Moss Meunier
Ben Volchok is bringing The Ceremony, once again, to the Adelaide Fringe. It’s a bizarre experimental show, part-group therapy, part-sermon and wholly hilarious. We saw the show (and loved it!) back at the Edinburgh Fringe and are keen to catch up with Ben over a digital pint to hear more about how the show was developed and his thoughts behind what the Ceremony tells us about creating meaning and connection.
You can catch The Ceremony at the Chapel @ The Courtyard of Curiosities as part of Adelaide Fringe every day until the 9th of March at 9.50pm (60 mins) as well as an earlier performance on the 1st of March at 2.20pm. Tickets are available through the Adelaide Fringe Online Box Office.
Moss: Hi Ben! The Ceremony is an improvised, experimental piece of theatre. I actually saw it at the Edinburgh Fringe, but I understand that the version I saw was far from how the show is “supposed” to go, if it is supposed to go in any way at all. Could you tell us what audiences can expect from the show?
Ben: Yeah, I remember that show. The thing that stuck out was that people were so eager to participate that I didn’t even get into the presentation portion of it. Usually what happens is I sort of greet people as they come in, there’s a little bit of a back and forth. We play a little bit and then I suppose we kind of get into the meat of the show, which begins with an introductory presentation, which sets out some ground rules and then kind of a bit later on, goes into a bit more of like an exploration of the themes of the show.
I’m making it all also sound very, very serious and theatrical and also very structured, but really, it’s all there just like a loose kind of safety pin holding the whole thing together. And as you found out, when someone unclasps that safety pin, you know, the whole garment falls off and we’re just sort of running around half-dressed, not literally, in the room.
What can audiences expect? It’s an interactive improvised ritual. So it’s a communal experience, I suppose, that is different every single time the show is performed. It really is built to be dependent on each crowd that comes in and each night that it happens, just sort of whatever energy is brought to the room, that energy gets harnessed and we kind of create something magical and wonderful. Sometimes it’s really, really silly. I think during your show we somehow started a cult about eels. But then other times it can be quite poignant and personal and deep. People can share some quite profound and meaningful moments from their lives or events that have shaped them. It’s really kind of designed to be whatever is felt to be needed in the moment.
Moss: What are some of the things that have happened that have stood out the most to you?
Ben: I mean, eels. There was one show where… Normally what happens is I’ll give people a prompt and they’ll name a significant recent life event. And I’ll get them to write them down on a piece of paper and put it into a bucket and then I’ll pull out the note from the bucket. And that goes into the show. There was one show where I was pulling note after note after note and, and all of them were about death. All of them were about someone who had died. And it just sort of immediately became this incredibly somber show and that’s no fault of the show and it’s no detriment to the show. It just becomes what that time in space needs. At one of the very first ones I remember someone wrote down a significant recent life event was getting their first gray hair and I remember that kind of sparked off quite a nice discussion about aging and what it means to have the first of something really kind of tiny but life-changing then other times I remember leading people outside and we conducted a funeral for a dog. There was one time where I burned all of the papers in the bucket.
Moss: Why did you burn all the papers in the bucket?
Ben: Someone had put a lighter into the bucket and it just felt right. I did that outdoors as well, just to assuage any of the OH&S people listening. There was one time where we took someone’s kind of motions that they went through to grieve a dead cat and applied them to mourn a really good bowl of soup that was so good that they thought they would never have a soup that good again. And, you know, there’s millions of others. I’ve been doing this show for years now and just every time it happens. One time I just led people in a singalong of Money, Money, Money by ABBA. Just happened to be what we needed at the time. I don’t know, it’s so vastly different and yet somehow still manages to maintain the same spirit across every show.
Moss: What sparked the idea to create The Ceremony?
Ben: So I turned 30 during the sort of worst of the lockdowns. It was September 2021. We were all sort of like at a moment’s notice, just all shut down. So I couldn’t celebrate. And I decided to make a big video call with all of my friends, and I decided to call it my 30th birthday ceremony. Just because it felt, you know, arbitrary as these numbers are, it did feel like I needed to mark the occasion somehow.
I had no idea what I was doing but I decided to call it a ceremony and I told people to dress up formally. In the show I’ve got sort of a running background of ambient music. I made a couple of those tracks for that event and I dressed up in a suit and tie and then welcomed people in. It was all by the seat of my pants. I decided that what I would do is sit down and start speaking and, and I wasn’t sure what was going to come next. I also did send around a survey for all my friends to fill in which was about hopes and dreams and regrets and non-regrets and nice memories of me and thoughts about aging and cake and things like that.
And that became a bit of a launching pad for what I was talking about. People would chime in in the chat of the video call, sometimes they’d speak up and we’d have a bit of a conversation. And it was just like the thing went for like three or four hours. Also what I loved about that was that I didn’t know myself and, by extension, neither did anyone in the chat whether or not this was serious. And there was this kind of just overarching vibe of the evening where everything was simultaneously completely earnest, but completely absurd and meaningless and making fun of that whole self-serious thing but it was also quite real.
