Vulnerability Vigil: The Trees are Our Elders Aug 18, 4-5pm, Duncan, BC

Date is now Sunday, August 18.

The old trees are our elders. The forest is our family.

Vulnerability Vigil
Trans-Canada Highway in Duncan, BC
Right by the Cowichan Region Visitor Centre
Also right by the "BC Forest Discovery Centre"
Saturday, August 17
Sunday, August 18
4-5 pm
All welcome.

I do what I can.

In this case, I will stand for an hour to hold a Vulnerability Vigil on behalf of our forests. I use my bare or nearly bare body in these vigils as a way of sharing vulnerability literally and figuratively and as a way of showing some solidarity with those who are most vulnerable. The vigils are art, expression, and a way of shifting energy or disrupting status quo.

I will wear a "cover-the-bits costume" of Extinction Symbol tree-rings (pictured). Please consider joining me. People who join can hold a sign; wear the signs (I'll bring some); or dress as they wish.

Our majestic old growth rainforest is on the verge of extinction, only 4% remains. People from all around the world come here to see those trees. Not clearcuts.

Forestry practices make fires more likely. All of this while global temperatures are at the highest in the history of the planet. Standing forests are recognized as one of our best defences in the climate crisis.

Yet what we have remaining is "harvested" daily, for pulp, chips, or to ship raw logs offshore. Lumber workers are striking. There is no more lumber industry in BC. Only lumber barons and their profiteer shareholders.

I've been doing (mostly) monthly public Vulnerability Vigils using my naked or nearly naked body since January of 2012.

Link to Facebook event

Tent, A Monthly Action in my own neighbourhood hood, Oct 14 3-4

Tent, A Monthly Action
Across the street from my house.
Sunday, October 14, 2018
3:00-4:00 pm

Almost every month for the last seven years I've held a monthly action in public as a way to explore vulnerability, expand discourse, disrupt status quo, resist cultural lies, etc. 

For this month's action, I will pitch a tent in the field across from my house and hold a sign that says: WE COULD LET PEOPLE DO THIS.

I welcome supporters or reporters. Email me at tashadiamanthuman@gmail.com for my address.

Link to Facebook event

humanbodyproject.org

Thanks, Tasha

ps Last month's action was cancelled due to illness.

pps CBC: Homeless tent cities play life-saving role and should be embraced, not battled, expert says

Grinding Groundedness + Birthday Action Sept 29 CANCELLED

I've gone from feeling crappy to feeling full-on shitty so I'm cancelling tomorrow's action.

Tasha's Birthday 
Act of Disruption and Resistance
Pro All Kids
September 29, 2018
CHANGED TIME AND LOCATION:
10:45-11:45 am
BC Legislature
Victoria, BC
12 noon-1 pm
Across from the Empress Hotel

There are actually people who take time out of their days to protest educational resources that support kids of all genders and sexualities. They will be at the BC Legislature protesting these resources on September 29 and I plan to be there to disrupt them (in a peaceful way).

All welcome to witness or participate.

Tasha's Monthly Action Facebook event

Pro-SOGI 123 Rally Facebook event

Atrocity Cheer. Aug 26, 2018.

__________

Grinding Groundedness

I signed up to do a fun thing but I woke up that day and I felt shitty so I cancelled. Cancelling also felt shitty.

Aside: I have a confession to make. I almost never go back and read past blog posts so I probably repeat myself and for that I apologize for anyone who reads this stuff. Anyway, I do know that even before the schmancer, I have often written about my susceptibility to illness and emotional pain. And I've written about it in relation to the MOST DESTRUCTIVE CULTURE THAT EVER EXISTED that I live in and am complicit in creating. That's what this post is also about but I hope I'm covering some new ground.

In the last week or so I've had two very vivid dreams. Dreams from HELL (i.e. EARTH), you might say. You would think you cannot make this shit up. But here is my brain...

