Content Keywords: Disability, Grief, Harm Reduction, Psychiatry, Trauma

Through experiments with technology, improvisation and new-found acceptance of lived experience, Ben E. Wood has built something of a catharsis-fueled time machine. The output is a rich and layered concept album that plays with hurt, love, anguish, wisdom, and self-destruction-for-the-sake-of-self-rebuilding. This album (and its live show counterpart) curiously dance through each stage of grief, ultimately landing on acceptance as the last stop. This is not just a story of endurance, it’s about transformation and growth. It’s about coming to accept reality, with all its pain and beauty. It’s about coming to terms with disability, and all that we can’t change.

This album is a dreamlike companion to crisis and recovery, drawing aesthetic inspiration from folk-punk, clowny 90s rock and psychedelic anti-folk. The refrains and motifs that weave in and out of the project are meant to tie each string into the bigger knot that is recovery. While the project is full of hard-found wisdom, throughout the show we get to see the emotional backstage of what it feels like to seek help.

Farewell Strange Hotel is about the derailment that comes from crisis, and the effort of helping the train onto a new track. This album moves us through frantic manic fear and urgency, to grounded and thoughtful resolutions. There’s pain and levity and roadblocks and epiphanies. And restarts. Sometimes recovery walks a circular path, and the lyrical and melodic interplay between the songs reflects that. It’ll walk with you. Sometimes in circles.

PART OF OUR HALLOWEEN SERIES: WELCOME TO THE MAD HOUSE
🪦 6:00PM – How to be Normal ( Film Screening )
🪦 8:00PM – Farewell Strange Hotel ( Album Launch )
🪦 9:30PM – Mad Haus Halloween Bash, Hosted by Sucka Queen

🍭 CRAFTS, HANG OUTS, AND DRINKS IN THE SOUTHERN CROSS ALL NIGHT LONG!

TICKETS IN ADVANCE OR AT THE DOOR.

We’re all mad here, why not flaunt it?
Come celebrate with us in community on Halloween Night as we let loose and get juiced.

What’s Happening (more or less)
🍬 Costumes = Candy!!
🍬 Lip Sync Battle, do you have what it takes?
🍬 Give us your best vogue on the Cat Walk-Off.
🍬 Live performance by your host, Sucka Queen!
🍬 Dancing, Dancing, Dancing!!
🍬 PRIZES & BRAGGING RIGHTS

Keywords: BIPOC, protest & resistance, technology & media

‘Everything has a voice’

Lips pressed against a mic with a determination to be heard, even in fragmented lines, distorting. Two gloved hands wave over a series of objects arranged on a large white table; a VHS player and CRT Monitor, a Cassette Player, three mixers, a camera, a power bar and several charging cells, the crackling electromagnetic static they emit made audible and interruptive. Their wires spill over the edge of the desk, entangled.

‘Sound is something that you can feel beyond your skin’

“Listening Gloves” designed as an instrument to play different pulsing electromagnetic frequencies of curated technological artifacts through touch. In this process of amplification, they tune into sounds as though they are rhythms of a living being.

This is “Sandpaper Hammock”, a solo multimedia performance series where improvised sound compositions are played off of technological artifacts in combination with original poetry recitations. Through sound, a story unfolds, inviting embodied feeling as a vehicle to share in ways that do not center language over sensation.

Statis is used as a material of resistance; the electromagnetic frequencies made audible are a sonic reminder of a friction that exists between surface and depth, a disruption of smoothness. During the set, the camera is turned onto the audience and the frequencies generated from a live feed on a CRT are an act of subversion.

This piece disrupts the focus by interrogating the nature of viewership through technology in the performance itself. People are asked to “watch themselves, watching me. Who remembers longer? The static, the screen, or the human being?’

Keywords: Digital Media, news, desensitization, marginalized communities, community care

No More News for Nancy is a spoken word, movement, and sound-based digital performance experiment exploring the connection of 24-hour news in marginalized communities.