At some point, I think I decided that I wanted to harness that energy into a live space because I was thinking a lot about what it means to be in a theater, in a live space where you’re not sort of really dissociated from that space. You do exist in that location and in that moment in time. So what you do in that space is real, even if it’s completely ludicrous or even if it’s completely divorced from reality and so I think it somehow came together. I brainstormed a little bit of a skeleton for the show and then off it went, really.
I did a couple of trial shows still not really knowing what I was doing but the first time I did it it kind of naturally just fell into place. The kind of loose shape that I put on it was there would be kind of an introduction, we’d go through the past, the present, the future, and then there’d be an epilogue. And that very soon, but also very gradually spiraled into something out of the realm of what I’d ever imagined the show could be.
Moss: You’re also bringing another interactive show, one-on-one interactive show to Adelaide Fringe called The Oracle? What is that? Because I actually looked on the Adelaide Fringe site and I couldn’t find anything about it.
Ben: Yes, it’s a mysterious beast. It is, as you say, a one-on-one interactive experience. I’ll be sitting in a booth in the Courtyard of Curiosities, which already sounds like the beginnings of a fantasy. So where I’m doing The Ceremony is a place called the Courtyard of Curiosities and there’ll be a booth there and I will be sitting behind it, and anyone can come up to me and ask me any question.
Moss: How long are you going to be there?
Ben: I’ll probably be an hour, maybe a couple of hours every night. I did have this idea to sort of make it like a, you know, “I’m there when I’m there” sort of thing. But I don’t know if enough people kind of pass by specifically that that would work. So, yeah, I think it’ll be kind of an hour or so in the evening before I do my show.
Moss: Have you done that before?
Ben: I’ve done it once before. It was like the proto version of it. I was at a friend’s party, I sort of painted a third eye on my forehead and sat down and said the Oracle is in. People can come up and ask me a question. I’ll take the hand in my hands. I’ll close my eyes. I’ll look at them with the third eye and then answer their question.
Moss: A lot of your work is heavily improvised. Do you ever get nervous before The Ceremony or something like the Oracle where you’ve got to have an answer to the question eventually?
Ben: I think yes and no. The Ceremony is my first improvised show. Before that, everything I did was very heavily scripted. I was a sucker for a script. I had to know everything I was saying, more or less. I’ve come from the world of comedy writing and I would make characters and monologues and jokes.
I started off as a one liner comedian. And so this was a real leap. sort of consciously, I suppose, in the sense of I wanted to challenge myself and see how I could be open to whatever happened. But I think with both the ceremony and the oracle, there’s obviously that kind of trepidation of, you know, what if nothing happens? I got to, you know, I got to make something happen. But I think the more that I do this kind of work, the more I realize that something always happens.
If I’m anxious about it happening, then that turns into a sort of desperation and clutching at straws and things like that, rather than just waiting and opening up to something happening, because it inevitably does. I think in a similar vein, both shows have this, or both ideas have this capacity for the absurd and the ridiculous and so I think and the nonsensical and I think it’s a saving grace in a way because I’m not under any pressure to concoct anything particularly meaningful.
It just has to sort of feel right in the moment or it has to be so ludicrous that it kind of creates its own world. And so if someone asks me a question for the Oracle, for example, I can think about it for a bit. I can make it up. If someone is going to ask me about their love life or something, I can just make it up. But you deliver it with such, and I feel like that’s what every fortune teller does, really, secretly. But it has this weight to it of, I suppose, some kind of a belief that what you’re saying is true, which is acting. And I think that allows it to escape from that worry of, what am I gonna say? But it is there, obviously. And I think that also that kind of balancing on the edge is what gives me enough excitement as well to then infuse the show with excitement.
Moss: You say this is not a cult, but the ceremony does feel like a parody of a cult. Similarly the Oracle sounds like a satire or parody of this idea of fortune tellers. Is that your intention?
Ben: Well, I want to be clear that I don’t really intend to parody or make fun of any belief system or way of organizing meaning or way of interpreting things. I’m not really sending up the idea of a fortune teller or of a gathering or of a ceremony. I’m specifically kind of not treading on any existing religion or existing symbology or anything.
I’m sort of, I hope, tapping into the subconscious understanding of what these things are. And I think partly how I think I achieve this is because I am earnestly approaching this despite the absurdity and despite the kind of surrealism and bizarreness, I am earnestly concocting something. I suppose it’s more of an interrogation of meaning than a parody of what people do to create it. I think it’s fascinating that we can sort of whip something up out of nothing.
Of course it is not ever out of nothing. It’s out of our shared experiences and it’s out of everything we’ve gone through up until this moment.
And I don’t think I ever really want to say that, “Oh, this is dangerous” or whatever. I know a couple of reviews have mentioned that, “Oh, this is scarily like what it might be like to start fascism” or whatever.
I think it’s more to do with how we can create meaning as a group and how we can sort of combine and attune together so quickly. I think that’s more what I’m tapping into.
