Darren O'Donnell, Your Secrets Sleep With Me, Coach House Books, 2000.
"Toronto's CN Tower has fallen into the lake. The city is crowded with refugees from the US. Michael and Ruth Racco's dad has, in a rash of road rage, perpetrated the Backhoe Massacre. And, in the middle of it all, little Jimmy Hardcastle has, in the fountain of a suburban mall, walked on water. As helicopters chop the air over Toronto and a paranoid America slides into fascism, kids from south of the border collide with kids from north of the border and, over lattes, ruminate on new possibilities. Your Secrets Sleep With Me is a frenetic, ruthlessly hilarious critique of power and politics. Brilliant, absurd, incisive and fun, this caffeinated novel will take you on a doomed search for the place where you end and everything else begins. But you will not be alone. Shhh. Don't worry. Your secrets sleep with us."
"Darren O’Donnell didn’t start off working with children, but in the last few years his performances with children have become some of his best-known work, both in his elected home of Toronto and abroad. Haircuts by Children began it all: a performance piece that involves training children to be stylists, then having them take over a salon and give haircuts to people. The show traveled to London, New York, Dublin, L.A., Vancouver, Sydney, Terni, and other cities, always using local children.
In 2008 and 2009, his theater company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, was the artist-in-residence at the Parkdale Public School (Parkdale is a lower-income neighborhood in Toronto), and his work continued to move further away from writing, producing, and acting in plays, which is how he began his career, in the early 1990s, with Who Shot Jacques Lacan?
Before children, his work dealt with sex: at an all-night performance festival in Toronto, he debuted Slow Dance with Teacher, in which giddy participants slow danced with nice, neatly dressed teachers. He hosted make-out parties; he published a novel, Your Secrets Sleep with Me; and, in the past year, he began working with the elderly. He has always been preoccupied with race, politics, and what it means to live in a city.
O’Donnell is a single, forty-five-year-old straight man without children. His theater company has four part-time employees, spends much of its year touring, and can be counted on to produce some of the most exciting and revelatory theater in Canada—shows that live somewhere between the art of theater and life itself. He is a combination of producer, actor, writer, director, city planner, host, relational-aesthetics artist, louche uncle, neighborhood granny, and kid. He talks very quickly, in a staccato voice, and seems to care little about social decorum or potential embarrassment to himself.
In 2006, Coach House Books published his manifesto, Social Acupuncture, an emotional inquiry into theater’s oblivious, vain uselessness, and his own longtime complicity in it, and an idealistic search for something more relevant and revolutionary. The text was punctuated by his characteristic insecurity and self-flagellation, and has developed a cult following among theater and relational artists. His work has recently come to reliably resemble the “social acupuncture” of his dreams: art that, by pricking people, may “contribute to a healthy functioning social sphere.”—Sheila Heti
"This is a bible for the dispossessed, a prohecy so full of hope it's crushing." - The Chicago Reader
"The most unknown literary masterpiece I have had the chance to come across, Your Secrets Sleep With Me manages the impossible: to seduce from its very first page. Following an eclectic group of children in Toronto who discover life as the world crumbles around them, O'Donnell makes humanity's beauty manifest in the most unlikely places. The best Canadian fiction I have read since Timothy Findley's The Wars. - The Concordian
"In our era of homogeneous realistic novels, it's refreshing to step into unstable territory, where ideas matter." - Geist Magazine
"O'Donnell's a terrific writer - pick any page at random and you'll be seduced." - Now Magazine
"O'Donnell's book is a breath of fresh air...he juxtaposes all of the best elements of his prose in to a wonderfully bizarre finale." - The Link
Coach House Books asks Darren O’Donnell a few things about Your Secrets Sleep With Me
Read it at Google Books
"Theatre doesn’t have much relevance anymore. Or so acclaimed playwright Darren O’Donnell tells us. The dynamics of unplanned social interaction, he says, are far more compelling than any play he could produce. So his latest show, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, isn’t really a show; it’s an interactive chitchat about memory, depression, and 9/11, a dazzling whirl of talking streetcars, pizza and schizophrenia. And it’s hilarious.
