Imagine you’re a nervous volunteer, sitting in a hair salon where a swarm of black, white and brown 10-year-olds from a local public school scurry around with scissors. One of them, biting her lips and scrunching her eyes in concentration, approaches your head with an electric razor. Is there art going on in this room? And if so, who are the artists?

The event is Haircuts by Children, the most popular project so far by Mammalian Diving Reflex, a Toronto-based “atelier” headed by the artist Darren O’Donnell. The show has commandeered barber shops on three continents, mesmerizing audiences and media wherever it goes. The immediate appeal, of course, is the possibility of a train wreck—of vainglorious tonsorial disaster. But because the children are given a few styling lessons and take their responsibility so earnestly, major mishaps have been rare among the hundreds of haircuts so far. The deeper thrill is in the carnivalesque reversal of power, and the rare, almost taboo encounter between a child and a grown-up who isn’t their teacher or relative.

The voltage is boosted by the parameters of the piece, which specify that at least half of the children must be immigrants or the children of immigrants. So the barriers being breached aren’t just generational, but also those of an informal ethnic segregation that official multiculturalism tries to wish away.

Irrepressibly boyish at 43, O’Donnell has been a performer, playwright and director, as well as a novelist, essayist, activist, traveller and shiatsu therapist. But in the past few years, he has leaped into a fresh identity as a social impresario—an engineer of experiences that spark unfamiliar forms of human contact.

Mammalian Diving Reflex—which consists of O’Donnell, a full-time producer (currently Natalie De Vito) and a rotating set of collaborators—invents ingenious recipes to stimulate such encounters, sponsored by theatres, galleries, festivals, schools and community centres, as well as government arts grants. The company has toured as far afield as the U.S., Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Australia, India and Pakistan, with requests accumulating faster than they can meet them.

Because the methods involve community outreach, some critics have charged that the art is gussied-up social work. O’Donnell wouldn’t mind making the world a better place, but insists his motives are personal rather than charitable. “I want to change my own day-to-day existence,” he says. “To live in the Sesame Street of my youth.” O’Donnell believes his pieces resonate most with people like him, his own generation. His biggest supporters are those “who came of age, moved to the big city and were looking for that dream of a neighbourly New York experience. And we got here, and we were like, ‘Where is all that shit?’ ”

So, what kind of person actually thinks you can use art to make the world a more just and equitable place, one where, as the Sesame Street theme chimes, “every door will open wide”? And isn’t that like trying to hammer a nail with a tulip?

Darren O’Donnell is quickly becoming Canada’s leading player in what French writer-curator Nicolas Bourriaud has tagged “relational aesthetics”—in short, the transformation of social life into the stuff of art, and vice versa. In the past decade and a half, artists have been holding shows that consist of such seemingly mundane things as cooking and serving dinner to gallery patrons. They’ve also remade games of pickup soccer in British public housing projects by simulcasting them on giant LED screens and having local kids do colour commentary through loudspeakers. They’ve guided viewers in Germany through dramatic scenarios via one-on-one cellphone conversations with workers at a call centre in India. In Toronto, artists have gone to Bay Street to offer free dance lessons to lawyers and business people at intersections, held mass pillow fights in Yonge-Dundas Square, and prompted roomfuls of people to join in making gibberish vocal noise.