The red is a Cadmium Burgundy, an expensive colour which, in association with Golden Ochre, holds associations with value. The thin watercolour paint surface suggested the opposite: povera, associated with the cardboard’s loss of contents and destroyed forms.

The miraculous potential of the shrine’s iconic usage can be productive in the understanding of narratives: secular or sacred. The association with prayer and rituals that protect or bring hope, health and prosperity, may be magnificent but similar qualities may also be found in the road-side shrines or votive offerings to household shrines for small.

There is a memory attached to making these works, of visiting a tiny Orthodox church in a remote Greek village. The iconostasis contained icons of various styles and dates, but there were many humble additions of printed cardboard icons, some quite modern, some dating from the nineteenth century. These could be faded or damaged by dust and damp, but nevertheless their sense of worth, as signs of attachment, remained. Permitted to have a place, humble images elevated by their setting and the hope they might literally bless, cure or remember their patrons, and those who worshipped in this remote place.

Joan Key, London, August 2022 *Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘The Surviving Image, Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017, p.218

The Miraculous Story of Walsingham Seen Through Glass - Scilla Landale

Scilla Landale started guided running guided tours of Walsingham over 35 years ago. Scilla will offer a special presentation entitled “The Miraculous Story of Walsingham Seen Through Glass”. This talk will contextualise “In Search of the Miraculous” within the broader religious and historical context of Walsingham. Additionally, Scilla’s tours of Walsingham may be joined on Friday 26th May. (see above for details).

Icon Painting Demonstration - Helen McIlldowie-Jenkins

Helen McIldowie-Jenkins is an artist, iconographer and Secular Franciscan (OFS) who has undertaken numerous fine art and icon commissions since the early 1990s.

Commissioning bodies include Bristol Cathedral, Chelmsford Cathedral, Wymondham Abbey, The English College Rome, The Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, The Turf Club Pall Mall, St Mary's Harrow on the Hill, Holy Trinity Cuckfield, All Hallows Gospel Oak, The Oratory of Cardiff University Chaplaincy and several chapels of the Woodard School Corporation. Helen has also produced numerous bespoke commissions for private clients in the UK, USA and Australia.

Helen has given interviews to BBC radio and talks to conferences and groups. Her research into 13th century crucifixion iconography has also been cited in art historical papers.

Helen only uses the traditional medieval panel painting techniques of egg tempera and water gilding to compose original devotional art as well as archetypal Byzantine Greek and Russians icons. Her work also references early Franciscan and Italian 14th century Trecento painting.

Helen also has a passion for Clerical Portraiture and has recently painted His Eminence Cardinal Vincent Nichols and Canon Bruce Ruddock of Chichester Cathedral.

Pilgrimage - Reverend Gyoro Nagase

Reverend Gyoro Nagase first arrived in England in 1978 from Aichi prefecture, near Nagoya, in Japan, to assist in the construction of the first Peace Pagoda in the UK in Milton Keynes. In 1984 he moved to London, to construct the Peace Pagoda in Battersea park, which was completed the following year. Reverend Nagase makes pilgrimages to and from areas of social and political significance to promote peace, with just a begging bowl and a walking drum. Pilgrimages have included Brantwood (John Ruskin’s home), Coniston, Cumbria to London Peace Pagoda, Battersea Park, from Vienna Peace Pagoda to Oświęcim, (Auschwitz), from Ukraine to Russia to visit and pray at Chernobyl, and walk from Kiev to Yasnaya Polyana (Leo Tolstoy’s home).

Messenger’s Lament- Holly Slingsby

Holly Slingsby is a visual artist working in performance, video and painting. She studied at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University; and the Slade School of Art, London. Her visual language reflects a fascination with iconographic traditions, drawing on Biblical imagery, mythologies, and contemporary culture. Much of her recent work seeks to convey the often unspoken experience of infertility.

