Rendezvous with Madness uses art to examine mental health

An interdisciplinary Toronto arts festival is using film and performance to start timely conversations on mental health.

Rendezvous with Madness is the largest arts and mental health festival in the world. This year marks the 31st iteration of the festival, facilitated by Workman Arts, a Toronto-based organization that promotes mental health and addiction advocacy. Since 2020, Workman Arts has been housed in the McCain Complex Care and Recovery Building at CAMH.

Rendezvous with Madness is an opportunity for Workman Arts to promote its work – as well as the creative pursuits of dozens of artists each year – to the general public, through screenings, live performances and talks.

“We have this brilliant opportunity to make change year-over-year,” Scott Miller Berry, managing director of Workman Arts and film programming committee lead for Rendezvous with Madness, told CP24 in an interview. “We get to try new things, take risks. We don’t bring back things that didn’t go so well the first time, using feedback from audiences and artists.”

One change festival-goers might have noticed this year is the festival’s hybrid model, carefully programmed so that streaming materials don’t overlap with in-person presentations.

“We’re trying not to exhaust our audiences,” Berry said. “We’re a mental health and arts organization, and we’re continually learning from past mistakes. We want to prioritize the mental health of our staff, and our audiences – we’re trying to be holistic about how we approach this. So that means slowing things down a bit, reading things out, and not doing 11 days in a row with programming every day.

“That’s a great traditional festival format,” he continued. “But it’s also a recipe for burnout. We’re avoiding burnout in our own team, but we’re also actively trying not to overwhelm audiences at the same time.”

Berry says that at the end of the day, the main goal of the festival is to bring people together – “where in a room or online” – to share in the importance of arts and then have a conversation about it.

“We want to create an offer of time and space for everyone to reflect on our own biases, our own assumptions, our own triggers. My experience of depression is going to be different from almost anyone else’s experiences of depression. It’s really magical when you’re willing to engage with yourself and each other – Rendezvous doesn’t shy away from that. We’re willing to make time to celebrate difficult topics, and to let people have their own response to those topics.”

Rendezvous with Madness runs until Nov. 5 in Toronto, with a blend of virtual and in-person events. The full list of remaining programming is available on the Workman Arts website.

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