If you’re in London this month, check out CEREMONY, a Festival of Performance, a five-day performance arts festival – including many queer performances – taking place April 23-27 at Peckham’s Copeland Gallery in South-East London.

Curated by Future Ritual, CEREMONY, a Festival of Performance includes the following gems amongst many more.

The Trembling Forest is a live art ballet created by Emilyn Claid in collaboration with Martin O’Brien. A forest of queer people, each painted with clay, crack, shiver, tremble and decay. The Trembling Forest evokes a macabre, surreal, grotesque, and beautiful world also featuring artists and participants including Eve Stainton, Azara, Adrienne Ming, and Orrow Bell with original sound by Lottie Poulet, known for their work with Test Department and the reformed Throbbing Gristle.

The prolific Anne Bean presents What is that damned beast? Anatomy of performance. Encountering works from across Bean’s five decades of practice, this new performance lecture explores what performance could be and why we keep doing it.

SERAFINE1369 presents (my body / running wild / this animal) glorious a group work in process. Their choreographic 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.

International artists include a rare opportunity to experience Sweden’s Gustaf Broms. In the early 90s, after having worked primarily with installation and photography, BRoms burned his work and in doing so, realised that the intensity of this action and the residual ashes outdid anything that he had previously made. Ensuing works included performances with immovable objects and a collaborative 18-month walk around Eastern Europe.

Berlin-based Liz Rosenfeld fuses performance with film in Tremble. Furthering themes of queer desire historically explored by the artist, Rosenfeld was granted access during the pandemic to one of the oldest cruising bars in Berlin. Its enforced closure prompted Rosenfeld to think about spaces defined by the bodies that use them. Tremble invokes questions relating to the past, present and future of queer public space, relevant to the questions of erasure that queer bodies presently face. Joining Rosenfeld will be Tamm Reynolds and Temitope Ajose.

Pianka Pärna presents Mother, don’t forget me yet II on the final day of the festival. Pärna is a non-binary post-Soviet artist from Estonia, exploring Baltic and Slavic mythologies, queer grief and gender non-conformity through performance.

VestAndPage the artist duo who founded Venice’s annual International Performance Art Week conclude the festival with BREATHE FEAR IN. BREATHE GOLD OUT a participatory closing performance on the evening of Sunday 27 April, intertwining alienation with intimacy.

Sounds really good. Looking forward to this!