Future Ritual’s artist roster and programming for CEREMONY has a definitive queer aesthetic. Here’s a rundown of names appearing who might particularly appeal to QX readers.
emilyn claid
Esteemed choreographer emilyn claid, whose career stretches back to the 1960s when she was a dancer with the National Ballet of Canada and the 1970s when she was co-founder of pioneering experimental collective X6 Dance Space in London, presents The Trembling Forest, a live art ballet created in collaboration with performance artist Martin O’Brien on 23 and 24 April. This ensemble piece will bring a forest of queer people, each painted with clay, cracking, shivering and trembling together on the opening days of the festival, evoking a macabre, surreal and beautiful world. Participants include prolific dance artists Eve Stainton, Azara, Adrienne Ming and Orrow Bell, with original sound by Lottie Poulet.
Kane Stonestreet and n:u
n:u (see feature image) and Kane Stonestreet, both exciting trans artists, perform on 23 and 24 April, respectively, opening both evenings at 7pm.
Kane is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice features ritual actions, queer esoteric traditions and body-based practices.
“At CEREMONY, I will be performing a composite piece to a gift, as yet (it might become), a ritual I performed shortly before my top surgery. Returning to the same materials over a year on, I will be stitching these two points together and diving into the feelings that have emerged post-waiting”.
Kane Stonestreet to QX
Meanwhile, n:u, also a trans artist, interrogates situations where healing, intimacy and altered embodiment can be experienced. Collaborating with space, companion materials, and witnesses, n:u is termed as an ‘atmosphere-maker’, breaking what is understood as active or passive agency to create sculptural scenes and develop new meanings and purposes, away from binary and linear processing.
SERAFINE1369
Choreographer SERAFINE1369 presents (my body / running wild / this animal) glorious a group work in process on Friday 25 April. Their renowned practice deals in intensities, atmospheres created by the tensions between things that make meaning, underpinned by their interest in the invisible systems and structures that choreograph bodies in life.
Liz Rosenfeld
On Saturday, 26 April, Berlin-based Liz Rosenfeld fuses performance with film in Tremble. Furthering themes of queer desire historically explored by the artist, Rosenfeld was granted access during the pandemic to Ficken 3000 (Ficken meaning Fuck), one of the oldest cruising bars in Berlin. Its enforced closure prompted Rosenfeld to think about spaces defined by the bodies that use them. Tremble invokes questions relating to the past, present and future of queer public space, relevant to the questions of erasure that queer bodies presently face. Joining Rosenfeld will be Tamm Reynolds, who readers might know for their alter egos Midgitte Bardot and Temitope Ajose.
Pianka Pärna
Pianka Pärna presents Mother, don’t forget me yet II on the final day of the CEREMONY festival from 3- 6pm. Pärna is a non-binary artist from Estonia, exploring Baltic and Slavic mythologies, queer grief and gender non-conformity through performance. Their durational piece touches on childhood memories of playing with Matryoshka dolls, unveiling the possibility to explore the politics of belonging within post-Soviet traditions and heritage while inhabiting queer time, considering un/worlding through embodied transformation.
Future Ritual, founded by artist Joseph Morgan Schofield
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.
“With the CEREMONY festival, I have been deliberate in inviting intergenerational collaboration. When I began Future Ritual in 2017, one of the driving forces was an awareness of lineage – of the artistic and political traditions which seemed to inform the contemporary practices of my peers and myself. Those lineages, as I understood them, were things like the politics of queer futurity, autonomous artistic organising, transgressive body-based performance work and action art.
Joseph Morgan Schofield to QX
“My curatorial work celebrates the practices of artists such as Ron Athey and emilyn claid, who have attained a level of iconicity in the field while continuing to experiment and break new artistic ground. Alongside their performances, I´ve also curated and produced projects of artistic exchange, allowing more emergent generations of queer artists and performers to learn from their brilliant work.
“In these spaces, I do see a multi-directional exchange happening which feels really exciting. I think we need to cultivate more spaces for the flow of ideas and practices between generations! This is something we are trying to do in the festival. So alongside performances by legends like emilyn, you´ll also see thrilling works by a younger generation of queer performance artists including kane stone street, Pianka Pärna and n:u..”
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).
CEREMONY: A Festival of Performance runs from 23rd – 27th April 2025 at Copeland Gallery, Unit 9, Copeland Park,133 Copeland Road, London SE15 3SN, United Kingdom.
Tickets: £14/£17/£20 Festival Pass: £50/£60/£75
Gathering, on Saturday, 26 April, is from 11am until 4pm, free but RSVP
Some exact performance times are TBC if not detailed above or online
Instagram: @futureritual
All images supplied.
