INCUBATION
Sauna Secrets: Artistic Research Experiment
Opening Event Femme Folks Fest 2026
Sunday March 15
2:00 PM
KW Sauna 396 Victoria St N Unit C, Kitchener, ON
SOLD OUT
Sauna Secrets is a research workshop experiment that asks “how and why would someone perform inside a sauna”. Artist Ben Gorodetsky will pose this very question to a group of 15 people as they share space and sweat inside a hot schvitz.
“I’m working on developing a performance piece that explores documentary forms, re-enactment, political protest, translation, and oral history within the site-specific staging of a public sauna. The intimacy and healing power of the sauna is profoundly inspiring to me: the proximity, the heat, the breath, and transformed sense of time. Furthermore I have a deep cultural connection to sauna experiences. As a Ukrainian immigrant, the experience of communal bathing and shared sweat is deeply a part of how I have connected to my father throughout my life. Moreover, in addition to the physical intimacy and healing, there is an emotional intensity that can happen in a sauna. Conversations that seem impossible in the regular world occur with greater ease inside contained spaces heated by woodfire. With all of this in mind I’m creating a performance piece that carefully cultivates a space of transformation and healing, responding to our current, painful moment of global conflict and societal destabilization.”
-Ben Gorodetsky, artist & schvitz lover
This research workshop is a part of the initial development phase for a larger performance experiment, generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Femme Folks Fest 2026 is honoured to host the first phase of incubation of this piece.
Ben Gorodetsky (he/they) is a Ukrainian-Canadian writer, performer and producer based in Kitchener. Their artistic work has been presented by The Art Gallery of Ontario, CAFKA, Movement Research at Judson Church, The Tank NYC, LUMEN, In/On/Out Interarts, Femme Folks Fest and Open Ears. Ben is the curator-host of the 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 docuseries for CTV Wild. Ben holds an MFA from Brooklyn College-CUNY, a BFA from the University of Alberta, and teaches video and performance at UWaterloo.
