Teenagers take control of the city
A surprising civic theatre project puts audience members in the hands of local young people for an improvised walking tour.
It is possible, on some nights, to walk the length of your own city until it becomes strange and unfamiliar, until you forget street names and buildings and lose yourself in a topography that seems almost foreign.
The experience may sound like the onset of a disturbing hallucinogenic episode, or even the backdrop to a grim horror film, cast under the lurid lights of a dangerous city. But to Darren O’Donnell, urban planner, writer and artistic director of the long-running Mammalian Diving Reflex, it’s the basis for his civic theatre project, Nightwalks with Teenagers.
After launching the project a decade ago, Nightwalks with Teenagers has toured more than 25 cities across North America, Europe and the UK, and is preparing to make its Australian debut at the Brisbane Festival this September. For audiences, the concept may appear abstract, simple and perhaps a little confronting: local teenagers leading adults through the city at night.
O’Donnell traces part of its genesis back to August 2003, when on a hot summer’s day he was strolling through Toronto when an enormous power failure beset the city, paralysing the province of Ontario as well as half a dozen US states. When night came, the city was plunged into darkness.
For more than 24 hours, the urban landscape was transformed: traffic ceased, trains stopped, the street lights went out. Thousands of people walked through the city to get home, or ambled along the streets to escape the darkness of their own homes and apartments. The blackout had changed the rules.
For O’Donnell, the sudden change opened the possibility of a new urban space, in which people’s priorities and relationships were brought into question. The absence of any authority figure, he says, forced people to rethink their civic identities and form new roles – often among strangers.
For the writer and artist it was the stuff of dreams. “The experience seemed to belong more to a novel or a work of social theory, or even to another century,” says O’Donnell, who soon realised its potential as a performance concept.
While Mammalian had already enjoyed popular success with its community-based works in the early 2000s, including its surreal Haircuts by Children – a project which gave kids a crash course in haircutting and a salon to practise on adults – O’Donnell was keen to try something different.
Taking his cue from art theorists Claire Bishop, Grant Kester and Nicolas Bourriaud, O’Donnell moved towards a less structured medium known as “live art” or “relational aesthetics”, which emphasises social engagement and community collaboration, rather than traditional forms of culture inside a theatre or gallery. In the late 1990s, the Canadian actor and writer had grown tired of Toronto’s theatre scene. “At the time many people were questioning the conventions and thinking about pushing the boundaries of performance and not just creating fictional characters for the stage,” he says.
“There was a big excitement around social engagement as a form of art … of working with a community on contemporary art with people who are interested in challenges, as opposed to maybe the process. We were about the product. I quickly realised it was more challenging, but also more rewarding.”
By 2010 O’Donnell returned to the city concept, determined to explore a new form of civic theatre, involving children, teenagers and adults. At the time Mammalian was working with teenagers from a suburb called Parkdale in Toronto, holding panel discussions, small performances and open mic nights. “We were doing lots of different activities with the group and one night we went to see a ballet performed by a Belgian dance company at the Harbourfront Theatre. We were all going to take public transport back, but the group wanted to walk back to their neighbourhood. And it was during that walk that the city seemed to change into a different space,” O’Donnell says.
“It was 11pm on a Friday and there were about 14 of us as we walked through the nightclub district where people were drinking and smoking. But the kids started to turn the city into a playground. They jumped around, played games and even started performing for the adults that were outside on the streets. We started to think: ‘why don’t we make this a thing and get adults to join in’.”
Fast-forward a decade and Nightwalks with Teenagers has travelled from Bologna to New York, Bristol to Cork, with members of the theatre company joining with young locals to plan, design and lead walks across the city.
While each nocturnal adventure is different, teenagers in Bologna let off flares, led dance processions and approached passersby to quiz them on their daily habits. In Bristol, kids performed improvised comedies in which they impersonated adults and held meditations in the streets. And in Berlin, teenagers played hide and seek and went “knick-knocking” (knocking on people’s doors and running away).
The aim of the public art project, according to Mammalian, is to give agency to young people and, in the process, help adults to reassess their relationships with them, as they are led by teenagers through the night.
“There is a kind of moral panic around protecting children, especially in a big city, and sometimes the protection can be too much,” says O’Donnell.
“Part of Nightwalks is to help let go, and surrender yourself to your environment.”
It’s an arrangement that challenges perceptions of space and people, according to Virginia Antonipillai, who joined Mammalian on its first project and now works for the company full-time as a creative producer and Nightwalks co-ordinator.
“The first Nightwalks we did was at Cape Breton in Nova Scotia,” she says. “It was a remote and beautiful place and we were the performers who had travelled from Toronto and collaborated with teenagers from Cape Breton.
“We were the kids from the big city collaborating with these kids from Cape Breton. There were two very two different dynamics, but we explored the town, played games along the streets, and began to form relationships that we wouldn’t have done in any other social setting.”
Antonipillai, 26, who will be attending Brisbane Festival’s Nightwalks, had never considered going to a theatre, visiting a gallery or engaging in art before she encountered Mammalian. But when she experienced the company’s work in Toronto, Antonipillai had an epiphany.
“I never really thought I would be involved in the arts in any way. It was just not in my realm. I thought I would never set foot into any of the prestigious art galleries or theatres. But I think what Mammalian and Nightwalks does is try to prove that art can be made anywhere and is for everyone.
“There is this narrow view that you need to be developed and older to have sound opinions on art and life, but when you bring young people to the table, in a different space, you quickly realise they often have amazing ideas and perspectives that other people may not have considered,” Antonipillai says.
The work of bringing an abstract concept to a new city, recruiting teenage participants and allowing the project to develop in a different setting and culture is never easy, according to Mammalian producer Ryan Lewis, who has been with the company for more than four years.
“Nightwalks is formed around the location and the teams that inhabit it. It can be done in any kind of environment, whether it’s in Cork in Ireland or Brooklyn in New York. They end up being completely different experiences, of course, and that’s why it’s crucial the performance is flexible.”
For 10 days a group of teenagers, ranging in age from 14 to 16, attend workshops to prepare for the Nightwalks performance, participating in games and getting to know other members, as the company’s presenters simulate awkward conversations and uncomfortable scenarios.
“There’s a lot of awkwardness involved in the project and during the pandemic we did notice some heightened anxiety among the group, so we’ve tried to make the walks more meditative,” Lewis says.
In Brisbane, local teenagers will take Nightwalks into unknown parts of the city, but the precise route will be left to them to plan when the workshops start next week.
“When we had to select a new concept for the festival we wanted to choose a fresh project that could engage teenagers from social housing, in the less prosperous areas of Brisbane, and engage them and their community outside the theatre,” Brisbane Festival director Louise Bezzina tells Review.
“We’ve been working directly with the Department of Housing and youth service organisations on this project with the aim of working with vulnerable groups on the project. What’s important for us is that we can sustain the relationship with Mammalian and ensure further long-term youth engagement as part of the festival,” Bezzina says.
“It’s a very rare thing to be guided through a city by teenagers. And Nightwalks will show us that we need to learn from across generations and find new approaches to understanding kids and teenagers, especially after the effects of the pandemic.”
Nightwalks with Teenagers, Brisbane Festival, September 15-17.
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