O’Donnell’s artistic practice has evolved into ‘something as close to hanging out as you can come and still charge admission.’ With his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, O’Donnell has generated a series of ongoing events that induce interactions between strangers in public; the Talking Creature, Q&A, Home Tours, the Toronto Strategy Meetings and Diplomatic Immunities bring people together in odd configurations, ask revealing questions and prove the generosity, abundance and power of the social sphere.
Social Acupuncture includes the full text of A Suicide-Site Guide to the City and an extensive essay on the waning significance of theatre and the notion of civic engagement and social interaction as an aesthetic."
"No other playwright working in Toronto right now has O’Donnell’s talent for synthesizing psychosocial, artistic and political random thoughts and reflections into compelling analyses... The world (not to mention the theatre world) could use more of this, if only to get us talking and debating... 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." - The Globe and Mail
"Part aesthetic manifesto, part play script, and all provocation, Social Acupuncture demands and rewards your critical attention." - This Magazine
"The text is essential reading to all concerned... O'Donnell places ethics before aesthetics, fundamentally shifting questions regarding criteria for art from the political to the moral." - Matrix
"This is a book that anyone involved with theatre or activism should read, maybe even anyone who identifies as left of centre. He's asking the right questions, and positing interesting answers." - The Dominion
"Social Acupuncture is an intensely thoughtful and entertaining piece of analysis, written in a smooth, unpretentiously colloquial style. O'Donnell won't bore you as he weaves together one fascinating nugget of social observation after another – he's insightful, but he's also very funny." - Liberty Gleaner
"I saw Darren O’Donnell on the street recently, but I didn’t say hello. After reading his book, I’m asking myself why not. There are two sections: the essay Social Acupuncture, and the play A Suicide-Site Guide to the City. I knew that I’d seen the play when it was performed at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto, but I’d forgotten that I was also in it – I was the audience volunteer who went on stage to make out with O’Donnell, the writer and performer of the piece. It’s right there on page 147: “If there’s a taker, we kiss, kiss, kiss.” That’s the kind of thing he’s into, and that's what this book is about: “an aesthetic of civic engagement,” ways of challenging traditional theatrical and artistic forms along with the capitalist conventions of social interaction. It’s complicated, and that’s why the essay is the real jewel, a manifesto of sorts about the work he and his company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, have done and will continue to do. I can’t say I agree with every tenet and assumption O’Donnell makes, or that the argument doesn’t at times wax superficial or egotistical. What surprises me, though, is that he consistently recognizes and flags these moments himself. I can say this is a book that anyone involved with theatre or activism should read, maybe even anyone who identifies as left of centre. He’s asking the right questions, and positing interesting answers. Does it make sense to buy a book meant to be a guide to undercutting capitalism? If you see Darren on the street, ask him." - Matthew J. Trafford
"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.' - Eye Weekly
"By 9/11 Toronto actor Darren O’Donnell was already fed up with the political limitations of traditional representational theater. So, after the 2003 northeast blackout, when he saw the disparate residents of his neighborhood come together in something of a utopian moment, he set out to find a new approach to making art, one that stimulates civic engagement. He calls his method “social acupuncture”—structured moments that break down boundaries between performer and audience. In the first part of this somewhat bipolar book, he lays out his manifesto and gives examples from his recent work. In one project an audience member whose name was drawn from a hat was invited onstage to field questions from the house—though, in a crafty shift of power, he or she was also welcome to refuse to answer any or all of them.
The second half of the book is a rough script for O’Donnell’s interactive one-man show, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City. I’ve only seen parts of it performed—and by design it’s different each time, so some readers might find it tedious doing the mental gymnastics required to fully imagine the experience. But O’Donnell’s synthesis of critical and conversational writing styles can make for wildly entertaining reading, of a piece with his scorching 2004 novel, Your Secrets Sleep With Me." - Todd Dills
"Part aesthetic manifesto, part play script, and all provocation, Social Acupuncture demands and rewards your critical attention. In his latest book, Darren O'Donnell takes aim at the timidity and irrelevance of theatre (endless restagings of Shakespeare are dealt a particularly harsh blow) and the naïveté of "fun" and "feel good" artistic gestures toward utopia. And he knows what he's talking about: O'Donnell is one of the foremost practitioners – and, with this book, one of its most erudite and entertaining critics – of a particularly Canadian brand of participatory, socially engaged art. As a result, Social Acupuncture reads alternately like a stand-up comedy routine and an academic essay on aesthetic theory that, like much of the work he criticizes, is unlikely to reach beyond established audiences. Which is unfortunate, because whether or not your agree with his ideas about art as politics, you still have to contend with them." —Peter McCamus
"This book contains a lengthy essay on O’Donnell’s vision of a politically and socially engaged theatrical experience, which for O’Donnell is best achieved through an audience-involved, non-narrative theatre. He makes an impassioned call for artists to blur the line between art production and social work and to engage directly with their audiences through relevant, meaningful, non-academic works.
