LIVE performance

A selection of Ben's most recent live performance works: Theatre, Performance Art, Improvisation & Dance
For a complete artist CV/Resume please download here.

Izabella’s Voice

Izabella’s Voice is a durational performance art series: processing memory, language, and melody, through 49 performances, over 49 days, in 49 public locations around Kitchener-Waterloo. The performance is built around recordings of Ben’s 90 year old grandmother singing and reciting poetry from memory. Revolutionary ballads from her youth in 1930s Kharkiv, Ukraine - USSR, poems from the eastern front lines of WWII, social songs from distant soirees and summer camps all but lost in time and space. Her fallible memory, wavering voice, and everpresent hacking cough shape the recordings into a fragile and bittersweet collage. Using the visual language of drag and political street theatre, these recordings become a reclamation of immigrant history and cultural residue through serial public performance. Oral history, untranslated language, and private song set against a vibrant backdrop of community spaces and public sites of urban connection.

Commissioned for the CAFKA.25 Biennial - Field Guide to the Understory, Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area - Bringing Contemporary Art to the Public Space.

A full digital archive of all 49 performances is available on YouTube

Garlic Breath - A Quartet for Garlic, Cello, Mouth & Telephone

An interdisciplinary theatre piece from classical cellist Miriam Stewart-Kroeker and writer-performer Ben Gorodetsky. These two powerhouse artists bring their distinct styles to a performance that explores memories, melodies, smells and fragments of grandmaternal love and trauma. Contemporary classical solo cello is juxtaposed to stories exploring Ben's relationship with their maternal grandmother, Raiya. Her experiences with starvation, survival, and transformation are told through phone calls, live cooking, movement and translation. A delicious and nutritious mix of music, memory, telecommunication, and fragrant garlic.

“[We] were engrossed in a symphony of love, trauma and, of course, lots of garlic. The air was filled with the garlic’s pungency carried by the melodies from the cello bearing the weight of Raiya’s story. The performance left a lasting impact, [and] more questions than answers…”
-Harleen Kaur Dhillon, The Community Edition

Creative Team
Concept, Text & Direction - Ben Gorodetsky
Music Curation & Performance - Miriam Stewart-Kroeker
Dramaturgy - Lisa O’Connell & Lauren Prousky

Landscape, Displacement, Memory (Performance)

Landscape, Displacement, Memory is a multimedia live performance, integrating a screening of Ben’s experimental documentary films with a live, movement duet performed with an aerial drone camera. The performance juxtaposes pre-recorded site-specific dances and rituals in natural spaces captured with drones, family oral histories of immigration, displacement, and survival, and live projected footage from the drone “dancing” with Ben.

LDM was created with support from the Canada Council, Shevchenko Foundation, Ontario Arts Council, and Region of Waterloo Arts Council.

The live performance was developed and premiered through the Guelph Dance Festival’s Artist in Residency program (2021/2022).

Biblioteka

Situated at the intersection of movement, theatre, storytelling, literature, music, installation, and improvisational text-score Biblioteka is a performance that investigates the intellectual, cultural, and emotional artifact of books.

Created and performed by Ben Gorodetsky, Biblioteka intersects ritual movement, autobiographical storytelling, live reading, experimental theatre, folk music and improvisation. Using a combination of personal literary treasures that have travelled with Gorodetsky thousands of kilometres and criss-crossed international borders, and discarded garbage books from the curbs around Flatbush, Brooklyn. Performed in collaboration with multi-instrumentalist and storyteller Larissa Poho.

Performed in 2020 at The Living Things Festival (Kelowna), Dusty Flowerpot (Vancouver), and Mile Zero Dance (Edmonton).

Created with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Miseducated: An Oral History of Sexual (Mis)Education

An interdisciplinary dance-theatre work exploring the sensitive and fertile subject matter of Sex Ed. Using recordings and transcripts of interviews conducted with dozens of survivors of America’s sexual education system, Miseducated transforms the material of these stories into a dynamic and provocative physical performance.

"a blast of titillating and uncomfortable performance art" - Broadway World

Created by Flesh Mob (Ben Gorodetsky, Peekaboo Pointe, Hilary Preston) as their MFA thesis work in the Performance and Interactive Media Arts program at Brooklyn College - CUNY.

Workshop performances at Movement Research at Judson Church and Bizarre Bushwick, and world premiere at The Tank NYC.

