Future Ritual Presents CEREMONY: A Festival of Performance In April

Future Ritual will present CEREMONY: A Festival of Performance, a new 5-day festival of choreographic work and performance art taking place this April 23-27 at Peckham's Copeland Gallery in South-East London.

CEREMONY: A Festival of Performance concludes a year-long series of performances, exhibitions, artist labs and workshops exploring performance as a form of collective gathering amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life. April's rich offerings include new work commissioned by Future Ritual from seasoned dance artist emilyn claid in collaboration with performance artist Martin O'Brien (23 and 24 April). emilyn and Martin are set to deliver The Trembling Forest, a live art ballet created in collaboration with a host of dynamic queer artists including Eve Stainton, Azara and Orrow Bell.

Anne Bean, recipient of a 2024 Paul Hamlyn Award will present a performance lecture commissioned for the festival (25 April) and choreographer and dance artist SERAFINE1369 presents brand new work on the same day. UK premieres from International Artists include a performance from Marilyn Arsem, noted American artist and co-founder of Mobius Artist Group (27 April), Liz Rosenfeld (26 April) who fuses performance with film in their striking work Tremble reflecting on a landmark Berlin dark room. The renowned Belfast-based artist Alastair MacLennan and Sweden's Gustav Broms are both set to perform and to close the festival, VestAndPage, artist duo and founders of the annual Venice International Performance Art Week presenting BREATH FEAR IN, BREATHE GOLD OUT on Sunday 27 April.

Future Ritual is also excited to highlight emerging artists, who will perform across the festival. On Saturday, CEREMONY will host a day of free screenings and discursive events, fostering connection and dialogue across progressive artistic and social practices. In addition, VestAndPage will lead a week-long intensive co-creation workshop, inviting artists to explore our time's urgent and vital portals personally and collectively. They question how we can artistically reinvent rites of passage and rituals for modern society.

Future Ritual's work fosters spaces of sensitivity and attunement in which to think and feel through ideas of land, desire, belief, mystery and death. Founded by artist Joseph Morgan Schofield in 2017, Future Ritual are interested in performance ritual as a way of producing community and a sense of belonging, and as a way of experiencing our time in the world differently.

Says Morgan Schofield “There is a desire and urgency for these kinds of experiences - for processing the challenges of the contemporary world. We find performance art to be a potent way to offer this kind of experience to audiences, particularly for those of us outside of normative religions and cultures. We are interested in things which feel transgressive, which take us towards a more raw edge of experience where we can think and feel differently.”

The festival is Future Ritual's most ambitious programme to date, and follows sell-out programmes at Whitechapel Gallery and Norfolk and Norwich Festival (2023), the ICA London (2022) and Kunstraum Gallery (2019). Alongside this curatorial work, Future Ritual also acts as a producer for some of the UK's most distinctive performance artists, including Anne Bean and Martin O'Brien, both of whom present in this festival. Recent programmes have included co-curation of the prestigious Venice International Performance Art Week (Dec 2024) and Whistling as the Night Calls, an exhibition of collaborative photography by O'Brien and zack mennell, in Deptford's VSSL Studio (Nov 2024). Copeland Gallery is a spacious and striking gallery in Copeland Park, in the heart of Peckham.