NiFe

Performance

Ritual For The Uninvited

Ritual for the Uninvited is a twenty-minute solo performance merging Butoh and performance art as a ritual inquiry into relationship across ancestral and queer cosmic dimensions. Drawing from Celtic and Norse pagan ontologies, it evokes the porousness between worlds, living and dead, landscape and body, self and lineage, where ancestral transmissions move through physicalities and timescales in a choreography of inheritance and dissolution.

Emerging from grief and the ecstatic, the work approaches madness as divine release, a threshold where rationality breaks into the wild intelligence of love, grief, and cosmic memory. Rooted in the sudden death of the artist’s mother, it listens for the afterlife

of connection, understanding death as transformation and animacy that persists through body and landscape.

Cernunnos, the Celtic antlered deity of the wild, is invoked as a nonbinary life force, reframing fertility as multiplicity, vitality, and ecological reciprocity. Through this, the work enacts a queer cosmology that dissolves boundaries between human and more-than-human, life and death. The performer’s body becomes altar and threshold, gathering the uninvited, those silenced or excluded by sanctioned ways of being, into a collective field of presence: a living ecology of transformation where queerness is the structure of interconnection rather than a fixed subject.

a rhythm of living, the quiet, still, cavernous places, known to each of us.