‘A hunt for the beast that has plagued me’(Anne Bean)
Future Ritual presents CEREMONY, a new 5-day festival of choreographic work and performance art at Peckham’s Copeland Gallery.
CEREMONY 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. This April’s rich offerings include a new work commissioned by Future Ritual from seasoned dance artist emilyn claid and renowned performance artist Martin O’Brien, alongside new performances by Anne Bean, recipient of a 2024 Paul Hamlyn Award, SERAFINE1369 and UK premieres from international artists including Marilyn Arsem, the noted American artist and co-founder of Mobius Artist Group, Liz Rosenfeld, who lives and works primarily in Berlin and VestAndPage.
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.”
Encountering different works from across Bean’s five decades of practice, her new work ‘What is that damned beast? Anatomy of performance’ will explore what performance could be and why we keep doing it.
Says Anne: “This 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 lifework”
Copeland Gallery, Unit 9, Copeland Park,133 Copeland Rd, London, SE15 3SN from 23rd – 27th April 2025.
Full details and event booking: https://futureritual.co.uk/CEREMONY-a-festival-of-performance-2025