“Miseducated will have you laughing one moment and then seething with anger the next. It perfectly balances a sense of “Look at what we’re doing” with a sense of “We can do better”, and ultimately it’s that very phrase “We can do better” that fuels most of the play. By the end you want to do better, you want to create a world where people have healthier attitudes about sex and relationships and where they don’t have to be ashamed or harmed or confused by information given to them by people who seem to be just as confused as they are. In a world that is moving ever closer to having more open and honest conversations about sexuality, “Miseducated” is a great step towards that goal” - On Stage

Created in collaboration with Chanan Ben Simone, Emily Twines, Edie Nightcrawler, Tiger Bay, Luxe Fatale, Malena Dayen Christina Tang & Sizzle Dizzle.

Folk Lordz

Folk Lordz is the creative team and performance duo that Ben created with Todd Houseman while they were both senior players at Rapid Fire Theatre. The flagship live show consists of a fusion of folk storytelling, long-form improvisation and physical comedy. Taking inspiration from Indigenous oral tradition and storytelling practice, Russian Chekhovian character drama, and a third genre of the audience's choosing, Folk Lordz craft a spontaneous and hilarious homage to cultural storytelling practice. This work has won them two cultural diversity in the arts awards from the Edmonton Arts Council, and the show has toured internationally to Philadelphia's DuoFest, Atlanta's High Wire Comedy Fest, Austin's Improvised Play Festival, Vancouver's Chutzpah! Festival, Toronto's Bad Dog Theatre Combustion Festival, Vancouver International Improv Festival, Edmonton's LitFest, Edmonton's Thousand Faces Festival of Mythic Art, and the Toronto, Edmonton and Winnipeg Fringe Festivals, and headlined numerous CHiMPROV shows at Rapid Fire Theatre.

As part of the further development of this project they travelled to Yellowknife, NWT to learn traditional oral storytelling practice, protocol and structure from Dene elders. This research trip was supported by the Edmonton Arts Council through the Cultural Diversity in the Arts program. The motivation for this work was further de-colonizing of their performances, broadening their scope from just Cree stories to other Indigenous traditions, and traveling to less urban places and engaging in activities that many stories are about (fishing, trapping, being on the land, enduring cold, etc). Alt.Theatre journal commissioned Folk Lordz to write an article about their experiences on this journey, which was published internationally in the 'Storytelling Across Generations' issue, January 2016.

Mooney on Theatre reviewed the live show, saying:

“Everything about Folk Lordz is pleasing — and I do mean everything. If you pass up this hilarious and hyperkinetic tribute to lore and literature, you’re missing one of the most interesting, compelling and viscerally thrilling pieces of theatre you’ll see this season.”.

In addition to live performance, Folk Lordz is also a producing body. They created Stories on the Hills, a three-day, Indigenous storytelling gathering that profiled a series of multi-disciplinary performances from diverse artists and celebrated Edmonton/Amiskwaciy Waskahegen's history as a gathering place. The festival presented 31 artists, including a youth and emerging talent night, and a community-engaged workshop for inner city youth. The gathering was made possible through the partnership with Fort Edmonton Park and the support from the Edmonton Community Foundation and The Edmonton Arts Council. 

In 2018 Folk Lordz wrote, shot and released is a 15-part digital video sketch series, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts' New Chapter program. These political, absurd, and darkly hilarious video sketches were written to reflect urban-Indigenous, immigrant, and activist perspectives through the lens of satirical sketch comedy. The series was directed by Mike Robertson, and Season 2 premiered in 2021.

Charred

Charred is a documentary, dance-theatre performance, created and performed by Ben Gorodetsky and Mat Simpson. Using Mat Simpson's vivid photographs of neighbourhoods and forests affected by the Fort McMurray, Alberta wildfires of 2016. This multimedia work investigates the questions: How did the fire change the land? And whose story is that to tell?

This is a performance that speaks to ownership (of tragedy/industry/wealth), regional identity, and the politics of making work about a climate disaster in the conservative, northern Canadian Oil Sands. Set against a mounting list of global climate disasters, this experimental work combines movement, storytelling, projections, and improvisation in the form of an abstracted travelogue.

Charred was developed in Fort McMurray in December 2016 and Edmonton in January 2017 with the generous support of the Edmonton Arts Council. The premiere performance was at NextFest 2017, with a sold-out run in a transformed office in the Roxy on Gateway. Dancer/Choreographer/Professor Lin Snelling had this to say about Charred:

"An enticing dance/theatre story told through the lens of this quick witted and physically apt dynamic duo; it captures the raw beauty and confusion of a community dealing with “outsider” questions. Gorodetsky and Simpson are both eloquent and playful and it's a relief to see a performance that dares to experiment with how a story can be told."

This project would not have been possible without the support of creative collaborators Gerry Morita, Heather Inglis, Matt Schuurman, Caitlin Richards and Jenna Turner (aka The Olm), Julie Ferguson, and Kiidra Duhault.

Banner photo by Bangishimo