haircuts by children
You’re the founding director of Mammalian Diving Reflex. What’s your company about?
Mammalian Diving Reflex started in 1993. I trained as an actor initially. We did stage-based work with experimental scripts.
Around the year 2000, there was a movement in the visual arts in particular, and specifically around one theorist, Nicolas Bourriaud, who’s a French curator who wrote a book called Relational Aesthetics. That book laid theoretical groundwork for artists who wanted to make a difference in the world but had kind of given up on the lefty, revolutionary idea of a vanguard.
He had described artists becoming more interested in ‘microtopias’ than in large-scale, utopian, centrally planned visions. So learning to inhabit the world in a better way is, I think, almost a quote. That inspired a lot of my friends who were in the visual arts. There wasn’t much going on in theatre, so I started to look at how it could be applied to performance.
I began to do work in that realm, abandoned making script-based theatre, and then published a book called Social Acupuncture in April of 2006, which outlines some of the early thinking and why theatre might be actually a perfect place. Unlike many artforms, the audience and the performers are in the same space at the same time, so why aren’t they acknowledging each other and working together to do interesting things?
Is this where Haircuts by Children came about?
Yes, Haircuts by Children was one of the projects that was within this 'social acupuncture' realm. We had no idea that it would be this international hit that continues to tour today, nor that it would lead to a bunch of subsequent projects. But it was really fun to make. I enjoyed working with children much more than I’d ever enjoyed working with adults.
When we give kids more power, we allow adults an opportunity to be more vulnerable. And that's exactly what the world needs, argues Creative Director Darren O Donnell.
I’d spent a lot of time reading about relational aesthetics and that movement in the visual-art world. There was a project I really liked called , which was a very simple project. An artist, Gustavo Artigas, took two basketball teams from America and two soccer teams from Tijuana and got them to play each
