I am sitting at a long table of strangers, next to a 10-year-old, at the dingy Skyline Restaurant in bad Parkdale, attempting small talk. Cameras flash as I conquer my mammoth club sandwich.
“Do you want some of my fries?” I ask Tenzin, a recent immigrant from Nepal, patiently awaiting his pasta and chocolate milkshake, which won’t appear for another half hour.

“No thanks,” he demurs. Three minutes uncomfortably pass as I look over at the artist, filming our conversation on camera.

That artist is 43-year-old conceptualist Darren O’Donnell and, for him, this is a performance. But this excruciating social encounter he’s recording is also a glimpse into how he lives his own life, one project at a time.

In O’Donnell’s Toronto, apprehensive curators do the dead-man’s float with precocious 10-year-olds in community swimming pools, deep-sea diving for Band-Aids. Schoolteachers midnight-mambo with sweaty-palmed attendees at Nuit Blanche. Strangers’ tongues commingle on the back of the bus en route to York University. Someone’s door is always open during drop-in home tours through the Annex, and makeouts happen on demand from any given audience. Children cut adults’ hair; institutions are denigrated; and people are asked if they’ve ever been involuntarily ejaculated on.

Such projects — which have made O’Donnell a minor if surprisingly substantial local celebrity for a performance artist  — are about a Toronto just as dark, dangerous and heartbreaking as the one you currently live in. Which is why his company Mammalian Diving Reflex’s deliberate choice to work with the children of Parkdale Public School, a.k.a. “Parkdale Pumas,” as well as exporting similar kid-centric projects to Italy, Pakistan and Australia (their collaborators have run from rock star Patti Smith to Trampoline Hall host Misha Glouberman), seems questionable to critics who deem him a social worker without the guilt. O’Donnell doesn’t mind, though, since he needs the kids more than they need him. He wants them to be his friends.




O’Donnell lives just up the street in a sleek one-bedroom apartment at College and Dundas, above a pho restaurant and next door to former Mammalian producer Naomi Campbell. He is a lifelong bachelor, with no children except a “joke godson.” He has a reputation as an aggressive flirt who, friends say, “hits on everyone he meets” — particularly young women.

O’Donnell used to be an actor, director and playwright before his outright rejection of the theatre, earning several Dora nominations for works that include A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, [boxhead] and White Mice, and critical accolades for his performance as Daniel MacIvor’s lover in a 2001 touring production of In On It. He studied acting at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, his hometown, spurred by a love of drama’s regulation that allowed him to escape a “bad situation at home” as the oldest of three kids, namely his father’s “fucking around.” Though O’Donnell’s parents wouldn’t divorce until he was 24, his mom forced the family into social isolation for fear of constant infidelity.

“I was good at theatre so that helped,” he says of joining the drama club at age 10. “My mom always used the rhetoric of ‘we’re a team’ [when things got bad at home], and I think that’s what I found in theatre. Working with a team — it was social, but it was also productive.”

Meeting O’Donnell for the first time can be an intense experience. “He’s funny; he’s charming; he’s awkward; he’s aggressive,” says Mammalian artistic producer Natalie De Vito. “He’s every emotion at one moment.”

In person, O’Donnell looks younger than 43 in transparent frames, a low-slung backpack and his signature leather bomber jacket. Collaborators say he can behave like an attention-
seeking child, with no concern for what is considered appropriate behaviour, lying on the floor when he doesn’t want to work. But he’s also exceedingly vulnerable, prone to touching arms and shoulders for reassurance, standing too close, talking too fast and displaying too much interest in strangers, though friends say that, despite pissing some people off for good, it’s mostly harmless.

“I worry that everyone doesn’t like me,” he writes over Facebook chat at 1am, the night after an informational session at the school. “Dogs, women, children.”

“Yeah I’m paranoid,” he later elaborates in an interview. “It’s a mental-health issue. I just think everyone hates me because I hate myself. So it’s very difficult to project that over everyone and everything all of the time.”

O’Donnell is currently in therapy, though he’s convinced that his therapist hates him too. This paranoia is more than a Woody Allen joke; it comes from a very real place. In 1993, he spent three days in the psych ward of Toronto General, suffering from delusions that included believing that he could cure AIDS, that “the universe was magical” and that he could radiate dangerous high-energy beams from his eye sockets — a talent he demonstrated at a July 2002 Trampoline Hall lecture on the importance of eye contact.

Friend and collaborator Stephanie Comilang, who travelled to Lahore, Pakistan with O’Donnell for a production of Diplomatic Immunities says, “He is crazy. You can tell when you talk to him. But he’s also super brilliant. Darren went through a psychological breakdown a few years ago. He was hospitalized, but when he was in there, he wrote a couple of plays that were really successful, apparently.”

