2017 House Programs All the Sex I Ever Had | Page 5
social etiquette in a series of dares. Haircuts by
Children—which featured at last year’s Melbourne
Festival—asked members of the public to put
their own coiff on the line as a group of kids took
up the barber’s scissors. body of something as major as this but proving
for one moment that it can actually be quite
interesting and exciting to hear a bunch of older
people talk about the course of sexuality over a
lifetime.”
As novel as each idea sounds, none of the
company’s works are frivolous. Each are
serious—if entertaining—engagements that seek
to examine social life in new ways. If making it into your senior years guarantees
that there will be tough times along the way, it’s
encouraging that O’Donnell has found the flipside
to be true as well. Of all those who’ve taken to the
stage to talk about their most private matters,
none have been dull.
“This whole show is attending to the fact that
there’s not very much attention paid to older
people and there’s not very much attention paid
to the idea of sexuality in aging, so this is to
correct the imbalance through the acupuncture
of this project,” says O’Donnell.
Social acupuncture is “a metaphor for using
work to address social inequities and I’m not
just talking economic inequities, but attention
inequities, the idea that nobody talks about aging
and sexuality much or that we’re embarrassed
talking about our parents having sex. Those kinds
of imbalances. I’m not imagining curing the social
“The other thing that’s true is that if you live
that long, it doesn’t matter who you are, you’ll
live a rich life,” says the director. “There will
be interesting things that happen to you and
unexpected things and your life will take
unexpected turns. That’s consistent. We’ve done
this 13 times with six people plus we did a whole
pile of research interviewing people before that,
and those things seem to be consistent.”
—JOHN BAILEY