I disagree with O’Donnell’s basic premise, which is that it is not possible to have meaningful indirect, positive effects on the social world through the creation of esoteric art. However, his criticisms are particularly relevant and useful insofar as the theatre is concerned, and he’s right to deride the theatre’s obsession with the “classics” and the industry’s aversion to risk (an observation that also holds true for other artistic disciplines).
A play is also included in the book, something of an interactive yet scripted monologue, and O’Donnell’s recent (as of 2006) projects are discussed in an overview of how he has managed to develop and apply his ideas about “social acupuncture.” While I applaud O’Donnell for the most part, I’m troubled by his apparent unconcern with technical ability and aesthetic achievement.
The “general public” should not have to settle for unskilled, unspectacular art. The notion that the way to make one’s art more relevant and “palatable” is to downgrade its aesthetic and technical achievement is a common and condescending notion that permeates the theatrical and art worlds, especially insidious in the fields of performance and video art. O’Donnell’s work is more interesting and his play more well-written than this criticism might imply — the book, its argument, and the play are all excellent in many respects and I’d recommend this book to anyone with an interest in socially engaged art. I don’t buy many of these arguments but I think they are important arguments to consider and contend." — Jonathan Ball
Read it at Google Books
Darren O'Donnell, [boxhead], Coach House Books, 2004.
"Dr. Thoughtless Actions, a young geneticist, awakes one morning to find a cardboard box secured to his head. Unable to wrench it off, he attempts suicide, not only failing but also, unbeknowst to himself, cloning himself, creating Dr. Wishful Thinking. The two losers fall in love, fall in science, and fail to make a baby. Their conversation, an intricately woven semantic circus, traverses boxedness, love, and the more ridiculous areas of metaphysical speculation. Through a series of rapid exchanges, verbal games, and musical numbers, they discover that all their thoughts come from God, all their words come from the devil, and their desire for love is a habit acquired from the cinema. Sound familiar? Don’t be so hard on yourself.
[boxhead]: a bedtime story for your brain."
"Audacious, thought-provoking and frequently... O'Donnell's script is a tightly wound complex of existential postulations, metaphysical ruminations and poop jokes." - Eye Weekly
"You've probably never seen anything like [boxhead] - unless you've done a lot of acid...The play is not for the faint of heart...For the theatrically adventurous, it's one hell of a trip." - Kathleen Oliver
Darren O'Donnell, pppeeeaaaccceee, Coach House Books, 2011.
"pppeeeaaaccceee is a vast, imaginative and mesmerizing glide through Life and Power. The play is set in Ephemeral; three people firmly floating chat about the revolution. Which revolution? Good question. A gently aggressive meditation, pppeeeaaaccceee examines our being, asks us what we're doing and reminds us that there are monsters in here. Peace. Say it slow, stretch it out, make it last forever."
Darren O'Donnell, Inoculations: Four Scripts, Coach House Books, 2011.
"These four plays White Mice, Who Shot Jacques Lacan?, Radio Rooster Says That's Bad and Over written by Darren O'Donnell for Mammalian Diving Reflex, will challenge your politics, your ontology and everything you hold to be safe, stable and sacrosanct. Who Shot Jacques Lacan? slams together theatre and psychoanalysis; White Mice posits a post-white, post-capitalist world; Radio Rooster Says That's Bad employs rhythm, rhyme, and repetition to explore millennial fever, paranoia, and psychosis and Over is a vaudevillian exploration of the possibilities of the paranormal as a legitimate agent in ordinary lives. Inoculations can be read online or purchased at Coach House Books."
Darren O'Donnell interviewed by Sheila Heti for The Believer (2011) (pdf)
Darren O'Donnell's web page
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.