Slingsby’s work has been shown at Turner Contemporary, Margate; Bòlit, Centre d’Art Contemporani, Girona; Tintype, London; DKUK, London; Matt’s Gallery; Spike Island; Modern Art Oxford; Freud Museum, London; CCC Barcelona; LABS Bologna; ICA, London; FEM Festival, Girona; Art Licks Weekend, London; and Barbican, London.

Dreams and nightmares made of sound and fury - Filippos Tsitsopoulos

Lady Macbeth, whose shadow precedes her down the castle stairs as she sleepwalks toward insanity, meets its male personage, Macbeth in a deluge of genre and symbolism of a Heideggerian dasein. He/She/Them is rubbing her/his/ their hands together in a famous line of regret: “Out, damned spot!” Her staff overhears this murder confession before both are returning upstairs with the chillingly fatalistic line: “What’s done can not be undone. To bed.” To dream no more.

And what if a dream can heal the myth? Macbeth plays a silent piano in the broken carcases of the airplane wings.

The riddle of Shakespeare in search for the miracle.

Filippos is using extraordinary and elaborately constructed masks as a form of protec- tion, disguise, identity, isolation, alienation, and human resilience. His work involves an exploration of authentic identity versus performed identity. He considers the often polarised fragmented identities that we perform and how to bring the interiorised au- thentic self and the exterior constructed self together. His goal is to examine socially constructed patterns of behaviour, create situations in which the participants break or transcend the internal feedback loops that control their own actions, and address the power structures we inhabit and perpetrate.

Talismans - Candide Turner Bridger

Candide Turner Bridger is an ecoartist and pigment maker, based in Walsingham. She works with the earth in site specific projects, using the soil to make rich and colourful pigments. Her work questions our relationship to nature by exploring symbols and patterns within.

Candide researches the history and folk tales from a site she has taken the soil to make pigment from and holds workshops where the audience are encouraged to create a dialogue around our history with nature, and the importance of ecological and social justice. Her aim is to inspire care and respect for the world we live in.

Ecoart is grounded in ecological ethics; it encompasses the physical, biological, cultural, political and historical aspects of ecosystems.

Warship - Worship - Richard Wilson RA

Richard Wilson’s interventions in architectural space draw heavily for their inspiration from the worlds of engineering and construction.

The ship (bark or barque, barchetta) was an ancient Christian symbol. It is the Church tossed on the sea of disbelief, worldliness, and persecution but finally reaching safe harbour with its cargo of human souls. “A ship carries the body and the church carries the soul”

It was also a great symbol during times when Christians needed to disguise the cross, since the ship’s mast forms a cross in many of its depictions. The term nave is from navis, the Latin word for ship, an early Christian symbol of the Church as a whole, with a possible connection to the Ship of St. Peter or the Ark of Noah. The term may also have been suggested by the keel shape of the vaulting of a church. In many Nordic and Baltic countries a model ship is commonly found hanging in the nave of a church, and in some languages the same word means both “nave” and “ship”.

arnolfini

performances, Bristol, October 2018

An evening of performances by DAS GLAMOR, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Kitty Fedorec, Luke Jordan and Sean O’Driscoll, and hosted by Arnolfini.

I cannot take the future, or ritual, for granted. A future ritual is something we do together and I definitely don’t agree with all of you. How to be together, then? How to remember what we came for?

In order to watch, to be there, receiving, thinking with, thinking about, F U T U R E R I T U A L - a series of performances, a series of series, a plural in the singular, a singular plurality, a thread, a plait - I’ll agree to disagree; to struggle, to writhe, to wiggle with my eyes and words, to embrace partiality, to allow the risk of cliché, the cliché of risk, to bounce off my burning body and onto yours.

The body burns because it’s embarrassing to watch performance, to perform audiencehood, to acquiesce to encounters you never sought out or imagined; to allow intimacy into square feet you would rather keep for yourself; a fragile, unsafe self. The mutual suspension of comfort for something else is perhaps the most precious ritual of all, though, so for now I agree to be thrown sideways into other people. Into other people’s futures. Into other people’s rituals. Let’s begin, I think. I stop thinking.

