Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage - Season 1

Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage - Season 1

Season 1

In a brand new four-part series for Channel 4, Grayson Perry will explore the landmark events in all of our lives – birth, coming of age, marriage and death - and try to reinvent them for our modern secular age. He'll be travelling the world for inspiration, spending time with communities in the Amazon, Indonesia and Japan to see how they treat these great moments. Back home Grayson will collaborate with British families to devise ceremonies that will mark a genuine milestone in their lives.

Grayson believes in the power of ritual to help us make sense of our lives, and thinks we are in danger of losing our way when it comes to marking those important moments today. Religions all have their rituals - weddings, funerals, christenings - but the UK is now one of the most secular countries in the world, so they don't always resonate with everyone. At their worst, they can feel empty and impersonal. And in a modern Britain of divorce, blended families and gay marriage, the traditional ceremonies don't always fit with the way we actually live our lives.

In this series, Grayson will work with people who are going through those universal experiences, and try find out what they need and want from the ceremonies they're about to go through. Then he'll turn his unique artist-anthropologist's eye on the ways in which other cultures mark the same moments, travelling around the world to see what we can learn from them. The final result will involve a ceremony that Grayson will help the families to design, as well as ritual art objects that Grayson will make. In its international sweep, and its focus on the universal experiences we all go through, this will be Grayson Perry's most ambitious series yet.

Network
Episodes4
Datesaoût 23, 2018 - sept. 13, 2018

Episodes

Death
Season 1Episode 160 min

Death

In this first episode, Grayson confronts death. In modern, increasingly secular Britain, are we in danger of forgetting how to mark and commemorate the deaths of the people we love? In search of an alternative, he travels to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi to meet the Toraja people, whose ideas about death are very different.

août 23, 2018
Marriage
Season 1Episode 260 min

Marriage

Grayson Perry continues his exploration of the importance of ritual in our lives. Grayson visits Japan, where he attends a spectacular Shinto wedding. He's awe-struck by the ceremony's beauty, precision and attention to detail. And in Japan he finds a modern, high-tech society that nevertheless keeps its reverence for its ritual traditions: a combination that he believes we can learn from. Back in the UK, Grayson meets Ben and Sarika, a couple from very different backgrounds who are planning two weddings. Sarika belongs to the Hare Krishna faith, so her side of the family are staging a traditional religious ceremony. But the couple are also planning a civil ceremony the following day. Ben's from a non-religious background, and they're struggling to devise an occasion that expresses his cultural heritage. So Grayson helps them to come up with a secular ceremony with some of the magic and sense of occasion of the religious one.

août 30, 2018
Birth
Season 1Episode 360 min

Birth

Grayson Perry continues his exploration of the importance of ritual in our lives. Bringing a child into the world is surely one of the most consequential things we can do, but how should we celebrate this life-changing moment? Grayson Perry begins his exploration of rituals for birth on the Indonesian island of Bali, where, in local tradition, a new-born child is seen as not fully part of our human world until it is 105 days old. Until that time, it's considered the height of misfortune if it should ever touch the ground. So, for its every waking moment it is constantly held by its parents and their family and friends. It's the ultimate expression of the adage that it takes a village to raise a child. When the baby reaches its 105th day, the family stage an elaborate ceremony where the child is allowed to touch the earth for the first time. Grayson experiences this beautiful ritual, and believes that we can all learn something from it.

sept. 6, 2018
Coming of Age
Season 1Episode 460 min

Coming of Age

In this closing episode, the rite of passage Grayson Perry explores is one with meaning and importance we often struggle to comprehend in modern Britain: coming of age. Grayson travels to the most remote place he's ever visited - deep into the Amazonian rainforest in western Brazil - to spend time with the Tikuna people, the region's largest indigenous group. He witnesses a coming of age ritual for teenage girls. Having been kept in seclusion from the rest of the community, and given instruction by the elder women of the village, Tikuna girls undergo an elaborate ceremony to mark their becoming an adult. It's a sometimes shocking event which challenges many of our ideas about how best to help young people make the difficult transition from child to adult. Back in the UK, Grayson meets a group of teenage girls from the Lewisham Young Women's Hub in south London.

sept. 13, 2018

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