Nancy is a young Biracial Gen Z millennial cusp who has a very unhealthy relationship with news. Deemed too empathetic by the “system,” Nancy is placed in TIN (Trapped In News), a government program designed to desensitize people of the global majority to news. Through spoken word, dance, and music, Nancy confronts some serious life questions that she is not sure she is equipped to deal with.

“Why do conspiracy theories exist?”
“What was it like to grow up in the generation that was the birth of the digital age?”
“What is the obsession with 24-hour news?”
“How is access to information harmful vs. helpful?”
“What is it like as a black person to consume news that causes unfathomable pain?”

Was it the Twin Towers? The mad cowers? Or Tori, that girl who has been missing for hours?

Performance includes audience “goodie bags” featuring nostalgic 90s/2000s snacks stress relief treats.

Back by popular demand, the 2nd annual Rhythm of the Night closes out the Rendezvous With Madness festival.

We #DISRUPTTHEFOCUS and challenge stigma placed on our community by daring to create, regardless of whether what we create has anything to do with our challenges or not. Our life, our passion, our joy, our creativity belongs to us. Not always our struggles.

Join us for a musical showcase and mini night market that celebrates and connects audience with amazingly talented and diverse local musicians and vendors who all support and exist within the various intersections of mental illness and addictions. Come be in community as we headbang, dance, groove, vibe, and shop the whole night away.

MUSIC | MAIN HALL
11:00PM | SUPERFRAUD
10:00PM | SAM-R
09:20PM | Vivek Mehmi
08:45PM | DJ Nico

NIGHT MARKET | MAIN HALL & SOUTHERN CROSS

KEYWORDS: Trauma, Family, Loss, Grief, Gender

Rana is a middle-aged woman holding a high-ranking position at a major bank. Her husband left her when she was pregnant with their daughter. Since that time, she has been raising Hoda alone and her daughter means the world to her. Hoda’s birthday is approaching fast, and she would like to celebrate it at an amusement park; overprotective Rana is not so pleased, but finally agrees. An accident at the amusement park ends fatally for Hoda, and Rana’s life is turned upside down. As if the pain and tragedy of losing her only daughter was not enough, Rana must also face the absurdity of the laws and traditions in her country.

Keywords: Relationships, trauma, addictions, isolation, terminal mental illness, grief

Featured artists: TK Workman, Gavin Seal, Serena McCarroll, Ace Kazkayasi, Andrea Thompson, Brian Demoskoff, Ishaa Vinod, Zan Redcrow, Emmanuel Teji

Our annual short film program celebrating films by Workman Arts’ member artists! 

“Poetic Proclamations’’ features nine films exploring a wide palette of creations including documentary, fiction, animation, spoken word and 360-degree cinema. An all-encompassing range of poetic, personal and transformational expressions that not only disrupt common narratives around mental health they also embody the connections of what it means to connect, critique and commiserate in a mad world.

Featuring artists: Amreen Kullar, Edna Bovas, Imogen Lister, Jonathan Bent-Ford, Jessi Elgood, Jessica Wu, Leo Dean

For the ninth consecutive year, If You Ask Me (IYAM) has supported emerging filmmakers with lived mental health and/or addiction experiences to create new short films. This year’s program features shorts by filmmakers from across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). These new films were developed from July – September 2025 under the guidance of Robin Riad, along with IYAM alumnus Esteban Powell serving as mentor. Equipment rentals and facilities were generously provided by our community sponsor and partner, LIFT.

KEYWORDS: Black mental health, trauma, income inequality, racism

Village Keeper follows a family grappling with secrets that upholds domestic abuse and unresolved rage. After life’s precarious scale tips her fortune back into poverty, Jean relocates her children with their grandmother to the community housing project where she grew up. Jean lives in constant fear of everything that could go wrong, going to great lengths to shelter her children, so when a spree of violence comes to her doorstep, she secretly cleans an abandoned crime scene, which unknowingly leads her on a path that exposes generational chains of silence, self-discovery and finally putting herself first.

SCREENING FOLLOWING OUR 2025 Rendezvous with Madness Festival Fundraiser.

Interested in attending? Each fundraiser ticket includes access to this screening.

GET YOUR TICKETS HERE