Kitty Fedorec has a suitcase of cassette tapes. She’s gothed-up, wig flying in our faces, daring us to diss or squirm or admire too lovingly, revealing our own fandoms, our own dominions. I lean forward. There are atlases on the floor. She stands on them. A string of dances, steady and studied.

She dances in defiance of something and I wonder whether every dance ever is in defiance of something. I think about my recent desire for only dances, no dancers. She speaks about mental health and feeling under constant threat. She speaks about the nation state being unwell. “The nation state wishes it was an eagle.”

She conducts a participatory war game with two audience members and I think about individual identity within and against national identity; the requirement to participate in nationhood, to “be a good sport”. I feel caught out; I’ve said ‘yes’ to this; to party politics; to paying taxes; to pressing send; to submission. Perhaps we can’t make art without making conversation with the parasites; the war machines. We’re already good sports for turning up, turning out, turning our love for possibility into social capital. To turn away is to taint the possibility of togetherness actually being pleasurable at some point in the future. I wonder whether the nation is always doomed to make war, whether the individual is always doomed to be a national treasure, whether outbreaks of violence are always synonymous with war and what would it be to violently break the state, our collective state of loneliness; the individual, the art institution, the dancer, the family, the monarchy, the dutiful subject, the artwork-as-commodity, the infinite misunderstandings of each other, into a billion shards? I wonder about this country. I wonder how to get rid of the billionaires. I wonder about sunken ships. And sunken desires for escape. How to raise them from the bottom of the sea?

I can’t remember how she ended up naked, but I do remember her singing with her band, which suddenly arose from the corner of the room, like solid ghosts. Gold leaf falls off her face. She’s only wearing a biker jacket, and a pair of Ray-Bans. I want to hang off her. Every word.

Kitty Fedorec, Some Day Dominion, 2018. Photo by Asher Fynn.

Joseph Morgan Schofield acts with and upon their body, calmly not-so-calmly piercing skin as if it was fabric. Not-so-calm because it requires me to be there, the witness, diluted in my witnessing, distracted, wanting rather to drape myself over the person next to me and breathe only in for a while, as Joseph takes care of breathing out. Or is it the other way around? Joseph does the breathing in, we do the breathing out. The tip of my tongue presses lightly into my front teeth and I suck the sides of this stupid, mute, always-active organ inwards, creating a rush of cold air between top and bottom jaw. “Thssshhhhhh.”

Would I bite the bullet? Would I grab the needle? Would I feel pleasure? I feel only their body matters. I feel heroic for not running up and saving them and then I feel stupid and then I feel sad and then I feel brave and then I feel hot. We’ve all agreed to watch and learn. We consent to every moment because they’ve consented to the longest moment and all the moments and all the labour before and afterwards. The cleaning, the white flannel that turns red, the tentative, too-casual post-show discussions, the avoidances, the calm after the storm, the storm swirling above and around us as they tip hot wax onto their arm.

There’s a tension between action and impact, reaction and smooth, calm observation. Body as observant subservience. Malleable bloodstream. Tightening skin. Decisions made long ago coming back to serve us an enormous platter of fuck-the-present, hold-on-tight, simply-close-your-eyes-if-you-need-to feeling.

I’m starting to really want a tattoo.

Joseph Morgan Schofield, yesterday I dreamt of flying, 2018. Photo by Asher Fynn.

DAS GLAMOUR are two but actually three people. I’m reminded of a Twitter meme about an imagined future with no men. Funny how fast a group of three becomes societal in scale. Perhaps I’ve re-internalised the compulsion to reproduce that haunted me for a while between 2014 and 2017. I can see them reproducing like spider plants - asexually - which isn’t to say they don’t have sex, but that sex is at last discontinuous with making babies - before and beyond my eyes and into a future beyond patriarchy, a world and word that feels so vintage already. Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. Perhaps you’re not ready to sign up to this spider future. In any case, I’m not entirely sure how we get from here to there without killing anyone - cookshops of the future, etc - so for now I’ll scale it down and focus on these three; this time.

