In books (Social Acupuncture, Your Secrets Sleep With Me), performance art (Diplomatic Immunities) and plays (A Suicide-Site Guide to the City), artist Darren O’Donnell has tried to do one simple thing—get people to talk to one another. As interested in removing social inhibitions as he is in producing unique forms of art and entertainment, O’Donnell creates situations in which strangers interact in the public sphere. In his latest project, Haircuts by Children, O’Donnell rounded up a group of 10-year-olds and trained them to cut hair; throughout May they’re offering free trims to anyone who wants one. O’Donnell’s point? To illustrate that kids are creative and competent individuals whose aesthetic—and, by extension, political—choices should be trusted. Scary or sublime? Make yourself an appointment and find out.

How will Haircuts by Children work?

It’s exactly what the title says. We’re working with a Grade 5/6 class at Parkdale Public School and we’re training the kids, with certified, licensed hair stylists, to cut hair. Then, for four hours every Saturday in May, at a different salon [see list below], we’ll be offering haircuts to anyone who wants their hair cut by a kid.

Do the kids get paid?

Yeah, I forget how much. It’s an honorarium. It’s more than I’m getting.

And what’s the thinking behind this project?

It’s part of a larger practice I call Social Acupuncture. We do stuff that induces atypical encounters between strangers in the public sphere. We go out into public and create situations where people who don’t normally hang out with each other get to hang out with each other. Things like The Talking Creature, where we just get strangers talking to one another, or Home Tours, where we knock on doors and ask for tours of random people’s homes. We have another project called Diplomatic Immunities, where we take a group of performers from locale to locale to meet and interview people; then we return to Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and report on our findings. And that’s the show. This is all just to prove the power, abundance and generosity of the social sphere, that there’s no reason to be afraid of people.

This work grew out of a dissatisfaction with the traditional avenues for socializing, as well as with what passes for entertainment or art. I don’t like sitting in a dark room, separate from other people, staring up at flickering light or idiots on a stage. I can’t stand live music events. I don’t like those configurations. The grown-up ways of having fun seemed so dumb and limited. Only kids played. I wanted to figure out how adults could play, how talking with people you didn’t know could be fun and anarchic, how it could lead to discovery.

The empirical proof of what we’re doing is the blackout of 2003, when people were jettisoned out of their ordinary social circumstances, when power had been taken away both literally and figuratively. Electricity was gone, but so too was economic power. Those things travel the same wires. You’re attached to your computer, checking your e-mail all the time, watching your DVDs—you’re plugged into a network that determines social flows. The blackout interrupted those flows and proved definitively that the world is a safe and generous place. It proved there was something to anarchism—not anarchy. That we can take care of each other, we don’t need the old hierarchies. (For one night, obviously. When you have to figure out how to ship food, other issues will come up.) But it was clear on that one night that people were really happy to bust out of their normal circuits of interaction. It made them ecstatic.

Haircuts by Children is an illustration of your argument for giving children more political power, essentially giving them the right to vote.

That’s how we’re framing it. I don’t know that it will do that.

Do you think kids want to vote?

Yeah, sure. Kids want to participate. They often think they’re not qualified to. They’ve bought the propaganda—they don’t think they’re mature enough, know enough about the issues. But most of my friends don’t have a clue, either.

And I bet most of your friends don’t vote. Do you want to encourage kids to participate in a system that’s flawed, that maybe doesn’t work?

Yeah, yeah. I’d like them to feel the frustration of voting and see that Stephen Harper gets, what, 39 per cent of the popular vote, and then gets power. I’d like them to experience the bafflement of that. I think some kids will want to vote and some kids won’t, just like adults. It just seems illogical to not include children in the political process, to deny that children are intelligent people who can respond rationally.