The first dream consisted of me sort of accompanied by what could hardly be called a following, maybe like a small loosely organized class, or even just a random raggedy group of people who had nowhere else to go and looked even more lost than me. Except for being near each other, we seemed to have no comprehensible connection. For the duration of the dream, which felt interminable, I was trudging around a cityscape with few open spaces; where the spaces available were cramped and the ground was all ditchy or really steep. Everywhere, I had some sort of entourage and it was very difficult or impossible to stand without slipping or needing to find new footing. 

And, I'm not kidding, for the WHOLE dream as we painfully wandered in this way, I kept asking myself: Why am I here? Why am I here? Why am I here? Why am I here?

If there is a distillation of my struggle in this existence this dream is it. Thanks Mr. Sandman.

Dream number 2. Definitely the work of the same auteur. I went to bed, disappointed with myself that I felt so unwell and would probably not be able to attend the thing that I had to cancel.

Again, this dream had the interminability and repetitive qualities of the previous one. In this case, the "star" was a woman I am acquainted with who bears a strong resemblance to the neighbourhood mother of my youth who, in my critic brain, represents the apex of judgmental, white, upper-middle-class, Calgarian, 1960s-1970s, NARROWNESS that I grew up in. And she played this role in my dream simply by showing up with her harsh, crabby face (a resting bitch face, as the lovely expression goes and as I, myself, at the age of almost 57, now sport as well or, perhaps better, than Mrs. X. ever did.)

I'm not kidding about this dream, either. For almost the whole dream, I was crying and apologizing to this apparently unyielding lady for missing an important event I had promised to go to. For a LONG time. This one had more of a conclusion, however. 

Somewhere in my desperate remorse, literally sobbing on her bosom, her shirt came off (no, of course, it did not turn into a fun sexy dream) and exposed an atrocious sight. Her breasts were there but covered or simply composed of red, raw-looking scar tissue, as if burned with oil or acid. Her nipples no longer existed. Witnessing the brutality of the damage was traumatic!

I know I am often a buzzkill kinda gal. You should get into my brain people! Never a buzz!

It's challenging to find a nugget of hope from these "messages." But what I have gleaned is an ever deeper and pointed groundedness in the grinding here and now. (I know I wrote that alliterative phrase last month, but it still rings my writing bell.)

And by GRINDING, I still mean, as I have written about and spoken about for years: in my body and self. I.e. I get sick a lot, whether it's mental illness or physical or both or I can't tell the difference. Many days I feel like I have a cold in my head, which also feels like I have no energy. Or, as I tell my kids, I am not able to function as an adult today. I will make you macaroni and wieners and watch Netflix with earphones. They don't want the macaroni? I have no idea what they eat. We have food.

Have I mentioned my low bar, which I need to remind myself of now and then? Keep the kids alive. (Living pets are a bonus.)

"Grounded" is an interesting word. It often means that someone is stable and functions well. But I wouldn't describe myself that way. I use extreme amounts of emotional energy in the adult functioning and interacting that I either have to do or choose to do. More than anything, that's why I get sick a lot.

It's not that I have to interact with awful people. On the contrary, I am fortunate enough to interact with many lovely and engaged people. It's just that I don't know how to do it in a way that works for me in this language and culture. My inside me is wide open and vulnerable but also filled with rage and grief and my outside me has resting bitch face and Canadian-English conversational and relationship skills honed in the excellent years of the latter decades of the 20th Century, i.e. crusty and awkward.

I'm grounded. I'm just grounded in a parallel reality.

I saw this video of Zoë Dodd speaking passionately for thousands of people dealing with the opioid crisis, especially people who are disadvantaged. It spoke to me so deeply. 

https://www.facebook.com/DarrylJGebs/videos/10156474807990729/UzpfSTQzMDEwMTk6MTAxMDA1NTIyNTg4NDA2OTQ/?fb_dtsg_ag=AdxjRZEoxzwlAhuoblS3G6xWZK3mpalFrr7Z7XIzr0IWuQ%3AAdzHiYTWb9KvC_Yh7zX_0GNQBiTsfGP-MSDjR6dlpizkbw

If the link doesn't work, basically a woman named Zoë Dodd is speaking with authentic emotion, as well as intelligence, clarity, and volume, about the urgency of acting on the crisis of people dying on our streets in the thousands. A roomful of people not used to authentic communication looks on awkwardly and a platform of politician-types gaze out uncomfortably and respond with platitudes.