It was 2018. It was autumn. I was wearing black. I was squatting, open-mouthed, with a group of other open mouths in a recently-defunded arts space to watch silently one of the most unapologetically constructivist, bish bash bosh, open-heartedly curious, in-love utopic, choreographic body-voice-drum-song works I’ve ever squatted open-mouthed in front of.
They yodelled. They stood on boxes. They stamped. Their voices were clear and calm and technical and guttural without the machismo of musicians and definitely none of the desperate, aspirational subjecthood of dancers. They just sang because singing is an animal faculty. They moved because moving is in them. Because singing and moving and drumming are pure vibration. Pure desire.

DAS GLAMOUR, In Iridescent Iteration, 2018. Photo by Asher Fynn.

Are they the vision of a future with only dances, no dancers? Who is the artist here? Who is the muse? Who has been taught? Who did the teaching? Who downloaded the holy text and from where? Who is this serving if not everybody? Who are they if not the ghosts of a future ritual without the need for fixed meanings or labour-as-we-know-it or nations or property or anxiety, except the continuous consideration of which pleasure we’ll take next?

Is there violence in dragging ritual from its deep history and chucking it into the future? Or chucking the future upon it? Maybe. But then I’m not much of a pacifist. I like things that smash together. I like shards. I like to read futures from fragments. We’re all witches here, DAS GLAMOUR seem to say, and don’t care for our agreement or disagreement. Just that we’re here. And it’s not that special. Perhaps performance isn’t that special, just unusual.

How many times have you slipped through time into a dark room to watch silently the glitter, the reddening skin, the guitar strings, the erotic implications, the lighting rig, the other nervous witches? Let’s assume there is the potential to agree on a future. Or many intersecting futures, at least. You cannot produce your future separately from mine, or theirs, so don’t even try. Don’t even try.

DAS GLAMOUR sing, and their song stays with me:

“desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire”

Text by Charlie Ashwell.

Luke Jordan, 2018. Photo by Asher Fynn.

Sean O’Driscoll, datum, 2018. Photo by Asher Fynn.

In Iridiscent Iteration a lure-dance paired with a work out on chewing gum. In Iridiscent Iteration involves and explores the harmonies and dissonances between alpine rituals, Schuhplatteln, self-optimization and fitness cult, Aerobic, goat figures and processes of artistic production. By appropriating and fragmneting the movement material of Areobic and Schuhplatteln a new independent luredance emerges. Possibly the lure-dance will attract queer-feminist goat creatures. New dances and songs are combined to a ritual of self-empowerment, agency and celebrations of pleasure.

The performance duo DAS GLAMOUR was formed in 2018 by Bernadette Laimbauer and Christa Wall and is based in Linz and Vienna. Their work is a sensual investigation of folk rituals, customs, iterations, circuits and transformations to their queer-feminist potentials.

thinking about icarus and deleuze and gender and my father. this is a leap of faith. the purpose is never to fly.

Joseph Morgan Schofield is a performance artist working across the body, text and endurance work.

séance: communication between dead and living, past / future and the present.possession: duality of the body as body possessed by an alien materiality and self possessing body, whilst also having the capacity to be possessed through an affective immersive experience leading to a lose of subjectivity in the rhythmic materiality of sensation, a ‘nocturnal anarchy of the senses’.exorcism: cathartic expulsion of unwanted elements from the mind / body.

