Toronto's foremost expert on the art of social interaction is back with a new project involving a pop-up office space at the Drake, a high-school student songwriting challenge and grilled-cheese sandwiches. Naturally, we asked him to explain.
Inside the Drake Hotel Lab, a tough-looking 15-year-old insists the lights be turned off so he can sing without scrutiny. His dulcet crooning of a short love song, written hours earlier by he and two friends, causes the small studio space to erupt in cheers from his peers.
“Who knew everyone was so fucking talented?” one girl exclaims approvingly.
The 10 or so teenagers clustered in the Lab are high-school students from Parkdale Collegiate, as well as members of The Torontonians, a collective and mentorship program established by Mammalian Diving Reflex, the research-art atelier/workshop best known for its Haircuts by Children project. Yesterday marked the beginning of Mammalian and The Torontonians’ two-week residency at the Drake Lab.
Dubbed (naturally) the Grilled Open Cheese Office Songwriting Sandwich, Mammalian staff will use the space as an office by day, and devote evenings to The Torontonians’ 12 Days 24 Songs songwriting challenge and the latest edition of the Mammalian’s Dare Night. There will also be grilled cheese. And pickles.
Before the first batch of songs got underway, Darren O’Donnell, Mammalian’s artistic director and west-of Ossington-household-name, explained the madness.
For those who’ve never heard of it, what is the mandate of Mammalian Diving Reflex?
We search for contradictions in the social sphere to whip up into scintillating aesthetic experiences. We’re looking for interesting social situations, often those involving people who are not participating in all the cultural fun. We like to remind everyone that there’s a bunch of people who are not invited into this fun called the “creative city”—children being the most obvious ones, so we like to work with them.
When you’re working with art you can do a lot of things that would not normally be permitted. Small things—like, right now, I’m also working on a project in Vancouver called “Eat the Street”—we get a jury of 10-year-old kids and drag them around to a bunch of restaurants to eat and give out awards.
The main artistic point is that adults come and have dinner with them. To bring adults and children who don’t know each other into the same room to hang out and eat dinner—the only way you’re going to have that happening is by calling it art.
How often do you get labeled as “creepy”?
All the time. Constantly. There’s a lot of sensational bullshit. There was an article [in Eye Weekly] that was really unfair. [The writer] tried to portray me in as creepy a light as she could. My company’s relationship with the kids at Parkdale Public School is destroyed.
I’m a bald, middle-aged guy; it freaks people out. But then, there’s a whole team of us, it’s not just me: [there's] Stephanie Springgay, an educational consultant who’s a professor at OISE, Krys Verrall, a professor at York in Children’s Studies. Plus, we work with a couple of producers, a couple of art historians—it’s not just me hanging around with a bunch of kids.
Who, exactly, are The Torontonians?
We started working with Parkdale Public School in 2005. We did Haircuts by Children with them and a whole series of projects, inducing encounters between kids at the school and artists in the neighbourhood. Then we went away for a while, because the problem with success, for us, was that it sort of disconnected us from the neighbourhood. In 2010, I got a message from one of the kids I had done work with. We got together and shot a video, and we started to do work and he brought some friends in. They’re 15 or 16 now, so I don’t have to work with the school. We were able to independently organize with them through Facebook.
At a certain point, it became clear that we should sort of formalize this, and we decided this would be a succession plan: We wanted to give the kids in Parkdale the company, to have it and run it when they were 25 or 30.
This whole thing is sort of driving towards that. We have [another] project right now, funded by the Ontario government, called the Producers of Parkdale—a year-long residency at the Gladstone Hotel where they’re learning the elements of event production.
How many Torontonians are there?
The Facebook group has about 30 lurking around there. The most we’ve ever had at an event is 18, but it hovers around 15, and there’s an absolute core of 10 who don’t miss a single thing.
Is it your mandate to work specifically with marginalized kids, or do you find kids in themselves to be marginalized?
