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