THE PSYCHEDELIC TZADIK
a live performance and participatory workshop
2024-Present
The Psychedelic Tzadik and the Watermelon, Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp, Belgium, April 2024 (film still Mary Szydlowaksa).
The Psychedelic Tzadik is a live performance and participatory workshop reanimating ancestral memory and forging new solidarities through clowning, ritual, and radical imagination. At the center of the project is a gender-queer rabbinical figure—a mystical trickster who journeys through ancestral and contemporary landscapes to awaken a shared practice of collective liberation.
Drawing from Yiddish culture, while queering play and ritual, the Tzadik invites audiences into a hallucinatory world where the sacred and the profane, the historical and the speculative, merge in ecstatic dialogue. By invoking the trickster archetype, the work dismantles certainty, animates the liminal, and explores how embodied imagination can become a tool for transformation—attuning us to the thresholds of loss, joy, and renewal.
Spring is Here, Is Liberation Near?, archival print, variable dimensions, 2025 (photo credit Tamir Lederberg).
The Psychedelic Tzadik’s Collective Liberation Workshop, The Greenhouse Project at the University of California, Santa Cuz, CA, Oct 21, 2025. (photo credit Erin Clews).
The Collective Liberation Workshop
Since debuting in 2024, The Psychedelic Tzadik has appeared at ShtetlBerlin, ExtraCity Antwerp, Harvard Divinity School, and Judson Memorial Church in New York, among other venues. The project has evolved into a participatory workshop, led by the Tzadik, inviting participants into creative discovery through clowning, storytelling, and embodied improvisation. The workshop creates a dynamic space for playful encounters that explore what collective liberation could feel like in practice.
The Psychedelic Tzadik’s Collective Liberation Workshop, The Greenhouse Project at the University of California, Santa Cuz, CA, Oct 21, 2025. (photo credit Erin Clews).
The Psychedelic Tzadik’s Collective Liberation Workshop, Refo-Moabit, Berlin, November 25, 2025. (photo credit Juliette Pagacz).
The Psychedelic Tzadik’s Collective Liberation Workshop, The Greenhouse Project at the University of California, Santa Cuz, CA, Oct 21, 2025. (photo credit Erin Clews).
The Psychedelic Tzadik’s Collective Liberation Workshop, Refo-Moabit, Berlin, November 25, 2025. (photo credit Juliette Pagacz).
The Psychedelic Tzadik’s Collective Liberation Workshop, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, March 10, 2025. (photo credit Lila Rimalovski).
The Psychedelic Tzadik’s Collective Liberation Workshop, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, March 10, 2025. (photo credit Lila Rimalovski).
This short interview between The Psychedelic Tzadik and activist-scholar Daniel Voskoboynik, weaves Yiddish and English dialogue in a poetic exploration of ancestral memory and diasporic imagination. Filmed at the Teremiski Theater in Teremiski, Poland, with cinematography by Maciej Eichelberger.