Thanks to a generous invitation from Marc Streit I got busy with a lab around contemporary ritual in the context of Zürich Moves! With guest artists Barabra Raes, Jen Rosenblit, Jassem Hindi and a fabulous local Zürich crew we interrogated our ambivalence towards ritual, addressed unacknowledged loss and got very greasy too.
Below is an intial decription.
On rituals and remedies in troubling times – Performance research Lab
Over the course of a week an impressive assemblage of Zürich artists and guests gather and settle in the spaces of Walcheturm gallery to research notions of ritual in contemporary society. Circumventing the kind of thinking that prescribes rituals as exotic practices of other cultures or even vestiges of social conservatism, they embrace rituals as an arena in which social change can emerge and be absorbed in social practice. Rituals are performative – their meanings generated by the action itself. Reformulating ritual as meaningful beyond signification of existing external realities offers possibilities for combining divergent bodily practices, speech acts, play and embodied ideas in an alchemy of everyday magic. Can the repetition and ritualization of actions and utterances generate acts of resistance and healing? Employing a working methodology that accentuates repetition, difference, rupture and affect, this temporary ensemble navigates new performance rituals that sit inside ideas of transition, grafting, commemoration and decay.
On two evenings, the first just two days into their lab and the second as a culmination, the artists invite you to meet in a temporary gathering where concerns and complications of ritualization are shared. A social practice may emerge where the things we have come to care about become elevated, become significant. Turns out that the extraordinary is always an amplification of something that was already in the works. The ritual needn’t be explained by the surprise production of magic but by return, a commitment to the habitus of action itself.