This is how I feel about everything. I feel like I'm grounded in an emotional reality similar to what Dodds is expressing in the video. URGENCY. And those people on the platform are not necessarily evil or unfeeling, but they are probably grounded in a different reality. 

Fires+Cancerversary Action Sun Aug 26 3-4 pm Quadra near Pandora

Fire$, tree$. $orry, not $orry.

I hope everyone who is reading this can breathe.

August 26th will mark the third anniversary of being admitted to hospital with what turned out to be Stage 4 ladybits cancer (ovarian, fallopian, too difficult to be sure).

So I'm holding a...

Cancerversary+Fires Action
Sunday, August 26
3-4pm
Quadra St near Pandora, Victoria, BC

This action will entail a performance of what I'm dubbing an Atrocity Cheer.
I'll be in my version of cheerleader garb, complete with pompoms.
All are welcome.

Facebook event

I'm still breathing.

30% to 50% of those in my schmancer boat are still alive after five years. I do plan to continue to be in that number even though I feel quite sure I landed on an incorrect planet, or at least an incorrect time period on this one. Having landed here though, I've made some heart connections and whatnot so I've gotta do the time.

To recap, I've been holding the Monthly Actions / Acts of Disruption+Resistance / Vulnerability Vigils for more than six years, doing the performance artwork under the umbrella of the Human Body Project for more than 12, and, while cancer sucked, the intense emotional pain that I've come to identify with being on the wrong planet has been a longer and harder road since about age 12 on.

When I had the idea for the Human Body Project in 2004 (it took me two years to get the courage up to be naked), the main reason I felt compelled to do the work and chose the overarching theme of vulnerability was because everything I felt was important and URGENT was nowhere to be found in any accessible discourse I could enter into.

Lately, many of the conversations that were impossible to imagine people having are finally happening in a much more open way: the severe pain and cost of capitalism; non-binary distinctions; systemic corruption, violence, racism and misogyny; the ongoing effects of colonialism; ongoing colonialism; etc. Or at least that's how it looks to me in my self-curated social media feeds.

Dots are finally being connected. Compartments are being pried open. The dark layers are becoming visible.

So I've been confused. Should I still follow the impetus that has taken me this far? Like, do I still have my unpaid, embarrassing job?! Haha.

NON-TRANSCENDENT. It recently dawned on me that this word describes my work.

It helped me realize it is still an important artistic statement in the sense that it's SUPPOSED TO BE grounding and extreme in the grinding and excruciating here and now.

I do still have my cop-magnet, buzz-kill job!

Link to Saanich News story about last month's action:
https://www.saanichnews.com/news/naked-roadside-protest-stopped-outside-camp-namegans/

Support? Hey, I recently won an award for my show Naked Ugly Dancing at the Montreal Fringe but the money from my award and ticket sales did not even cover my plane fare. If you'd like to support this work by, say, buying me the equivalent of a latte or two once a month or even once please consider checking out my Patreon site.
https://www.patreon.com/humanbodyproject

Naked Ugly Dancing @fringeMtl + Handcuffed video

Upcoming Fringe Show! 
Tell your friends in Montreal!
#NUD
#fringefemmes

Naked Ugly Dancing
At the Montreal Fringe
June 7-17, 2018

Jun 07 Thu 7:45 pm
Jun 09 Sat 6:15 pm
Jun 12 Tue 11:00pm
Jun 13 Wed 6:00 pm
Jun 15 Fri 7:45 pm
Jun 17 Sun 2:30 pm

Montreal Fringe online program+tickets
Facebook event

Performance art
And ritual+improvisation+storytelling+dance

Venue 7
Montreal Improv Theatre A
3697 Blvd St-Laurent 
$10
nudity +16
en Anglais 75 minutes

Healer, feeler, revealer. Paradigm shifter. Heavy lifter of paradox+pain. Ageing, overweight, cancer schmancerous. Recovering academic. Suburban mommy lady. Powerful+vulnerable. Privilege-user+vagina-haver. PTSD+lover of trees. Tasha Diamant ugly dances naked+improvises conversations+connections. Because: business-as-usual brutality. On behalf of the collective. Participation optional.

