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!
🍭 COSTUMES = CANDY.

Farewell Strange Hotel

Performed by Ben E. Wood | Music | Album Launch

 

Box Office opens at 7:00 PM | MAIN HALL

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.

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

Artist Bio
Ben E. Wood (he/they) is a disabled artist and media-maker in East York whose experiences fill out a whimsical body of work playing in the tension between misery and joy. Through experiments with technology, improvisation and new-found acceptance of lived experience, Ben has built something of a catharsis-fueled time machine. Ben's new recoverycore concept album is called Farewell Strange Hotel, and it's a dreamlike companion to 2024's immersive psychosis episode, a 4-week hospitalization and its associated recovery efforts afterwards. It seeks to laugh and cry at the same time, covering both the manic frantic fear and the measured thoughtful resolutions.

 

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Every artist featured in Rendezvous 2025 is a disruptor.
#GETMAD #DISRUPTTHEFOCUS 

ABOUT RENDEZVOUS WITH MADNESS & WORKMAN ARTS
Rendezvous With Madness is both the first and the longest running Mental Health & Addictions based film & multi-arts festival in North America. With its roots in raising awareness through film, it has since expanded into bringing in other mediums such as theatre, dance, music and visual art. All programming, artwork, administration, and operations is created by and run by those who have lived and living experience. Follow us on Instagram: @workmanartsto

 

TICKETING & SEATING
Tickets are general Admission with limited seating available! To avoid being turned away or standing in a rush line, please book your ticket in advance if possible. In order to keep our festival accessible, we offer a limited quantity of low to no cost tickets in advance for those who need it with a pay-by-donation option at the door. Please consider paying full price if you are able as it helps the sustainability of reduced rates for those who may be unable to otherwise access our programming. Please arrive to the venue no later than 15 minutes before the event in order to avoid your ticket being given to the rush line should an event be sold out.

RUSH TICKETS & INFORMATION
If a program is off sale, you can come to the venue starting one hour before the event begins to place your name on our Rush list. Rush tickets are sold at the start of the event and patrons are seated just after introductions while trailers are playing. To avoid having your seat given to a Rush patron, please plan to arrive at the venue at least 15 minutes before the program begins.

ACCESS INFORMATION
All of our venues are fully accessible. If you require ASL/Interpretation, please inquire no later than October 18th, 2025. We will do our best to accommodate requests for ASL/Interpretation made later than this date but cannot guarantee availability of ASL/Interpreters. Live captioning provided for most spoken events and Q&A's. Open Captions for the vast majority of films. Films in other languages are always presented with English subtitles.