Yeah, they are [all marginalized], for sure. One of the aspects of what we’re trying to do is acknowledge that there’s a whole bunch of young people in Toronto whose parents are relatively recent immigrants—many are refugees—and those guys don’t accrue the same kind of cultural capital that many people who’ve been here for generations do. These kids are all turning 15 to 20 years old, they really want to be involved in the city and want stuff to do. We’re trying to create connections between the business owners, artists and these kids, with the city as an institutional entity—that’s the kind of role we’re playing within the Parkdale neighbourhood.
What’s the purpose of the Drake residency?
I’ve been out of town [touring] for so long, I don’t even know who lives in Toronto. Mammalian wanted to reconnect with the city through The Torontonians, because they’re here all the time and love attending events, so we decided to run our office down there. Anybody who wants to can come hang with us, so we can become a presence and get to know people.
Why the songwriting challenge?
The Torontonians really like singing, and we wrote one song once and it went really well and we want to do that again. There’s a big-name producer we’ve met who works up at the Christie and Ossington Community Centre and he produces people’s tracks for free, it’s pretty amazing. I don’t know anything about hip-hop, but he produces people like k-os and Saukrates, so everyone’s really blown away that his day job is working at a community centre producing tracks for kids. We want to write a bunch of stuff and take it to him and see what he can do with it.
You’re advertising a full-functioning office at the Lab from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.—is the idea for people to watch you do work?
If anyone comes by, we’ll just hang out with them. They don’t have to look at us do work. We’ll stop working. We’re just bringing our laptops and our files and working there.
Is there any connection between the songwriting project and this open-office thing?
There’s no connection, no.
None?
We don’t have regular space to make noise in, so the first idea was to just do the 12 Days 24 Songs at the Drake Lab and then it became, “Well, why don’t we run our office out of there?” Most of my artistic job for a number of years has been as an emailer—my artistic practice now consists primarily of sending emails. I’m not joking, it’s fucking for real. And so, we’ll do that and, at a certain point, we’ll also do other stuff—we’ll sing and write songs and the whole thing culminates [after two weeks] in a Dare night.
Is having people watch the songwriting project integral to the artistic process?
No, no, in the same way you don’t have to watch the painter paint his painting before you see it. Painting is what we’ll be doing—the equivalent of it. You know, you can watch the painter paint, but the painter’s not interested in that so much as you coming to look at the painting when it’s done. We consider ourselves social-practice artists. Our material is social relations, that’s what we work with for the most part: affecting them, tweaking them and framing them in different kinds of ways. Our office is going social for a couple weeks so we can reconnect with old friends and make new ones.
What kinds of things do kids typically write songs about?
We’ve only ever written one song [in the past], so it’s hard to say.
What was it about?
Um, the lyrics were like: “The ship is sinking/ But you’re not thinking/ You might be drowning/ But all you’re really doing is rearranging the chairs.” It was right after Ford got elected and the song was for this thing called The Wrecking Ball—a theatre thing that addresses political stuff, and in the song The Torontonians were sort of accusing the audience and other artists of not really addressing fundamental stuff.
The Torontonians, none of those kids are white, and that demographic is kind of neglected in the Queen West arts scene. The chorus was: “Come and get your chairs/ Rearrange your chairs/ Chairs are here and there/ Come and get your chairs”—or something like that.
What’s going to happen at Dare night?
The Torontonians have done two Dare nights already; they have a box full of dares and they dare the audience to do stuff, or each other. Some of the dares are staged, they’ve been rehearsed. So, suddenly, there will be a dare like, sing “I believe in miracles” [a.k.a. "You Sexy Thing"] by Hot Chocolate. So the kids will pretend they’ve never heard the song and suddenly all 18 of us start to beat-box and do an a cappella version and the kids starts singing this ridiculous version.
What’s the worst dare somebody had to do in the past?
Lick somebody’s armpit.
Oh, okay.
You’re not impressed. You probably wanted something really racy. They’re kids, man.
No, I am impressed.
An intern from York licked somebody’s armpit and now she claims she has strep throat and we’re not sure there’s a connection.
Finally: Why grilled cheese?
When you work with kids, the one thing is, they’re hungry all the motherfucking time, and they eat a ton, so if we’re going to ask them to hang out with us between 4 and 7 p.m., we cannot do that without feeding them.