Also, I made a mini-documentary after being handcuffed on the lawn of the BC Legislature during last week's Monthly Act of Disruption and Resistance

Monthly Action May 27 2-3pm BC Legislature "the SHAME of PAIN is still a thing"

Monthly Action
When: Sunday, May 27, 2018, 2-3 pm
Where: BC Legislature (obsolete colonial structure) grounds

What/Why/How:
Performance art/activism. Radical embarrassment.
I use my naked (or semi-naked) body/self in public to express pain, improvise connections+push back against business-as-usual brutality. On behalf of the collective. Participation encouraged.

Healer, feeler, revealer. Paradigm shifter. Heavy lifter of paradox+pain. Ageing, overweight, cancer schmancerous. Recovering academic. Suburban mommy lady. Powerful+vulnerable. Privilege-user+vagina-haver. PTSD+lover of trees.

PS I've only started using the words "pain" and "trauma." Twelve years ago I started using the concept of "vulnerability" (four years before before Brené Brown's viral TEDTalk) because people would look at me blankly when I said this work emerged from pain. Now Pink is on her Beautiful Trauma world tour. There's always a Lululemonization (ie, capitalist yoga) when concepts go mainstream. So... not sure what to think except, ya, people are in CRIPPLING and SHAME-HIDDEN pain and even though pop stars are singing about it, the SHAME of PAIN in a culture of INVISIBLE BRUTALITY is still a thing.

Amalgam: Marathon of Schmope idea; YouTube censorship; Esq HS lockdown; etc

I post a lot on Facebook and forget to post here.

So the following are some more important posts from the recent past.

Today:

Always with the brain and the heart and the layers and the nuance and the overwhelm and the complexity and the paradox and the heaviness and thank Dog I no longer menstruate.

April 30, 2018:


It's April 30th and, although I'm still fucking sick of the endless fucking shit, I did not do a monthly action for April and it's not happening today. So sue me.


Instead, I post here a new idea I have been sitting with.


Marathon of Schmope


Marathon of Schmope is my version of being a schmancery person who runs across Canada. (An extension, if you will, of Terry Fox's Marathon of Hope.)


Except that I'm a mom and I ostensibly need to feed the younguns. And I'm on disability and can't afford a driver or even Steve Fonyo's used van.


So my plan is to just slowly rack up the miles by occasionally running/naked ugly dancing around my town of Victoria, BC. Probably mostly around the legislature (=obsolete colonial structure) and probably mostly naked (=undefended+vulnerable, not to mention old+fat while being female).


Why? For quite a while, I've had to live every day with the belief that we (or at least I) with awareness and privilege should be self-immolating like the Tibetan nuns and monks until the masses finally wake up.


But I'm a mother, not a nun (yet), so that's not an option either.


My schmancer is no doubt partly a self-immolation. And for the last 12 years, I've been doing forms of "self-immolation" by using my naked body to bypass my family/tribal (ie European/North American)/epigenetic defence responses and allow myself to be physically and emotionally vulnerable.


Also, I should say, even before I became a schmurvivor of Stage 4 schmancer, I was very touched and inspired by Terry Fox and Steve Fonyo. (See previous blog post So I Took the Kids to the Terry Fox Exhibit for more on Terry Fox and Steve Fonyo)


I call it Marathon of Schmope not to ridicule but to use language without hard labels. I don't feel hope but hopelessness isn't exactly correct.


I'm grateful that Cancer, Inc. (and many good people and good research) helped save my life but, no, I'm not raising money.


(In fact, I LOATHE with every single breath in my body that the sole response we continue to teach to our children in this day and age is to throw money at a GIANT COMPLICATED PROBLEM without having the ability or desire to teach complexity much less disruption or resistance.

This is activism and endurance. This is continuation of my work in the Human Body Project.