There would be no need to describe O’Donnell’s neurosis if his work wasn’t about how to socialize. He wrote a book about it, Social Acupuncture, for Coach House Press in 2006, using his experience in shiatsu to describe politicized art as akin to the act of stabbing needles into someone’s back.

“Acupuncture is used to break system-wide holding patterns that are compromising the function of nervous, muscular, vascular, organ and psychological systems,” he writes. “Theoretically, the same thing should apply to the social body: small interventions at key junctures should affect larger organs, in turn contributing to feedback loops that can amplify and affect the distribution of energy resources.” What O’Donnell fails to mention is how good it can feel to be touched.




Eat the Street, in which a jury of children review restaurants along pre- and post-gentrified Queen West, is a continuation of a series Mammalian curated last year. In Parkdale vs Queen West, grade-schoolers took over their neighbourhood, staffing chi-chi resto Coca as bartenders, chefs and waiters, facing off with their school band against Kids on TV, and giving walking tours of the artster no-man’s land between Wrongbar and Roncesvalles. It’s part of an initiative that began with 2006’s Haircuts by Children, in which local barbers trained a class of Parkdale fifth- and sixth-graders to cut adults’ hair. It’s since been performed in Dublin, Birmingham and Portland.

In a neighbourhood where crack addicts commingle with nine-year-olds playing videogames at internet café/porn rental shop The Underground, Parkdale Public boasts a swimming pool, an ESL training program and a TV station. Of its 623 students, 64 per cent speak a primary language other than English — the majority, from Tibet, adore a kind of dumpling called momos. Mammalian has been the company in residence at the school since 2006. Though O’Donnell takes issue with the school’s administration, particularly Principal James Smyth, who debates the necessity of Eat the Street’s official t-shirts (“I just don’t think we need to do it, Darren”), kids scream out his name in the halls as we walk to an informational session in Ms. Wallace’s classroom.

In attendance are Coca chef Nathan Isberg, Toronto Star food critic Corey Mintz, and Mammalian project coordinator Petrina Ng, who’s often mistaken for a grade-schooler. Only a handful of kids show up, hands propped on their chins in boredom — except for a bashful Indian girl, who answers almost every question despite herself. Sitting atop a desk with an actor’s poise, O’Donnell stammers out talking points in his plush, deep voice. “Uh, who here has had bad rice before?” he questions the kids, who are too shy to confirm. “Think about what bad rice might be like… what your expectations are. If your rice looks and tastes like pumpkin pie, now that’s bad rice.”

O’Donnell thinks kids should have the same rights as adults — the right to vote, the right to operate streetcars and the right to counter the old adage that “children should be seen and not heard.” With Eat the Street, kids can order whatever they want off the menu and review the Drake’s service, ambience and food. O’Donnell wrote the criteria himself, which include things like, “This restaurant was so terrible it made me want to die.” On May 11th, an official ceremony at the Gladstone will hand out awards like “Hardest Working Waiter on Queen West” and “Worst Bathroom,” with emcees scouted at the Parkdale PS annual talent show.

Some criticize Mammalian’s depiction of an empowered childhood. National Post art critic Leah Sandals, whose personal dislike of O’Donnell is so great that she refuses to review his work, writes in a blog debate, “If MDR was really all concerned with empowering kids (poor or otherwise) it would address the needs and wants of the children themselves, maybe even individually…. As it stands… it’s very possible in these ‘performance art’ situations that the children are made to act out the adult-in-power’s ideas of what an empowered childhood looks like.”

But adults seek children’s approval, too. Part of working with kids is relearning how to be one. Writes O’Donnell in response, “My current art project is to be a nicer person. I’ve even hired a therapist as ‘collaborator.’ The pain I offer is minimal — like the acupuncture needle. I think the lack of a strong relationship between the artsters living in Parkdale and the kids is an area of depletion, so I’m giving it a little poke to see if it might stimulate flow…. Working with Parkdale PS means that suddenly I have 600 new friends who live in my neighbourhood.”

Yes Darren, adults might say, but those friends are children. You can’t go to a bar with them. You can’t meet them at the Common to complain about your grant application. And if you’re a single, 43-year-old man, you can’t even hang out with them without a parental-consent form.
In the 2006 project The Floating Curator, O’Donnell challenged accusations of adult pervert–dom by having curator Christine Shaw sign a social contract: Shaw spent 1.5 hours a day for five days floating in the shallow end of the Alexandra Park pool, interacting with children of different ethnicities. The result was a transformative experience for artist, curator and children alike.

Writes O’Donnell on the Curator blog, “I had a good time with a couple of the girls involved with Haircuts by Children and would like to spend some time with them this summer swimming at the pool, checking out galleries on Queen Street or just shooting hoops at the park. When I tell people this they laugh and caution me to be careful. They tell me to have a kid of my own or hang out with some friend’s kids. But I want to hang out with these kids, these particular people are my friends by virtue of who they are, not how old they are.” He confesses, “I miss them.”




