F U T U R E R I T U A L is an artist-led performance and research project exploring the place, use and function of ritual action in contemporary performance and queer cultures.
F U T U R E R I T U A L is primarily concerned with queer futurities and positions ritual as a technology of speculative transformation.
Queer ritual action is understood as a method for divination and augury - as a way of mapping, visioning, fabulating or otherwise embodying future potentialities. A future ritual might function by gesturing towards or manifesting or otherwise calling forth these alternate states, these other ways of being.
The project is a lab for performative research by Joseph Morgan Schofield and other invited artists. Through public performance events, F U T U R E R I T U A L aims to provide an active context for the presentation of performance art in the UK.
The next series of F U T U R E R I T U A L events will take place in London between April and July 2020.
R E S E A R C H // R E F L E C T I O N
Critical and artistic reflections on the project by Joseph Morgan Schofield and commissioned writers may be found here, and on event archive pages.
Interview: Joseph Morgan Schofield, Nov 2019
Response: Sara Sassanelli, Sept 2019
Response: Bean, Nov 2018
Response: Charlie Ashwell, Oct 2018
Response: Benjamin Sebastian, Oct 2018
Response: Es Morgan, Sept 2018
A R C H I V E
F U T U R E R I T U A L was established in 2017 by Joseph Morgan Schofield and Thomas Yeomans. The initial phase of the project took the form of six itinerant performance events, temporarily inhabiting and activating borrowed spaces, with five or six works taking place at each event. The events held space for artists and audiences interested in queerness, ritual, myth, magick and mysticism to come together, to resist marginalisation, to challenge decency, to protest, to process, to dream us forward.
In September 2019, F U T U R E R I T U A L presented a three day programme at Kunstraum and the Live Art Development Agency. The programme was entirely free to attend and included a screening and discussion event, followed by two performance events.
Documentation of the events, including commissioned responses, can be viewed on the individual event pages:
S H A R E D A C T I O N
Future research looks towards S H A R E D A C T I O N, a notion that imagines performance rituals as a space through which collaboration, kinship and communion can emerge or be developed.
The first shared action took place at Chisenhale Dance Space (London) in June 2019, featuring Joseph Morgan Schofield and selina bonelli.
F U T U R E R I T U A L A R T I S T S
Alex Billingham, Alicia Radage, Anni Movsisyan, António Branco + Riccardo T., Augusto Cascales, Charlie Ashwell, China, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, DAS GLAMOUR, Ellis D, Eunjung Kim, Evie Fehilly, Hellen Burrough, Iris Madariaga, Jon John, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Kelvin Atmadibrata, Kitty Fedorec, Laura Burns, Leman Daricioğlu, Lise Boucon, Lizzie Masterton, Louisa Robbin, Luke Jordan, Martin O'Brien + Sheree Rose, Niko Wearden, Neo Fung, Nene Jayne Camara, Nwando Ebizie, Oberon White, Radage ▽ Hardaker, Ro Hardaker, Sandra Stanionyte, Seán O'Driscoll, selina bonelli, and Tsinder Ash.
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a queer ritual might be a ritual where rites and traditions are queered, or re-discovered, or enacted by queers for queers. it is likely engaged in the conscious rejection of heterosexual societal norms. they likely resist and critique the politics of assimilation and celebrate, instead, subversion, indecency, aberrance, and difference.
a queer ritual might be a strategy for survival, for effecting social and political change, for taking on the world and for making it through the damn day.
a queer ritual might involve dancing, sigil crafting, dragging up, singing, bleeding, mourning, celebrating, loving, shouting, or something else entirely.