Choreographer and Interdisciplinary artist Brendan Drake makes their Dance Place Debut with Ceremonials, presented by DC Dance Network and co-presented with Dance Place. Please note that this performance is for an 18+ audience and community members. 

Drawing inspiration from Catholic iconography and Gay Porn, Ceremonials is an hour-long performance work exploring the not-so-subtle similarities between Christianity and eroticism.

The work connects 14th-century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich’s text Revelations of Divine Love with images of contemporary queer smut to consider how sorrow and ecstasy are such strange but familiar bedfellows. Ceremonials is a utopic fever dream that lives somewhere between passion play and an elegiac orgy.

A bacchanalian parade of images, complete with fallen angels, messianic delusions, beautiful boyx drenched in holy water, and Mother Mary herself. It is a raucous meditation on pleasure, pain, and surrender as well as a call for hope, despite the horrors.

Sorrow is the content, ecstasy is the form.