Social Acupuncture
The beauty of permissive social frameworks
One of my favorite feelings is when everything feels possible with other people.
In my early twenties, I was swimming in this feeling. I had just come from a college environment where an expectation of my actual job was to produce an event called “roller disco and night of 100 pizzas” and had begun working at a museum that offered butter aerobics on Friday followed up by a pop-up beach theater in a cave on Saturday.
Something alchemic happened in every experience: Rollerskating could be made somehow more joyful with the presence of 100 pizzas. Milk was transformed into actual butter by a bunch of people shaking it up to Technotronic. A beach was transformed into a viewing room.
It was around that time that my friend and colleague Stacey Marie Garcia introduced me to Mammalian Diving Reflex, who offered method to what I had only experienced up until that point as (awesome) madness.
There are a million different phrases for the permissive structures that allows for human magic to explode, confetti-like, all over the place. Mammalian Diving Reflex refers to their version of it as Social Acupuncture.
A little background: Mammalian Diving Reflex creates performances that tickle at social barriers and bring people together like Haircuts By Children (it is what it sounds like), All the Sex I’ve Ever Had (elders sharing sex advice), and Nightwalks With Teenagers, a roving exploration of your city led by young people at night.
Every project is at once silly and deep, obvious and genius, the wildest possibility and the safest idea. And they really seem to transform people! But not in a way that is preachy or sneaky. (So many things fall into the preachy/sneaky binary, don’t they?)
This is because Social Acupuncture is a methodology that is simply baked into their bread. From their Methods page:
SOCIAL ACUPUNCTURE
The abundance that is locked in social structures, institutions and dynamics creates holding patterns of energetic stagnation. Social acupuncture playfully and creatively pokes at these with a dual purpose: to disrupt holding patterns, yielding a greater degree of equity and balance, as well as to dissipate and distribute energy, yielding new and unexpected ways of relating to – and being with – one another. We are not social engineers, making large-scale changes through central planning; we are curious nerds sending gentle little shocks into the system to observe what happens between people.
Isn’t that just the best thing you’ve ever read? This kind of thing actually makes me get the chills. I JUST LOVE IT SO MUCH. Okay here’s why:
Beautiful metaphors make beautiful things possible. Acupuncture is about releasing something stagnant or blocked; it works with what’s already present. It’s gentle, holistic, and tender. This metaphor matters.
Imagine how different it would feel if the metaphor was about a “Social Dunk Tank” or “Social Cocaine”. There’s an almost intuitive understanding of the quality of their work because of their beautiful choice of language. Words make us think about specific things and these specific things matter.
They’re the spark, not the engineers. It acknowledges their position as instigators, as “curious nerds sending gentle little shocks into the system”, not “social engineers”. So often with social experience work like this, it can feel almost like a gotcha, one step away from Candid Camera, like the producers see something the rest of us plebes could never imagine. Their power dynamic respects the intelligence of the people they’re creating projects with, while also acknowledging the need for someone to disrupt and distribute social holding patterns.
It’s a phrase others can gather around. I first heard Social Acupuncture referenced by young “mammals” (their name for youth creating projects with the company) in this documentary about Nightwalks with Teenagers. I loved that real humans in the company use the phrase, that it's not just hidden in their About page or book title of their Founder,
like so many creative values can be. For work with this much social nuance, it could be so easily misunderstood as woo-woo or accidentally impactful, not purposefully powerful. To have a phrase that everyone can understand (again, helped by a beautiful metaphor) can become as inspirational as a secret sauce.I can’t wait to dig in more to the philosophy behind this and share similar ideas with you. If this made you think of something similar, you should tell me about it!
Here’s hoping we all find something that sends a gentle little shock or playful poke our way this week.
P.S. Did this make you think of a Social Acupuncturist in your life? Let ‘em know!