Projects in Development
Die Laughing (2025)
Die Laughing is a hilarious, heart-warming stand-up comedy performance showcasing the wisdom, wit and humour of Toronto’s most seasoned residents. After a comedy crash-course by a professional comedian, a group of senior first-time performers will share their lifetime of experiences, delivering a one-of-a-kind stand-up comedy set full of laughs and life lessons.
Die Laughing will be presented by Comedy Bar Danforth in Toronto, Canada on July 24, 2025.
The Original Production of Die Laughing in Toronto, Canada in 2025 is:
By Mammalian Diving Reflex
Produced by Marie Lola Minimo & Ryan Lewis
Coordinated by Becca Buttigieg
Stand-Up Training by Tamara Shevon
Die Laughing is developed with support from The Canada Council for the Arts.
Presentation History
Comedy Bar (2025)
Let’s Get Lost
Let’s Get Lost features a group of performers equipped with wearable live-streaming webcams, GPS trackers and old-school pagers. Blindfolded and stripped of monetary resources, the performers are transferred to a remote area and left with one mission: to find their way back to the audience, depending on the kindness of strangers.
Meanwhile, audience members are tasked with helping the performers by sending messages, giving directions and even calling businesses in the vicinity of the performer to request their support.
In a world dominated by digital addictions, instantaneous and infinite access to knowledge (and Google Maps!), Let’s Get Lost takes a critical look at our tendency to avoid being lost. While constant online connectivity, information overload and a false sense of certainty has become the norm, Let’s Get Lost posits that uncertainty in life is both healthy and essential for building resilience.
Let’s Get Lost is being developed with BASE in Milan, Italy, in collaboration with 35 young people in July 2025.
Collaborators include: Darren O’Donnell, Alice Fleming, Isabel Ahat, Virginia Antonipillai, Ngawang Luding, alongside Tech Consultant David Mesiha and digital artist Zia Gul Sadeqi.
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.