When I meet up with the Parkdale Pumas in front of the school, O’Donnell is quizzing them about the restauarant. “Have you ever been to Skyline?” he asks a kid, pushing his video camera into his face. “Have you?” he asks another. “Have you?” The act doesn’t stop until he has asked everyone in sight. Cute.

We walk to the restaurant in a muddled clump, as O’Donnell films the people in the neighbourhood — a sketchy guy transporting twenty boxes of Miller Genuine Draft in a grocery cart, a woman muttering to herself, a couple undergoing a screaming match as the sun begins to set. The kids seem nonplussed. During last year’s walking tour, many pointed out the back alleyways they use as shortcuts on the way to school.

Is the jury having a good time?

“Yeah,” they say.

Do they think adults should pay more attention to what kids have to say?

“Yes, because kids sometimes have really good opinions. Stuff like that.” Do they think kids tell the truth more than adults do?

“Sometimes.”

Are they going to review the restaurants honestly?

“It depends, like if it’s really bad. If they’re rude to me, then I’ll write that.”

“I’ll never come back.”

“I’ll complain.”

It’s hard to tell if Eat the Street is more for Parkdale’s benefit or O’Donnell’s. But at the end of the night, O’Donnell and I drop off five children one-by-one down Jameson, observing them scurrying into their giant low-income housing complexes that line the streets torn up by construction — a part of Parkdale I never thought existed. “This area is never going to really be gentrified, until they decide what to do with all this,” he says.

O’Donnell says the walk home is his favourite part of the night — the kids are relaxed and excited from their experience at the restaurant. They can open up and be themselves. It’s the only time he’s allowed to be with them alone. I’ve befriended two grade-eight girls from Russia, who teach me how to say hello and debate the high points of Twilight as we walk together on the first nice night of spring, O’Donnell leading the way with the boys as the girls take up the rear. (“Can you ask us more questions?” they say. “We like this!”) In a weird way, it feels like a makeshift family of strangers, an experience that makes me wish I could live in O’Donnell’s Toronto forever.

Eat the Street is only a jumping-off point for a project slated for October with Aboriginal children in Tasmania. The kids are going to review local businesses, block by block. O’Donnell wants to have an awards ceremony there too. Since launching Haircuts in 2006, Mammalian’s grasp has expanded worldwide, a specific brand of social awkwardness that results in social emancipation. But there’s a simpler explanation behind Darren’s work.

“I think he wants to meet everyone,” says Comilang. “I think Darren wants to have a conversation with every single person in the world. Which is kind of a faux-pas, isn’t it?”

The idea of a city unfolding itself, making every institution accessible and every woman, man, child and streetcar driver a potential conversationalist is both utopian and dangerous. Though Darren would never rock a cardigan, projects like Eat the Street speak to a longing to be understood: it’s a beautiful day in the neighourhood — would you be mine? Could you be mine?

“Did you ever see Slow Dance With Teacher?” asks De Vito. “It was a project at Nuit Blanche where we put two strangers in a very intimate relationship for three minutes, which can seem like an eternity. In that situation, some people are really awkward and try to laugh it off. Some overcompensate. That’s what it’s like for people when they first meet Darren. It’s like he’s slow dancing with everyone he meets.”

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The play’s the thing
Coming as they do from a playwright, director and actor, Darren O’Donnell’s interventions with Mammalian Diving Reflex are essentially performative, bringing people together while also making them uncomfortable in their own skin, and challenging the most basic of social norms, especially the role of children. Here’s a look at some of his recent work.

Free Advice From A Teenager, 2005
O’Donnell published an essay entitled “Toronto the Teenager” in Coach House Books’ first uTOpia. At the launch he enlisted the help of 14-year-old Kirsten Azan to dole out advice to everyone and anyone in the Toronto literary scene.

Beachballs41+all, 2006
Four hundred toys were provided to 100 kids at a public pool. An effort to demonstrate abundance, as well as to introduce underprivileged children to Toronto artists, it probably just looked like a really fun pool party to passersby.

Haircuts By Children, 2006
Throwing caution, and perhaps aesthetics, to the wind, O’Donnell’s piece had children cutting and styling people’s hair for free.

Ballroom Dancing, 2006
For Toronto’s first Nuit Blanche in 2006, O’Donnell enlisted children to DJ an all-ages, all-night dance party, complete with thousands of rubber balls littering the gymnasium space.

Please Allow Us the Honour of Relaxing You, 2007
During the Open Engagement conference in Regina, O’Donnell simplified the idea of relaxation into one simple formula: 70 participants + 70 yoga mats x 4 half-hour slots = 280 massages.

Slow Dance With Teacher, 2007
Returning to Nuit Blanche, O’Donnell recruited Toronto-area teachers to dance with audience members. The brief, if unnerving, glimpse at intimacy in public places made many critics’ best-of lists for the evening’s events.  » LAUREN RAHAM

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