The human body project : teaching vulnerability
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Date
2011-02-01
Authors
Diamant, Tasha
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Lethbridge, Alta. : Faculty of Education
Abstract
This inquiry is part of the Human Body Project, a larger ongoing, interdisciplinary,
arts-informed research project, which I began in 2006, on my own at a local arts
centre. The Human Body Project is my service to humanity; I offer my experience in
Gandhi’s sense of “being the change,” i.e., deliberately showing up in vulnerability
with the intention of moving humanity beyond normal cultural, neurobiological
avoidance of this shared experience to the creation of a necessarily broader and
embodied understanding of our interconnectedness and the possibility of human
harmony. The project resonates with who I am as an award-winning educator; it is my
most important and urgent responsibility to model and to motivate each person to do
whatever they too can do to move humanity forward. Tasha Diamant’s Human Body
Project, shot at six performances of the Human Body Project at the 2009 Edmonton
International Fringe Theatre Festival, is a 53-minute video that both documents and
provokes further exploration of the research inquiry of the Human Body Project. Both
the film and the broader Human Body Project explore the ways that vulnerability can
generate empathy, connection, conversation, creativity, and shared responsibility. I
use nakedness, both literal, in terms of nudity, and metaphorical, in terms of offering
up my authentic self. The nakedness deliberately employs and exhibits that which we
all share as humans (a body and a self) but also provokes visceral vulnerability in the
performer (myself and a co-performer, Megan Fairlee Fester) and the participant
audience, which furthers our connection to ourselves as beings sharing the problems
of the physical plane. The video shows how my co-performer, the audience, and I
grapple with this dialogical experience while it expands the exploration to the viewer.
Description
Keywords
Human body -- Social aspects , Human body -- Symbolic aspects , Body image , Body marking , Body art , Human body -- Social aspects , Women -- Psychology