Projects in Development

Speed-Dating with Cacti

What happens when you put a dharma teacher, a botanist, a cognitive neuroscientist, an entomologist, a stand-up comedian, an 88-year old woman with Alzheimers, and a group of children in the same room?

Speed-Dating with Cacti is a site-specific community-engaged audio and meditation-focused performance, which takes place in a public garden. Wearing headphones, the audience is first asked to enjoy the sight of a group of experienced meditators as they practice Mahasi-style walking meditation, which happens to be very, very, very very slow.

This action is supported by sports-style commentating, linking the latest findings in brain science with models of spiritual enlightenment and the idea that the self, as we understand it, does not exist. The calm proceedings are interrupted by vibrant interventions – samba bands, zealous teenagers playing soccer, jugglers, billowing clouds of pink smoke, clouds of insects, and children chasing an ice-cream truck, to name a few.

Speed-Dating with Cacti asks the impossible to answer question: which species has the purest access to this present moment… riiiiiight….NOW?

Speed-Dating with Cacti is currently being developed independently from Mammalian Diving Reflex by Darren O’Donnell and Alice Fleming in collaboration with Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria and will premiere in Fall 2025.

My Thing → Your Thing

Created in collaboration with 20 young people from South Korea and their local neighbours, My Thing → Your Thing activates a community of people, bringing them together to co-perform in a unique auction-style spectacle, featuring original songs that weave in the neighbour’s stories behind their objects, all driven by the curiosity of the young people. Believing that fact is more interesting than fiction, My Thing → Your Thing approaches the question of object acquisition by introducing the object, unadulterated, into a community exchange where generosity and the power of the object’s story take center stage.

My Thing → Your Thing is being developed in South Korea with support from the Canada Council’s Canada-Korea Co-creation Fund.

Collaborators include: Rhian Hinkley, Ivy Hinkley, Alice Fleming, Ngawang Luding, Virginia Antonipillai, and Darren O’Donnell.

Playgrounds on Fire!

Playgrounds on Fire! is a participatory experience in which a mixed hearing-and-deaf* audience is confronted by a playground that just won’t stop burning. In order to douse the fires, the audience has to come together to solve a series of puzzles, the clues for which are shared by our young team. There’s just one rule:

No spoken language!

The team can point, use sign language, red lights, green lights, massive emojis; anything in the world except spoken language!

Playgrounds on Fire! is being developed by an intergenerational deaf/hearing inclusive team in partnership with FELD Theater für junges Publikum in Berlin, Germany.

Collaborators include: Elli Kühne, Mia Wiethoff, Anna Deul, Darren O’Donnell, Jan Kress, Manuel Ahnemüller, and Steve Heather, who makes music you can feel in your bones.

*Deaf is a positive self-designation of non-hearing people, regardless of whether they are deaf, profoundly deaf or hard of hearing.