This is dealing with the trauma of living in a culture of BLIND BRUTALITY.

This is my feminism is my indigenism is my pain is my self is my body is my brain is my art. This is using my privilege.

This is my vulnerable body, my body that brought life into the world, providing ritual that is feeling that is revealing that is healing.


April 29, 2018

I think Michele Wolf is a brave woman. Here's a link to her speech at the White House Correspondents' dinner.
https://www.facebook.com/NowThisPolitics/videos/2031466310218182/UzpfSTgxNTA3MDYwMDoxMDE2MDUwOTcxODcyMDYwMQ/

April 23, 2018

Heard today: "I need to be treated with respect and so I'm unemployable."

Couldn't have said it better.

April 15, 2018

The post and the conversation. Interesting. I find parts of the conversation provide an excellent example of trying to express trauma and pain to people who aren't in touch with it. And aren't much in touch with empathy.



April 13, 2018

In 2018, someone took the time to report my YouTube video:

Hi HumanBodyProject,

As you may know, our Community Guidelines describe which content we allow – and don’t allow – on YouTube. Your video "My Own Little Desperate Pride Parade" was flagged for review. Upon review, we’ve determined that it violates our guidelines. We’ve removed it from YouTube and assigned a Community Guidelines strike, or temporary penalty, to your account.

Video content restrictions

If a video contains nudity, pornography, or other sexually provocative content, it's less likely to be allowed on YouTube. YouTube reviews content on a case by case basis and will make limited exceptions for appropriate educational, documentary, artistic, and scientific contexts. In such cases, we may apply an age restriction so that only viewers over a certain age can view the content. Learn more here.

The impact of strikes

This is the first strike applied to your account. We understand that users seldom intend to violate our policies. That’s why strikes don’t last forever – this strike will expire in three months. However, it’s important to remember that additional strikes could prevent you from posting content to YouTube or even lead to your account being terminated.

I appealed:

My nudity is a political statement and a piece of performance art, along the lines of the work of Marina Abramovic who also uses her naked body as a medium. There is absolutely NOTHING sexual or sexually explicit about my video. It is an expression of the vulnerability of my body and all our bodies in a desperate time. In the video itself you can see that the police who speak with me come to understand that my work is a valid form of expression in a country with freedom of expression laws. I have never been arrested and my work is accepted by many as important art. I have won a national research award for my arts-based practice and I am a former university instructor in the field of cultural studies. YouTube’s knee-jerk reaction to harmless bodies is inappropriate and, arguably, discrimination.

(I have not yet received a reply.)

March 29, 2018

Walking around Montreal is like walking around a huge (non-wankerish) contemporary art installation about what can happen when low property prices, diverse cultures, bad weather, Canadian-Quebecois policies (esp late 70s-early 80s Anglo exodus), two main languages, and a general je ne give a fuck pas all come together. I LOVE it. (Except the bad weather).

March 11, 2018

I did an impromptu Monthly Action in March.



March 7, 2018

Follow-up to my concerns about the lockdown at Esquimalt High School. Bottom line, many of my conclusions were mistaken:

Last week, I met with the police school liaison officer for Esquimalt High School (who had been part of the team deployed during the Esquimalt lockdown) along with his boss, an inspector.

Some background: After the lockdown at Esquimalt in November I wrote a piece sharing concerns about what I’d witnessed. I’d arrived at the school, moments after the lockdown started, to pick up my kid for an appointment. I ended up watching the whole thing, which took 2+ hours, from the outside.

Humbled, I have learned quite a lot since sharing on social media and speaking with these police officers.

I had found the casual attitude exhibited by the police officers outside the school comforting from the POV of a mom but it had made me wonder about the necessity for a lockdown with big weapons, especially given that the person they were looking for was a teenager armed with a knife who stole a backpack.

A friend who works as a security officer in Alberta told me that often, in such situations, officers may look like they’re joking or whatever but they are deadly serious. She also said it’s difficult to talk about these kinds of situations with people who don’t do this kind of work. (The armchair quarterback thing but with lives on the line.)

