Toronto cultural planner, author, and playwright Darren O’Donnell describes Sex, Drugs and Criminality as an “interview show”. But it’s not your usual interview show like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert or The View. In Sex, Drugs and Criminality, which will be presented at the HOLD ON LET GO festival, teenagers ask the questions.
For the Vancouver show on Friday (February 7) at the Russian Hall, the respondents will be three high-profile Vancouver artists. Actor Hiro Kanagawa, performance artist and curator Vanessa Kwan, and musician Dan Mangan have agreed to answer any questions that the teens decide to ask.
O’Donnell explains that his Toronto-based company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, focuses on social relations by bringing people together in ways that dismantle barriers.
“We use encounters between people as our material,” O’Donnell tells the Toronto Spark over Zoom. “That’s our main material.”
Mammalian Diving Reflex was founded in 1993 as a fairly typical arts company. For the first 10 years, it produced stage-based performances by O’Donnell. In 2005, he started working with a group of kids in the Parkdale neighbourhood on collaborative projects. When they became leaders, they could pursue these projects in other countries to further their development.
The origins of Sex, Drugs and Criminality go back to a lunch that O’Donnell had with three teens in a Vietnamese restaurant on Spadina Avenue. He wanted to hear their thoughts on what they should be making a project about. One of them, Tenzin Chosang, blurted out an unexpected question.
“He just asked me: ‘What happens if you’re having sex with a woman and you have to pee? What happens if you pee inside her?’ ” O’Donnell says. “So that then became this bros-y kind of conversation with these three 15-year-olds.”
Drugs and criminality added for German show
He wanted to help them understand the complexity of sexuality. And it was the impetus for creating a production in which teens could ask a diverse group of adults some questions about sex.
At that point, Chosang joins the conversation over Zoom. And he laughs uproariously as he recalls the lunch in the Vietnamese restaurant. These days, Chosang is a husband, a father, a homeowner, and a successful producer of corporate videos.
He tells the Toronto Spark that there are some questions that you just can’t ask your parents when you’re a teenager. So, it seemed natural for him to bring it up with O’Donnell, who was easy to talk to and who helped in other ways.
“It was just nice to just ask an adult some questions,” Chosang says.
The group of them decided to evaluate the idea by making a videotaped version.
“We called it High School Health and it was focused on just sexuality,” O’Donnell says.
The teens directed their questions at some high-profile Canadians: film director Atom Egoyan, singer Dan Hill, and playwright and author Ann-Marie MacDonald.
Later, one of the teens suggested that sex wasn’t enough for the show. He suggested adding the topics of drugs and criminality for a production in Germany in 2017. Since then, it has been performed as Sex, Drugs and Criminality in Italy, Finland, Latvia, and Portugal.
Darren O’Donnell speaks about his company’s evolution in this video.
Pursuing youth empowerment
Chosang was born in Nepal and he says that within some immigrant families, sexuality is a taboo topic. Therefore, he has some advice for the teens (Luccianna Albarrán, Milo Engleman, Luc Groeneweg, Anders Hille Kellam, Hokuto MacDuff, Emily McCall, and Mackale Steele) in the Vancouver show.
“Don’t be afraid to ask anything,” Chosang says. “You’re going into it with adults who’ve been through a little bit more. So, I think, just be open.”
According to O’Donnell, four of the original kids are now full-time employees. A good friend of one of the original kids, Marie Lola Minimo, is producer of the Vancouver show. The Vancouver project coordinator, Thule van den Dam, joined the company as an intern in 2019.
O’Donnell says that he had lots of fun creating his own work for many years. But when he turned 40 in 2005, he started thinking about what he could do to give back to the community. In 2010, they formed a collective called the Torontonians and around the same time, O’Donnell returned to university to get a master’s degree in urban planning.
“I wanted to focus on youth cultural engagement and community economic development,” he says. “We were a laboratory of testing how we could do it.”
Ultimately, his research led to a book called Haircuts by Children and Other Evidence for a New Social Contract, which was published by Coach House Books. The title reflects one of Mammalian Diving Reflex’s most famous shows, Haircuts by Children.
As a result of all of his work, O’Donnell has learned many things about working with young people. First of all, it’s critical to treat them as colleagues as opposed to thinking that you are teaching or mentoring them.
“They are there making work with you,” he emphasizes.
O’Donnell rejects authoritarian approach
At this point, Chosang re-enters the conversation. He emphasizes that working with Mammalian Diving Reflex opened his mind to the possibility of working in the arts. He realized that he didn’t have to do a regular job.
“Darren always treated us like an adult,” Chosang adds. “We were able to do whatever we wanted. He never said, like, ‘Don’t do that’ when we had ideas.”
To O’Donnell, it comes down to two options: you either negotiate with young people as equals or you are an authoritarian and you boss them around. And the latter option doesn’t work in a creative environment.
“I can put up with so much chaos, like the chaos that these guys would rain down on our heads,” O’Donnell says with a laugh. “I mean, sometimes it would be me and, like, 10 of these guys. And they would just be bouncing off the walls—and we would be trying to get something done. And I just refused to boss them around. There was no way I was going to ‘shush’ them. I didn’t want to put myself in that role.”
https://youtu.be/wVlZgl1V1Sg?feature=shared
Watch Charlie Smith’s interview with Darren O’Donnell and Tenzing Chosang.
The HOLD ON LET GO festival will present Mammalian Diving Reflex’s Sex, Drugs and Criminality at the Russian Hall (600 Campbell Avenue) at 8 p.m. on Friday (February 7). For tickets and more information, visit the HOLD ON LET GO website. The Toronto Spark is on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social. Follow the Toronto Spark on X @TOSparkOfficial.