I like to think that the show comes from a very non-judgmental space and with the Oracle as well, I just think it’s interesting how we can bond and how we can open up. I think it really puts into question what we kind of perceive to be real and in our lives in general. If you can kind of come up and ask a question and receive some kind of answer that feels real but it’s just kind of been made up in this moment, then you’re sort of brought to potentially question, “What else have I been taking for granted, you know, about my life?”
Moss: What do you hope the audiences will take away from the ceremony?
Ben: I feel as a baseline, I would like them simply to have walked away thinking that was a special hour of my life. That was a unique time that I’ve spent. And it was real. I think the show can inspire people with hope, the show can inspire people with some kind of life affirmation, some kind of, you know, reflection. I’d like it to be indescribable. I’d like it to be so, on such a felt on such a subconscious level that you don’t really know what to say except for I was there for that hour and it was real.
I always kind of bring this up when I’m talking about the show. One of my most memorable live show experiences was when I went to a comedian’s show who essentially had a breakdown in the middle of the show. They were going through the show, it was going well, but then there was one audience member who just wasn’t laughing and this comedian fixated on them and just couldn’t let it go. They were just so drawn to figuring out why this person wasn’t laughing and, and it just completely threw them and couldn’t get back to the show. And I remember the tension was electric.
There were other performers in the room as well. So we all knew sort of how it felt, but this was kind of taken to a bit of an extreme and, and we all felt this discomfort and disbelief. This comedian is also someone who sometimes plays tricks on the audience and things like that. So, I remember that sitting there feeling, is this real? What, what are we doing? I can’t believe this is happening. It was so divorced from the norms of what you expect from a comedy show. It was real. The comic did really kind of break down and derail the whole show. I just remember thinking that was one of the most real things that I’ve ever felt in an auditorium.I think somehow a kernel of that sentiment made its way into my show. I want people to really kind of hyper sense the realness of the moment
In the end, as a punchline to the story, it was discovered that that audience member had actually taken Valium before coming to the show.
Moss: That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense.
Ben: Which is why they weren’t laughing. But the comic spent so long just grilling this man that they just didn’t get to that. And in the end, he kicked him out and gave him a refund. And then had to sort of do the entire sort of last three quarters of the show in 15 minutes. And kind of offered it for everyone to come back and see it another day. And I did. And it was an amazing show when it worked properly. But I’ve never been able to shake that feeling of, “Wow. This is happening”.
Moss: There’s something about seeing something kind of unplanned and that feels a lot more real. Like literally just going to the pantomime and seeing things go wrong.
Ben: It’s funny how suspension of disbelief is such a power, just a powerful psychological concept. I enjoy playing with that cognitive dissonance of suspension of disbelief where at times you’re caught up in this and at times you’ll sort of realize, wait, hang on. No, I’m standing up in a room, I’m chanting EELS with a group of people. Hang on. What? What?!
And yet that’s still part of the show and it also feels like a really real moment of connection.
Moss: What are you looking forward to most at the Adelaide Fringe?
Ben: Oh, my God. There’s so many shows. What am I looking forward to? Hannah Camilleri‘s got a new show coming out and she’s brilliant. What else? There’s a bunch of shows that I can’t see because they clash with me. I’m doing two and a half weeks. Oliver Coleman is fantastic. I’m also doing a lineup show with my friend Mel, who’s doing a show called Motorboat. There’s a bunch of shows that I’ve already seen that are coming that I think are great. I am looking forward to there’s a show called Strange Chaos that I saw a couple of years ago in Adelaide that is coming back in some way. I think it it may or may not be reworked. There’s The Beryls, there’s SWAN?, Virtuoso, there’s Boklesque, No Babies in the Sauna, If You’re From Africa? and Plenty of Fish in the Sea, which I think was one of my favorite things that I saw in Edinburgh. Incredible physical theater.
What else is there that I’m looking forward to? The inevitable late night kebab. I don’t drink, but I love late night kebabs. I don’t know what that says about me. Just doing something, going to the gallery, just going to the botanical gardens. My main goal for this fringe is to do more things that are not the fringe. Because I think I get sucked up into the world very easily. Particularly this year, I’m going to be doing three things. It’s going to take a lot out of me. And that tends to make me a bit more insular. I tend to fall into a bit of a routine and rest a lot, which is great. But it also means that I don’t actually get to experience anything else.
Moss: If your show were a drink, caffeinated, alcoholic, non-caffeinated, whatever beverage, what sort of drink would it be?
Ben: I feel like it’s some kind of… What’s the name of that drink where everyone pours something into it? It’s called Jungle Juice, isn’t it? Here we go. According to Wikipedia, Jungle Juice is an improvised mix of liquor that is usually served for group consumption.
I’ll say that that’s what it is, Jungle Juice. In the sense that everyone pours something different in and it’s something more than what it ever was.
And it’s going to be completely different every time and it’s going to be a new experience.
You can catch The Ceremony at the Chapel @ The Courtyard of Curiosities as part of Adelaide Fringe every day until the 9th of March at 9.50pm (60 mins) as well as an earlier performance on the 1st of March at 2.20pm. Tickets are available through the Adelaide Fringe Online Box Office.
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