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Books:
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The books below are available through Coach House Books or at your local bookseller. If you live in Toronto, we recommend Pages Books, 256 Queen W. If you live in Chicago, we recommend Quimby's, 1854 W. North Ave.
Social Acupuncture: A guide to suicide, performance and utopia
Essay and a play by Darren O'Donnell
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.
"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
Your Secrets Sleep With Me
Darren O'Donnell's first novel
"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
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, Don't worry, you will not be alone.
[boxhead]
a script by Darren O'Donnell
[boxhead] features Dr. Thoughtless Actions, a young geneticist, who awakes one morning to find a cardboard box secured to his head. Unable to rip it off, he finds all his thoughts come from God, all his actions from the devil and his desire for love 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 hilarious ... a tightly wound complex of existential postulations, metaphysical ruminations and poop jokes."
Eye Weekly
Kathleen Oliver, Georgia Straight
pppeeeaaaccceee
a script by Darren O'Donnell with essays by all the collaborators
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.
Inoculations
Four scripts by Darren O'Donnell
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.
Articles:
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Stealth Pedagogy: the lessons of vomit, deception, and choosing children over friends.
from The Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy.
A short essay about who learns what when working with children, written by Darren O'Donnell for The Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy.
Download: Stealth Pedagogy
The Gardiner Garden: visions of provision.
from Greentopia, 2007 with Marney Isaac.
A proposal to turn the Gardiner Expressway into an elevated Garden, written in collaboration with ethnobotanist, Marney Isaac for Coach House Book's GreenTOpia, the third in the uTOpia series.
Download: The Gardiner Garden
The Social Impresario: capitalizing on the desire to be remembered for as long as
it takes wood to rot.
from Pivot, issue 1, spring 2007
Like so many of us in the culture industries, I am pulled by two seemingly
conflicted concerns: I want my work to be politically engaged, ameliorating
aspects of this horrible world and making it a better place, but, on the other
hand, I want to be rich and famous, an A-Lister with tons of power, glory and
influence. Initially, my method was to oscillate neurotically between these two
poles, trying to nurture one while obliterating the other. Then there was the more
successful attempt at synthesizing them to produce art in response to the
problems in the world, in a have-cake-eat-too strategy. This was a pretty good, it
worked for a while and it won me points in the local entertainment weeklies.
There was a big temptation to stop at that point, resting on the belief that
working with political content is the same as political engagement, perhaps
some of the insights of contemporary physics having convinced me that
witnessing is doing. And, maybe in some cases it is but, for the most part, it's not.
Download: The Social Impresario
Greasing the Glue and Gluing the Grease
from The New Quartlery, issue 101, winter 2007
What does it take for kids - especially kids in immigrant families to have a real sense of belonging in their neighbourhood? How can kids gain a sense of ownership when every day they pass galleries, high-end shops, restaurants and theatres that represent another world? Ask Darren O'Donnell, because that's exactly what he's trying to do in Toronto's Parkdale district, through playful interventions - like kids cutting hair - that challenge stodgy notions of art and artistic practice. O'Donnell uses his essay to further ideas about artists as "social impresarios" who can effect radical change in how all of us live, work and play.
Download: Greasing the Glue
Criteria to Determine Beautiful Civic Engagment
Darren O'Donnell proposes a list of criteria to determine successful social acupuncture
originally written for The New Quartlery, issue 101, winter 2007
Download: Beautiful Civic Engagement
Toronto the teenager: why we need a Children's Council
from uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, Coach House Books, 2005
Toronto is a teenager and, as a teenager, Toronto understands the indignities of youth, the untenable position of being able to understand the situation but do nothing about it. And this visceral understanding of disenfranchisement makes it the ideal seat for a rigorous challenge to the legal status of youth with respect to democratic participation.
from uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, Coach House Books, 2005
Download: Toronto the Teenager
Beachballs41+All
Beachballs41+All was a simple intervention that tried its best to pretend not to be anintervention. Through the charitable status of Toronto-based performance company Mammalian Diving Reflex (MDR), 400 inflatable pool toys were donated from Liz and Rennie's No Frills to Alexandra Pool's Wacky Fun Day. Then, again using the resources of MDR, a call was made for participants to come down to the pool early in the morning to donate air and lungpower. About 20 people showed up, providing 400 toys for about 100 kids.
Originally appeared in public access 32 (www.publicjournal.ca)
Download: beachballs41+all [7.49 MB]
The Talking Creature
written for the Canadian Theatre Review, Summer 2004
The Talking Creature was the inaugural event held by my theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, in our new program, SocialCapital. SocialCapital is a wing of the company dedicated to stripped-down research, experimentation, discussion and forms that, as yet, remain off the radar of traditional theatre and performance practices. he Talking Creature was an experiment in trying to isolate two core elements in the theatrical experience: talking and strangers.
Download: The Talking Creature