The human body project : teaching vulnerability

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Date
2011-02-01
Authors
Diamant, Tasha
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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.
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Keywords
Human body -- Social aspects , Human body -- Symbolic aspects , Body image , Body marking , Body art , Human body -- Social aspects , Women -- Psychology
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