Izabella's Voice – endurance performance series
Izabella’s Voice is a durational performance 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 the artist’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 shaping 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.
Ben Gorodetsky is a Ukrainian-Canadian performance and video artist, writer and producer based in Kitchener. Their work has been presented by The Art Gallery of Ontario, CAFKA, Movement Research at Judson Church, The Tank NYC, LUMEN, In/On/Out Interarts and Open Ears. Ben is the curator-host of interdisciplinary variety show Pinch Cabaret, and has performed and directed improvisation internationally. He was the 2022 artist-in-residence with Guelph Dance Fest, winner of the Emerging Artist Award at the Mayor's Celebration for the Arts (Edmonton), recipient of the Anna Pidruchney Young Writers Award, and a nominee for a Canadian Comedy Award and a Waterloo Region Arts Award. They’re the creator and executive producer of "MY PET ATE WHAT!?" a docu-series for CTV Wild, and the director of feature length documentary “A Hole in the Ground” for Inter Arts Matrix. Ben teaches video and performance at the University of Waterloo. He holds an MFA from Brooklyn College-CUNY and a BFA from the University of Alberta.
