Kid stuff

Lauren DeMers, 10, cuts Sarah Robayo Sheridan's hair as part of the Haircuts by Children theatre project in Toronto. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)

If you’re at all dubious about experimental art, Darren O’Donnell’s Haircuts by Children might seem at first like pure whimsy. The Toronto theatre artist’s premise? Get nearly two dozen 10-year-olds, arm them with scissors and watch them cut people’s hair. OK, so there’s a bit of training: four hours with a professional stylist, a few more in performance-art workshops. But that’s it.

After various stops around the world since opening in Toronto nearly two years ago, Haircuts by Children landed in Vancouver. It was the signature event at the recent PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. It was, in fact, PuSh’s public face this year. Festival posters appeared in city bus shelters and programs littered metropolitan libraries, theatres and community centres, all featuring the same image: a bearded, balding man being groomed (ever so carefully) by a pair of pre-teens.

During Haircuts’s first Vancouver performance, at a popular East End salon, adults gasped and cheered at the results. In one case, a Grade 6 stylist from Surrey wanted to shave a local newspaperman bald, then dye the stubble green. The reporter declined. But they struck a compromise: shorter all over. And the colour? Deep, dark purple.

Was this some cute gimmick? A neat marketing ploy? Since the festival began in 2003, PuSh has earned all the crucial critical adjectives (“edgy,” “intrepid,” “bold”). Was this a turn towards a more familiar brand of West Coast flakiness?

“No, of course it isn’t,” PuSh’s executive director Norman Armour shoots back. “The same things would have been thrown at Marcel Duchamp.”

Haircuts, Armour says, is something “radical” and goes to the heart of assumptions we hold about performance and about art. “The devil’s advocate might say there’s no integrity to this, there’s no thinking to this,” he says. “Absolutely not. There’s a huge amount of rigour to this piece.”

That rigour is part of a broader context for O’Donnell and his Toronto theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex — something they call “social acupuncture.” In projects such as Diplomatic Immunities or Slow Dance with Teacher, Mammalian throws strangers together and forces them to talk. It’s all about creating contexts for communities that don’t ordinarily interact. As Armour observes, the performance art of Haircuts by Children takes adults back “to their own memories of when they were children, when they were respected, and when they weren’t.”

The kids aren’t supposed to be aspiring artists (or stylists); their artlessness is, in fact, the point. It’s what ultimately redeems Haircuts and makes it work, binding the piece to any number of child-focused art projects.

But will this type of art actually last? What unique qualities does it bring to the cultural sphere?

The Langley Schools Music Project in Langley, B.C., inspired Richard Linklater's 2003 film School of Rock. (Paramount Pictures)

Ask retired B.C. teacher Hans Fenger. More than 30 years ago, he organized the Langley Schools Music Project, in which he recorded choirs of more than 70 kids from his elementary-school classes singing tunes by Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson and David Bowie in a boomy rural gymnasium. When Bowie heard Langley’s version of Space Oddity, he called Fenger’s backing arrangement “astounding.” The homespun recordings were rediscovered and released on the 2001 disc Innocence and Despair, which sold nearly 100,000 copies. The CD, and its story, inspired Richard Linklater’s 2003 film School of Rock.

“The whole album is bittersweet,” Fenger observed in a recent interview. “The difference between this and the School of Rock is that I didn’t teach kids rock 'n' roll riffs. I didn’t teach them Deep Purple songs; I didn’t put them in rock 'n' roll bands.” What did he teach them, then? Certainly, perfection was never the point — 10-year-olds sound like 10-year-olds, vocal parts stray out of tune among a sea of homemade instruments, little bells, percussion and guitars. Getting it right was secondary; for Fenger, making an emotional connection to the material was key.

Referring specifically to the Eagles ballad Desperado, Fenger says, “The way the child captures that song, as opposed to the way the Eagles capture that song, is that the child sings something of which he has absolutely no experience. Yet because of that, is able to deliver it in a way that has no artifice. It’s being able to deliver it without mannerisms, without bringing anything else to it.”

This grown-up fascination with kids art is embodied, more controversially, by the story of four-year-old Marla Olmstead. Three years ago, the upstate New York painter was being championed as a major new abstract expressionist; to date, her Jackson Pollock-like canvases have sold for a total of more than $300,000 US. The 2007 documentary My Kid Could Paint That examined whether Marla worked alone, or with her father’s help. Can kids really make high-quality art, or does it require a certain degree of grown-up self-awareness?

Director Amir Bar-Levin wouldn’t come down on one side or the other. The tricky thing about a four-year-old artist, he told CBCNews.ca last year, is that adults often imbue her comments with great significance. “I didn’t want to mock them for this because I see it as a deeply human thing, the desire to see a UFO, or see the Virgin Mary in a water stain, or a child who paints as some kind of vessel. It’s a very deeply human thing to want to believe that these extraordinary moments happen. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t.”

Alleged child artist Marla Olmstead is the subject of My Kid Could Paint That. (Mark and Laura Olmstead/Sony Pictures Classics)

In Haircuts, the revelations are altogether different; the adult audience sees the children as a route back to its own past. Still, that doesn’t diminish the kids’ unique role. Here, ordinary power dynamics are turned upside down. Children are given the power to make crucial, on-the-spot esthetic choices, something that O’Donnell contends might extend to politics, economics or social structures.

O’Donnell, a self-described “social impresario” who is part Jane Addams, part P.T. Barnum, explains: “At some point, I got tired of talking about making the world a better place, so I thought, ‘Why don’t I just make it a better place?’ . . .  I could do a play about children’s rights and giving children agency, but why not actually give them agency.”

Translate these lessons into Mammalian’s social context, and you begin to understand O’Donnell’s ambition. Sure, kids can illuminate levels of emotion and innocence that adults have forever lost, or abandoned. But children also get us talking: about their experiences and our experiences, about the kind of world we’ve created and the kind we want for their future.

The images from Haircuts by Children are themselves part of the project. They create conversation. And they last, whether you were at the show or not.

“This is a piece where the tales of it, the rumours of it, the mythology of it, is as much the content of it as actually being there,” Norman Armour says. “That again, I think, is the brilliance of the work.”

Greg Buium is a Vancouver writer.

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