Rituals was born out of a pandemic desire to cope with sudden change, grief and confusion. In 2021 with a seed commission from The Spire in Brighton, and partly inspired by The Start Up wife by Tahmina Aman, we explored how we might create personalised secular ritual for individuals and groups. We invited a small invited audience to The Spire and had rituals for perseverance, ageing and being more dog.
In 2022 with funding from Arts Council England we developed the project in two directions. We refined our offer and opened it to the public, holding two performances including more rituals with audience participation. There were rituals for sleep, new love, walking the line and one for a birthday.
We also began to develop a workshop series, inviting participants to create new secular rituals. They may be acts of connection, cleansing, coping, celebration, commiseration, calling for… or something else. We worked with staff teams to develop simple rituals that they could incorporate into and improve their working lives. With TiPP we worked with Resettle in Liverpool and then Our Room Manchester, The Railway Land Trust, Brighton Dome and Festival and Plot 22 in Hove. In educational settings we shared the workshop with students and Kingston and Manchester Universities.
In September 2022 London College of Music hosted “Performing Recovery” an event that launched the Addiction Recovery Arts network. And spa led a workshop at the beginning of the conference and then created a bespoke ritual that was performed by all conference attendees to close the event. We also ran a workshop at The Social Pedagogy Conference a ritual with workshop attendees.
