As this project reaches a pause within its current form, my attention turns toward where it might go next. Beyond the academic frame, the work could continue in different directions: further performances in public or informal spaces, adjustments shaped by real-world dynamics, experiments in removing my role as facilitator, new formats such as re-performable text scores, and a literary continuation in the form of a fragmentary essay.
Continuing the project outside institutional settings
Although CPM5 marked a temporary closure within an academic frame, the project itself is far from complete. From the start, it was driven by questions of presence, authorship, community, and shared creative agency—questions that remain open, and cannot be resolved within a single institutionally framed performance.
The ritual structure was never meant to exist only inside academia. It was conceived as portable and adaptable, able to take root in everyday life, non-art contexts, or spaces where art is not expected. CPM5 offered one prototype in a controlled environment, but it tested only the viability of a relational form, not a final composition.
Future iterations will unfold outside institutions—whether in public spaces, informal gatherings, or community contexts. These will not reproduce CPM5, but re-contextualize its structure, testing its flexibility, responsiveness, and capacity to hold collective presence.
In this sense, the project continues not through refinement, but through variation and re-situation. Its strength will not be measured by perfection, but by how it survives within the unpredictable rhythms of life.
Balancing Ideal and Reality in Public Performances
As I began imagining the project beyond academic settings, new challenges emerged. In informal contexts—parks, public squares, community gatherings—participation may flow naturally. But more formal venues, such as my submission to Silent Green’s open call, implied ticketed performances with audiences who might arrive unprepared or unwilling to engage. This raised difficult questions: how to balance participants and spectators, or justify a long ritual process when the “performance” is brief?
Possible adaptations came to mind—such as private rituals followed by public showcases—but these risk collapsing into spectacle, undermining values of presence and shared authorship. Capoeira offers a precedent: stylized demonstrations that attract newcomers, even if they simplify the deeper logic of the roda. Whether such trade-offs align with my own project remains unresolved. As I move forward, I must navigate the tension between invitation and integrity, visibility and depth.
Facilitator as Barrier: On Stepping Out of the Ritual
After the final performance on June 19th, I received many generous responses—some described the experience as moving, even transformative. Yet I left with a lingering sense of personal failure.
Despite everything going according to plan, I hadn’t truly been there. Throughout the ritual, I was split between listening and evaluating, performing and managing. I kept asking myself: Did I follow the structure? Did I respond at the right moment? Did I allow enough space for others?
This inability to remain fully present revealed a structural problem: I was occupying a double role. As both participant and facilitator, I could never surrender completely. Some part of me always stayed outside, holding the frame.
I began to suspect that this split was not just internal. Others might have sensed it too. My role carried an implicit authority—however soft or benevolent—and that presence may have introduced a subtle hierarchy.
This reflection pointed to a new direction: What if, after helping build the ritual structure, I step away? Could my absence become a gesture of trust—one that affirms the participants’ agency and dissolves the need for guidance?
At the same time, I reconsidered what “stepping away” might mean. In many ritual forms—capoeira among them—the facilitator is present, but in a different mode. The bateria that sustains the roda does not hold more power than the players in the center, but their attention is structural rather than expressive.
From here, I saw two possible paths. I could remain as a facilitator who listens, adjusts, and holds the space without contributing sound. Or I could hand over the facilitation entirely and join the circle as one among equals.
Both options demand a redistribution of attention and authority. Either way, they lead to the next question: if I’m no longer central to the ritual’s operation, how might its structure be carried forward? That question led directly to the idea of text scores, explored in the next section.
Text Scores and the Possibility of Ritual Without Me
After the June 19 performance, during a discussion with tutors, I was asked whether my ritual process existed only in my memory or if it had been written down. I replied that I had developed written records and scripts. My tutor responded, “Then you’ve already created a kind of text score—very much in the Fluxus tradition.”
That comment reframed my written planning—not merely as private prompts for myself, but as potential operational frameworks for others. It also revealed parallels between my project and instruction-based practices such as Allan Kaprow’s Happenings: works that are not just authored by the artist, but activated by others.
This recognition surfaced a tension I hadn’t fully resolved. Part of me resists codification; I want the ritual to remain ephemeral, embodied, and relational. But another part sees the potential in text scores: they offer a way for others to re-perform the structure, especially if I step away as facilitator.
This also raised questions of authorship. I don’t mind if the project is interpreted differently by others—after all, even within capoeira, different lineages develop distinct styles while sharing the same core structure. That diversity does not threaten the form; it sustains it.
This opens a path forward: not theoretical writing, but performative writing—modular, incomplete, open-ended instructions that preserve the architecture of the ritual without freezing its soul. In that sense, writing becomes the form through which I can remove myself, while keeping the ritual alive.
Writing as an extension: Toward a Sebald-style essay
Some of the reflections that emerged during the project—such as speculative analogies between fungal memory systems and communal ritual practices—felt intuitively relevant but did not align with the expectations of a formal academic submission. The desire to find an appropriate home for such fragments has become one of the motivations for pursuing an open-form, essay-based continuation of the project.
Rather than functioning as a theoretical report or documentation summary, this essay will serve as a parallel gesture—another expression of the project’s conceptual residue. Its aim is not to clarify but to echo, extend, and weave. I envision a textual form that mirrors the ritual’s commitment to simultaneity, distributed agency, and non-closure.
Inspired by W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn(1998), I plan to adopt a non-linear, fragmentary, and intertextual style. Sebald’s work follows a coastal walking journey, yet it constantly diverges—into memories, footnotes, historical detours, and visual archives. Similarly, I may use the human body—particularly the five senses—as an organizing axis, allowing each sensory modality to open a new path of reflection. These pathways may range from sonic experiences during the ritual to the texture of materials used in the instruments, or from the scent of hand cream to the tactile structure of space.
In doing so, writing becomes another medium of presence—not explanatory but attentive. It invites the reader to inhabit the work’s unresolved questions, to walk alongside them rather than map them.
This project began with a structural question: how might a performance dismantle the hierarchical divide between artist and audience—a divide so often embedded in the energy, authority, and spatial design of conventional music events? Initially situated as a critique of this imbalance, the project took a pivotal turn through my ongoing Capoeira practice, where I experienced a participatory model that resists such separation. The Capoeira roda offered not only a different aesthetic, but a different politics of presence—one that became the foundation for rethinking performance as ritual.
Through the process of building this project, I shifted from studying performance formats to actively constructing a full-scale ritual. Each element—from the design of the instruments, to the structuring of participation, to the multi-sensory documentation—was not merely functional, but part of a larger inquiry: how to build spaces that hold presence without control, enable co-creation without erasure, and foster agency that is shared, situated, and fragile. What emerged was not a fixed method, but the early formulation of a ritual-based performance framework—both conceptual and practical, theory and practice folded into one.
Yet this is not a conclusion. The work has only begun. As outlined in the final section, multiple questions remain open—about scale, facilitation, documentation, and continuation beyond my presence. This project is not a singular piece, but a living architecture of rituals-in-the-making. I will continue to build, test, and reshape it—not as a closed form, but as a practice that grows by being practiced.