Future Ritual’s artist roster and programming for CEREMONY has a definitive queer aesthetic. Tickets are availble here

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.

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.

Pianka Pärna

Pianka Pärna presents Mother, don’t forget me yet II on the final day of the CEREMONYfestival 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.

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).