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First discovered in beavers, the mammalian diving reflex is a self-preservation technique triggered in extreme situations. When the body is suddenly submerged in water or caught in a freezing environment, all of the major systems slow almost to a halt, minimizing the need for oxygen, increasing the chances of survival. You may remember the story of the little girl who wandered out into the snow, was frozen almost solid, yet lived with almost no permanent damage.
Mandate
Founded in 1993, Mammalian Diving Reflex is a research-art atelier dedicated to investigating the social sphere, always on the lookout for contradictions to whip into aesthetically scintillating experiences, producing one-off events, theatre-based performance, theoretical texts and community happenings. Mammalian Diving Reflex is dedicated to:
- Creating entertainment rich in content, intellectually challenging and engaging with language, ideas and information.
- Creating entertainment rich in style; overtly embracing and openly revealing a myriad of theatrical conventions.
- Creating entertainment that openly acknowledges the audience; attempting to create dialogue around ideas.
- Creating entertainment that embraces the political dimension of life; recognizing the social responsibility of the arts.
Artistic Mission
We create work that dismantles the barriers between individuals, fostering a dialogue between audience members, between the audience and the material and between the performers and the audience. Our goal is to create activist performance able to meld polemic with artistic rigour, creating work that is meticulous, uncompromising and thorough in its examination of political and social ontologies while still maintaining a total commitment to easy accessibility and entertainment.
We believe that the performing arts possess a built-in resistance to consumerist totality by simply being so difficult to commodify - if you can't duplicate, mass produce and distribute it, then what value is it? The answer to this question lies in the attribute unique to the performing arts: the fact that the performer and the audience are in the same room at the same time. We are interested in capitalizing on this attribute, fostering actual encounters between living, breathing bodies and the ideas they contain. It is our mission to bring people together, engage them, challenge them and get them talking, thinking and feeling. We create ideal entertainment for the end of the world - this world - and for a future beyond these terrifying days.