Globe and Mail loves getting needled by Social Acupuncture

Talking to strangers, and stranger yet

ZOE WHITTALL

If you've recently had your hair cut by a child from Toronto's Parkdale Public School, or been asked oddly personal questions on the street by a gaggle of curious beings, you've been touched by a brainchild project of Darren O'Donnell. His latest offering is Social Acupuncture: A Guide to Suicide, Performance and Utopia, which includes a three-part essay and the text of his play A Suicide-Site Guide to the City. The combination of evocative analysis and the innovative script succinctly captures O'Donnell's unique vision for an aesthetic of civic engagement.

If you live in Toronto, it's quite difficult to ignore O'Donnell, nor should you want to. An accomplished novelist, playwright, director and producer, he helps kick the mundane out of contemporary theatre in Canada. With the help of his production company, the Mammalian Diving Reflex, he's created a series of theatrical interventions, a creative melding of performance, social work, participatory playfulness and politics.

The company is propelled by a brazen belief that inspiring strangers to talk to one another will create positive social change, despite and because of the resulting anxiety and discomfort this may cause. The essays in Social Acupuncture are lively and complex, examining how art and activism have failed and the world is collapsing, but positing the possibility of bringing about change via "social acupuncture," art that functions like a needle to a blocked social body.

Power imbalances -- of race, sex and class, for example -- block mobility and create tensions. O'Donnell claims that activists on the left are too concerned with the idea of safe spaces, separating according to difference, and that they are not willing to endure discomfort. Putting up with distress, O'Donnell asserts, is the whole point. Take this assumption and add some theatrical flair, and you have a unique experience as audience member, participant and reader.

During the summer of SARS, the Mammalian Diving Reflex created its first project, The Talking Creature, a participatory event examining the art of conversing with strangers in public. The flyer read, "The summer of SARS is coming. The RICH will do their best to get out of town, leaving just the POOR. It might be a good time to do a lot of TALKING." O'Donnell describes transformative moments where the experiments worked, where others failed or caused alarm, such as a particularly caustic reaction from participants at a Canzine-festival Q & A session gone awry.

Haircuts by Children -- which is exactly what it sounds like -- happened in Toronto at the Milk International Children's Festival for the Arts, where it was described as a "whimsical relational performance" that examines the enfranchisement of children.

O'Donnell has the ability to take activists and artists on the left to task, himself included. "Too many of us are too busy fighting each other and nothing much is going to happen until we get that all sorted out." He seems to have grown up without the bashful gene, jumping up and down on the graveyard of Toronto identity politics ("I enjoy my privilege, I think everyone should have some"), pushing toward the utopian goal of bringing people together in unusual ways to engage in the power of the social sphere.

He balances statements some would consider audacious by being purposely self-effacing, acknowledging his place in society ("So, what's an angry, stupid, white idiot pervert . . . supposed to do?"), at the same time posing important questions that push leftist activists from their paralytic slumber to pursue social intelligence. It's all easier said than done, of course, and O'Donnell doesn't seem to shy away from the challenge.

O'Donnell says he went into theatre because of his obsessive need for attention, some bad choices and because he didn't realize that creating a truly transformative activist theatre was no longer possible. ("While all art is suspect, theatre is looking particularly sketchy . . . at least you can accuse other forms of selling out; all you can accuse theatre of doing is nothing.") The Mammalian Diving Reflex is definitely succeeding in its attempts to energize an art form it claims lacks significant social relevance.

The essays leading up to the script of A Suicide Site Guide to the City, the play he wrote while developing the theory of social acupuncture, provide a strong theoretical basis for the irreverent, semi-autobiographical monologue, which is rousing even if you've never seen it on stage.

O'Donnell writes like a sugar-addled genius at 300 km/h, making fun of his artistic and political past and humbly offering solutions based on what he's learned. Vaulting between extreme pessimism and excitedly dreaming up the sanguine possibilities of simple human interaction, the book ultimately displays a hopefulness antithetical to its occasional dive into the suicidal.