A quick mention, a parish notice if you like, of this year’s Ceremony today before Frieze Week sucks up every single minute, expect more on Cermony, once this Week is out of the way…
Future Ritual’s festival of performance art CEREMONY returns for its second edition, November 25-29. Foregrounding the ritual qualities of performance through an intergenerational and international programme, this year’s festival, curated by Joseph Morgan Schofield considers the ways queers, migrants and others who inhabit the outsides and undersides have tended to mystery, ritual and connection in the shadow of empire and industry. CEREMONY 2026 is Future Ritual’s most ambitious programme to date and follows a sell-out edition of the festival in 2025.
Says Morgan Schofield “Underneath the asphalt, beyond the glass, coming through the concrete are other cities – wilder and freer. Performance art is fundamentally about how we experience time, how we relate to each other, and how we inhabit the places we find ourselves. Through CEREMONY you’ll encounter myriad perspectives on these essential questions. The programme is a heady mix of visceral ritual, slow cognition, sensory encounter and radical expression. The festival is a rare opportunity to encounter legends of performance art alongside emerging voices. We work collaboratively with artists, against the tyranny of normativity, towards the more raw edges of experience where we can think and feel differently.”
This year’s artists include Ron Athey with the world premiere of Asclepeion on Friday November 27 & Saturday November 28. Five years in the making, this large-scale work is inspired by ancient Greek mysteries and takes place at Copeland Park’s Unit 08. Asclepeion features collaborators including Athens-based artists Hermes Pittakos and Myrgon and extreme vocal and performance artist Carmina Escobar, originally from Mexico now living in Los Angeles.
Launching the festival on Wednesday 25 November, Curtain Call from Pianka Pärna is a live art ballet where performers Wet Mess, Nando Messias and Claudia Palazzo work to undo the perfection of classical ballet training in the context of queer identity and post-Soviet displacement. Curtain Call is accompanied with a live score by Leo Chapman. On the same night and as a double bill, Ireland’s Paul Regan presents All Over [2], a work considering inherited ritual and cultural identity. Known for his intense physicality and appropriation of religious themes, Regan regularly performs in Europe. Both Curtain Call and All Over [2] will take place at the Copeland Gallery.
Thursday 26 November sees another double bill at the Copeland Gallery with trans*disciplinary artist and award-winning designer Mal Parry and Every Law a Tattoo. Since medieval times, UK laws have been inscribed on vellum (calf skin). Inspired by this, Parry’s new performance responds to hostility and legislative violence towards queer and trans people via a collision of contemporary materials, legal histories and traditional craft practices. Opening the evening, emerging artist Eoin McCaul presents TAIBHSE [Ghost] together with sound artist Dilan Kumar. This sensory collaboration explores the way ghosts of touch haunt the body.
Julia Bardsley, whose decades of practice span performance, sculpture and photography presents installation and performance #2:aNALOGUE Abyss iGNITION. This new, durational work foregrounds human-centred creativity in the age of artificial intelligence. Bardsley is joined by collaborators Moa Johansson and Andrew Poppy and the performance will run on the afternoons of Friday 27, Saturday 28 and Sunday 29 November at Copeland Park’s Safehouse 2.
Tiziano Cruz returns to the UK following well received performances of his compelling, autobiographical work in 2024. Cruz’s signature fusion of poignancy and provocation reflects the experiences of indigenous Argentinians. He will present a performance lecture on the evening of Copeland Gallery on Friday November 27.
Since the late 1970s, Katherine Meynell has worked across material media, moving image, performance, drawings and artists’ books. Meynell performs dead bird & fallen angels at Copeland Park’s Safehouse 1 on the afternoon of Friday November 27
On the afternoon of Saturday November 28 at the Copeland Gallery, n:u (melissandre varin) performs FREE(HOLD) alongside artists Ãssia Ghendir, Kelvin Atmadibrata, Sel Kofiga and by Xie Rong (aka Echo Morgan). Guided by spiritual, material and human encounters, the artists engage with the politics of land ownership and liberation. Simultaneously at Safehouse 1, Dagmar Bilon’s 7 Rooms: Dismantling Grief asks how the practices of dismantling, recycling and transformation might generate new rituals for those living with loss.
Sweden’s prolific Gustaf Broms’s practice draws from nature, exploring the ephemeral fragments of being, between mind and matter. His inaugural UK performance at CEREMONY in 2025 was a sellout success and for 2026, Broms will again perform a durational work on the afternoon of Sunday November 29 at Safehouse 1.
Also on the 29th at the Copeland Gallery, two other durational performance, occupy different areas of the space. Interdisciplinary artist Lynn Lu’s ongoing research is on female health, feminine resilience and sensuality in post-reproductive life while a new commission from artist Rona Lee marks a return after more than twenty years to durational work. In the evening, celebrated performance artist Lois Weaver will close CEREMONY Festival 2026 with the solo work WHAT’S A CHAIR WITHOUT A TABLE, looking at ageing mortality and solitude.
An additional event to CEREMONY 2026 is the next DISCHARGE, a semi regular performance evening curated by Martin O’Brien and featuring Shaun Caton, Daniel Oliver with Claudia Palazzo, selina bonelli, Bart Seng Wen Long with Tommy Burke, and Ewan Hindes. This takes place on Sat 28 November at the Copeland Gallery.
Tickets can be booked via: Buy tickets – Future Ritual: CEREMONY
About Future Ritual
Future Ritual cultivates performance art and artists, in the UK and internationally, amplifying the enlivening and transformative potential of this artform. Founded by artist Joseph Morgan Schofield in 2017, their work is guided by a belief in performance art and experiential practices as potent ways of connecting with ourselves, each other, and the places we inhabit. Against the alienation and fragmentation of contemporary life, Future Ritual creates and holds spaces for curious publics to gather, to think and to feel through place, desire, belief, loss and mystery.
CEREMONY 2026 follows programmes at Wellcome (2026), Whitechapel Gallery and Norfolk and Norwich Festival (2023), the ICA London (2022) and Kunstraum Gallery (2019).
Previously on these pages…