Luke Jordan’s works take many forms; experimental sound, live art, installation, sculpture, photography, video and text; often combining many of these elements. The artist is interested in speculations upon the temporality of the human as one among many decaying material forms, haunted by imagined pasts and futures, unexplored territories, communications with the unknown, and by the vast unknowable, without and within the human body. His work incorporates manifestations of primal and cultural anxieties, in material decay, corruption and impurity through the emergence of hybrid forms and figures, disrupting the borders of the human, and of ‘civilization’.

seán o’driscoll is an emerging performance artist , recently graduating from warwick university . seán's previous work , WAH (a waluigi Clown) , showed at the camden people's theatre in april 2018 (video link available hmu). new twitter & instagram pals are always welcome (bearing gifts or not) : @seanodriscoll_

‘first-footing' is a waning scottish new years ritual , wherein the fortune of the year hinges on the first person to be welcomed through the door bearing symbolic gifts . in the wake of GDPR and echoing y2k, datum reduces the first-foot and gifts into information and code , and explores the relationship between distrust in technology and crossing thresholds of time.

Kitty Fedorec is a dance artist and perpetual teenage-goth. Her work is informed by her relationship with mental health and neuro-divergence. It looks at the need of humans to control their environments, internal and external, and its expression through a spectrum of rituals, compulsions and religious practices. The Misters of Circe are a gender non-conforming Sisters of Mercy tribute.

Some Day Dominion is inspired by current global politics, historical echoes, my grandparents' experience as refugees, a geopolitical theory from the start of the twentieth century, subculture as refuge and the music of The Sisters of Mercy. It sits between live art, dance, ritual and gig, with music from gender-fucked tribute, The Misters of Circe; an act of phonomancy to create a protective pocket goth world, beyond borders.

emilyn claid

Letting Go Of Things

Intensive workshop 17th - 21st March 2025, London

Participation

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Queer?

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emilyn claid

Intensive workshop in esoteric performance development Mon 17th - Fri 21st February 2025, Battersea Arts Centre (London)

Ron Athey and Michele Occelli invite you to join an intensive 5 day workshop process exploring automatistic modes of performing through hypnosis, trance movement, mortification of the flesh and pageantry.

Come with a performance concept - the final day will be support participants to develop and realise their (solo or collaborative) projects.

Participation & Tickets

Who is this call for?

Logistics

Contact

Ron Athey

Michele Occelli

a project by zack mennell

zack mennell

Funders and support

Participation

Who is this call for?

Contact

Logistics

To Participate

VestAndPage

a project by emilyn claid with Martin O’Brien

Letting go of things

Funders and support

CEREMONY is a 12 month programming cycle unfolding in London and Venice across 2024 and 2025.

Programme Cycle

Credits and Support

Future Ritual is delighted to deepen our collaboration with Venice International Performance Art Week as co-curators of the forthcoming edition, Portals and Constellations.

Participating Artists

Anne Bean

emilyn claid

Ash McNaughton, Joseph Morgan Schofield & Marcel Sparmann

SERAFINE1369

Funders and support

Winter Gathering, Sunday 1st December

Martin O’Brien

zack mennell

Funders and support

Key Info

Ron Athey

Michele Occelli

Key Info

Anne Bean

A FELLING

Ash McNaughton

Joseph Morgan Schofield

Marcel Sparmann

Funders and support

An Eternity of Nothingness or The (Im)possibility of Living On

Martin O’Brien

An Ambulance to the Future (The Second Chance)

Overture For The End (An Ashen Place)

Fading Out of Dead Air (Transmissions for the Necropolis)

The Last Breath Society

DISCHARGE

a participatory live art project about living and dying queerly

The Last Breath Society

Approach

Care

Accessibility

Facilitators

Joining the Last Breath Society

Future Anatomies:

Exquisite Corpse, Exalted Flesh

Key Info

Accessibility

About VestAndPage

In Search of the Miraculous

Joining the pilgrimage

Closing Event

Credits

Bios and Works

Intensive workshop
17th - 21st March 2025, London

Intensive workshop in esoteric performance development

Mon 17th - Fri 21st February 2025, Battersea Arts Centre (London)

FUTURE
RITUAL
2022

ICA (London) & online
18th- 29th May