Matty Balkum, also known as Basha Voronets,
is a transdisciplinary culture worker: performer, writer, dramaturg, historian, and designer. Their transgressive work inhabits stage, screen, and script always with a healthy dose of ridiculousness and scintillating with eccentricity. Through their work Matty seeks to move, agitate, educate, and inspire.
Born in the fever dream that is Tampa, Florida, Matty has always sought to excite. A practitioner of epic theatre from early adolescence, directing their fellow neighborhood youngins in what can only be described as "Proto-queer Youth Guerrilla Performance Art" they have always found a way to push the envelope.
Always on the move, Matty distills eclectic contexts into their performance and playwriting. Crafting solo work and collaborative projects Matty works to distill the crux of the thing: no beating around the bush. Things are too important. Our time is too dire.
As a proud student of Queer culture, history, revolution, and camp Matty offers zaniness and intrigue in all that they do. In the spaces they inhabit, they act to centre community, empathy,
and collective struggle.
Matty holds a BFA in Musical Theatre from The Boston Conservatory at Berklee with Emphases in Directing, Devising & Solo Performance, and a Minor in Gender Studies. At the Conservatory, they undertook applied study in Dramaturgy.
When not pouring over the Quotations of Mao Tse-Tung or scrawling a poem, they’re eagerly developing new drag works, tuning their autoharp, dancing with reckless abandon, or haunting a garden.
Who are they?
“It is undeniable, our need of stories… how we need stories. From children learning together in the schoolyard to political prisoners using theatre to organize from inside the cage; from worker/tenants’ plays in order to build solidarity to beautifully outrageous scenes in sticky Queer bars: we need theatre, images of our reality. It is our inheritance: tool and talisman as humanity.”
“All work is political: in what it says and what it omits. We are led to believe that any propaganda (pejorative) is easy to identify. How much propaganda do you see in a day? Does it cease to be propaganda because it is familiar? Nostalgic?”
“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”
-Bertolt Brecht
"In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics."
- Mao Tse-Tung