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CEREMONY
A year-long programme cycle exploring performance in times of fragmentation.
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Anne Bean, What is this Damned Beast? The Anatomy of Performance, Future Ritual, 2025. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
CEREMONY a festival of performance
18.04 - 27.04.2025
A seven day festival of performance, conversation and exchange hosted by Copeland Gallery (Peckham), Live Art Development Agency (Bethnal Green) and Queen Mary University of London (Mile End).
Amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life and the ossifying effects of capitalism in the metropolis, CEREMONY was imagined as an invitation to cross a series of thresholds, to awaken desire, and to rekindle enchantment.
This multi-day offering, curated and produced by Future Ritual, featured the participation of artists including Alastair MacLennan, Anne Bean, emilyn claid, gustaf broms (SE), kane stonestreet, Liz Rosenfeld (DE), Marilyn Arsem (US), n:u, Pianka Pärna, Raisa Kabir, Rubiane Maia, SERAFINE1369 and VestAndPage (DE/IT) with Ash McNaughton and Joseph Morgan Schofield.
Future Ritual also offered two intensive artist development workshops across those days - Arcane Portals with VestAndPage and On Practice with Marilyn Arsem.
CEREMONY was 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. Across the festival the individual contributions of the presenting artists and the attentive presence of our audiences generated a potent collective energy, sharing myriad approaches to ideas of ritual, art, belief and ceremony.
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
Ewan Hindes, Audience Liaision Manager
Abstrakt Publicity, PR Manager
Arthur Morris & AJ Thwaites, Placements
funders & support
Future Ritual: Ceremony was 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).programme
23rd April: kane stonestreet + emilyn claid and co.
24th April: n:u + emilyn claid and co.
25th April: SERAFINE1369 + Anne Bean
26th April: Arcane Portals. Then Alastair MacLennan, gustaf broms + Liz Rosenfeld
27th April: Marilyn Arsem, Raisa Kabir, Rubiane Maia + Pianka Pärna. Then VestAndPage with Ash McNaughton + Joseph Morgan Schofield
Bios for all participating artists can be found on their page in our Artist Index.
18th April: an evening with Marilyn Arsem
19th April: STRATA by VestAndPage
26th April: Marilyn Arsem, Anne Bean + Joseph Morgan Schofield; then emilyn claid, Martin O’Brien + Martin Hargreaves; then Live Art Development Agency (Mary Osborn + kane stonestreet)
Documentation of these talks are held in our CEREMONY Knowledge Archive.
kane stonestreet
disclosurekane 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.
Their ritual actions are a process of survival.
Artist Index:
kane stonestreet
kane stonestreet, disclosure, Future Ritual, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
n:u
On SubstanceThe 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.
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.
Artist Index: n:u
n:u, On Substance, Future Ritual, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
emilyn claid & co
The Trembling ForestTurn 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.
Sound design by Lottie Poulet
Lighting design and production management by Rachel Shipp
The Trembling Forest has been produced by Future Ritual, London and co- commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre and Future Ritual. The project is supported by Arts Council England and Knotenpunkt, with further support given by The Place, Rose Choreographic School and Queen Mary University of London.
Artist Index: emilyn claid
Future Ritual: The Trembling Forest
emilyn claid, The Trembling Forest, Future Ritual, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
SERAFINE1369
(my body / running wild / this animal) gloriousI 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.
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
Artist Index: SERAFINE1369
SERAFINE1369, (my body / running wild / this animal) glorious, Future Ritual, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Anne Bean
What is this Damned Beast? The Anatomy of PerformanceThis 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.
Artist Index: Anne Bean
Anne Bean, What is this Damned Beast? The Anatomy of Performance, Future Ritual, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Arcane Portals
Participants in the Arcane Portals workshop, facilitated by VestAndPage, made a collective work looking at the (re)invention of rites of passage and rituals through performance art. Participating artists: Amy Mauvan, Aparna Ashok, Caro Ruoff, Cherlynn Zang, Frauke Huhn, Izzie Major, Joana Cifre Cerdà, Johanna Peltonen, Johanne Sundfør, Kelvin Atmadibrata, Marta Lodola, Olivia Hassett, Ruth Biene, Spirit Doll, Tania Camara and WOJAK.Future Ritual: Arcane Portals
VestAndPage, Arcane Portals, Future Ritual, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
gustaf broms
OUROBOROS pt.2gustaf 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 work in particular led him to work with the more formless processes of performance.
Artist Index: gustaf broms
The Guardian: the fearless artistic life of gustaf broms
gustaf broms, OUROBOROS pt.2, Future Ritual, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Alastair MacLennan
I N PAEANAlastair 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.
Alastair would like to acknowledge the support of members of the Bbeyond Performance Art organization and charity, from N.Ireland and beyond.
Artist Index: Alastair MacLennan
Alastair MacLennan, I N PAEAN, Future Ritual, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Liz Rosenfeld
TrembleFlutter. 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.
Performed by Temitope Ajose, Joanna Lindsey, Tamm Reynolds and Liz Rosenfeld
Artist Index: Liz Rosenfeld
Liz Rosenfeld, Tremble, Future Ritual, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Marilyn Arsem
Resisting, Surviving... A few hours into the performance the battery on the I-Book died. I asked the audience if anyone would be willing to continue from where it stopped by reading aloud from the actual book. I said they could read as long as they wanted, and that I hoped someone else would volunteer to take over. And from then on people willingly agreed to read out loud.
The energy in the room coalesced at that point, and the sense of community intensified. More and more people began to organize the broken pieces, helping each other to match them so that they could be glued back together ...
Marilyn Arsem, Resisting, Surviving Project Notes
Artist Index: Marilyn Arsem
Marilyn Arsem, Resisting, Surviving, Future Ritual, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Raisa Kabir
(work untitled)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.
Artist Index: Raisa Kabir
Raisa Kabir, Future Ritual, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Rubiane Maia
CultivationRubiane Maia is a Brazilian transdisciplinary artist based in Folkestone, UK. She completed a degree in Visual Arts and a Master degree in Institutional Psychology at Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil. 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 of nature, the landscape and the environment as guide and co-creators of her artworks.
Artist Index: Rubiane Maia
Rubiane Maia, Cultivation, Future Ritual, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Pianka Pärna
Mother, don’t forget me yet IIAn 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.
Artist Index: Pianka Pärna
Pianka Pärna, Mother, don’t forget me yet II, Future Ritual, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
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.
Artist Index: VestAndPage
VestAndPage, BREATHE FEAR IN. BREATHE GOLD OUT., Future Ritual, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.