ritual ritual ritual

Ulysses Black, as Lecturer 1, reveals the presence of the linear sequence of blackboards within the first configuration. Performance at the Basement, Brighton 2013

A Performance Lecture on the practice of ritual

The Basement
Brighton
Sept-Oct 2013

Poster for the first set of performances

Over the past two years Ulysses Black has sought to find different ways of presenting information on his research into the practice of ritual to audiences that combine both ritual practitioners, artists, and otherwise interested performance patrons. In this latest work, the artist sought to create a lecture on the subject of ritual practice that avoided any specific ritual contexts, instead drawing on the lecture format itself as a context. Added to this, the aim was to create a journey for audiences that would through repeated motifs enable an audience of different experience and knowledge, to engage with and even directly participate in a performance experience that would begin as a lecture, and gradually become increasingly encoded, until such a point that the audience found themselves as instrumental participants within a lecture of ritual that had somehow become itself a ritual of a lecture on ritual practice.
The structure followed three distinct 'lectures' which ran in sequence and which used complex repeating motifs to orchestrate the conditions of ritual within a lecture context, leading the audience through an external induction, and resulting in full immersion within a ritual. While drawing on seven specific 'lessons' on the practice of ritual being detailed on seven different free-standing, self illuminated blackboards.