Ritual Virtual: Inside the Sacred Rites

An immersive theatre experience by the Duvet Brothers
3rd and 4th July 2025 in T-Block, Frenchay Campus, UWE Bristol
Tickets on Eventbrite 7pm on Friday 4th July
Tickets on Headfirst 7pm on Thurs 3rd July
Tickets on Headfirst 8pm on Thurs 3rd July
Tickets on Headfirst 7pm on Thurs 4th July

What if the Duvet Brothers reformed 40 years later to do a big VR, robot, multiscreen live event thing. Ritual Virtual is an immersive theatre experience which employs all of the above plus live ritual with music. It will offer a glimpse of what it would have been like to be an initiate in an ancient Greek ritual.

The Duvet Brothers have reformed to present a live event in Bristol in July 2025. A small audience will be immersed as participants in the ancient Greek ritual of the Eleusinian Mysteries, a powerful celebration of loss and rebirth.

For more than 1000 years in ancient Greece annual initiations called the Eleusinian Mysteries were performed. Dedicated to the cult of Demeter and Persephone, this elaborate series of sacred rites and ritual preparations helped initiates overcome fear of death and achieve their best life. Ritual Virtual is an immersive theatre experience which employs live performance, video projections, robots and virtual reality to allow audience members to enter the initiation.

This exploratory research is funded by the University of the West of England's Bridge Exploratory Fund and will act as a proof of concept and evidence base for future research and development. We ask: Can VR, alongside theatrical staging, create profound first-person emotional resonances with a dramatic narrative?

Music composed by Gary Bridgewood and Peter Boyd Maclean. Additional sounds by Bioni Samp.

An image from one screen of the "troll bridge". This part of Ritual Virtual is a four screen installation where monitors are mounted on robot arms that follow audience members as they pass. In the Eleusinian Mysteries, after nine days of intense preparation and just before entering the temple to receive the revelation of the mystery, initiates had to cross a bridge while locals hurled abuse at them.

It is being made by the Duvet Brothers, their first project together since their pioneering work as video artists in the 1980's. Rik Lander is a Senior Lecturer at UWE specialising in participatory and interactive media and Peter Boyd Maclean is a director specialising in virtual reality. They will work with Nathan Churchill, Robotics Engineering Technician at The Bridge Studios, UWE's £3.2m interdisciplinary research lab. He will help choreograph the movement of four Universal Robots UR10e robots as part of the experience. The project is supported by the Digital Cultures Research Centre (DCRC) and Research, Business and Innovation (RBI) at UWE Bristol.

The Eleusinian Mysteries influenced great thinkers like Plato and Aristotle whose ideas have informed Western civilisation. Lander and Boyd-Maclean wonder if in these times of social fragmentation is it time to step again along these ancient pathways?