The officers I spoke to in Esquimalt agreed and also really allayed my concerns about the big guns. The weapon they use is far more accurate and far more stable than a smaller gun. They use it specifically because it’s far less likely to miss and far less likely to hit bystanders. They also said knife-weilders can be very dangerous, which is true, of course, and they have to take such a threat seriously.

Watching from the outside, the exercise had seemed over the top and uber-macho to me so I’m grateful a) for these two officers speaking to me with empathy and explaining openly and b) for the clarification that how I interpreted the situation was a lot of my own projection (I’m using those words; the officers kindly did not).

My last main concern had been that I witnessed some boys on the field talking excitedly about the cops’ guns. I found this the most disturbing... that boys, who were probably feeling vulnerable, would brush off those feelings to boastfully display their knowledge of the guns’ features and firepower, as if trying to make it all an entertainment.

I had asked if there could be some kind of discussion about the police’s use of big guns and gun culture. During all the debriefing that occurs, my hope is that it can include discussion that is focused on the officers’ feelings of realness and danger of either getting shot or having to shoot a human being. In those moments of dialled-up emotion for everyone, addressing the actual officers’ authentic POVs might be very useful in our world of first-person-shooter games, uber-violent movies, and an epidemic of mass gun murders at schools.

The officers said that my concerns made sense and were taken seriously. They said that they would take those concerns to a committee meeting addressing the Esquimalt lockdown where a discussion of improving lockdown responses would be taking place.


I’ll never have to respond to such a scary situation. I appreciated that these men took the time to talk to me. Even though I struggle with violence of all forms in our culture and feel that our justice system is profoundly UNjust, I feel appreciation for what my friend in Alberta, these men, and other individuals are required to do in the course of their jobs and, though I may detest the idea of people armed with heavy artillery entering my daughter’s school, I now comprehend the necessity of the police actions during the lockdown at Esquimalt.

February 24, 2018

Excellent piece. The Time I was Almost a School Shooter
http://www.davideverettfisher.com/the-time-i-was-almost-a-school-shooter/

January 30, 2018

Excellent piece. The Female Price of Male Pleasure
http://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure

January 25, 2018

I won't share the reply I got from Vic PD but here's my follow-up:

Thank you for the risks you take and the care you have. I do appreciate it.

What I understood and witnessed was that the police were heavily armed. The weapons were not pistols but big guns. I understand being armed but why such big guns? I assume automatic or semi-automatics? Is that the case? If so, why?

I believe "boys love guns" is a social construction, which definitely includes police culture, so I'm somewhat disturbed to hear this brushed off. I think it's something important to address with students after such an event in the future.

Talk about the weaponry and the reasons for using. Tell us about how they keep us safer than pistols. I honestly don't know and would like to understand why, because crazy big automatic guns don't seem like a good idea to me.

And be honest about what it's like. Is it scarier than a first-person-shooter game or a typical movie? Does it inform your understanding of these entertainments? I think these kinds of topics would be relevant, comforting from a transparency standpoint, and educational. Better than journals.

Thanks for conversing, Tasha

January 25, 2018

I have finally written (to the police, PAC, and educators) regarding the over-the-top November lockdown at my kid’s school.

“This is how accidental police shootings occur. I feel the police put those children in more danger than the robber did.”

To the Chief of Police et al:

My daughter is a student at Esquimalt High School.

On Monday, November 6, 2017, a student was robbed at knifepoint outside of the school and the school was placed in lockdown.

I happened to arrive moments after the lockdown started and waited about 1 1/2-2 hours until it ended because my daughter had an important doctor appointment.

It’s taken me a while to formulate my thoughts and I am now writing to express that I am very disappointed and horrified about what took place.

First, I could tell from my vantage point that the police were not super-concerned. The ones in the parking lot did not look stressed and were at ease. As a parent on the scene, I felt comforted.

However, as I waited, I walked around the field and heard three boys speaking with excitement about the armed officers (who had entered the school shortly before I got there). They were, no doubt, feeling at least a little vulnerable by the situation and the weaponry, but they spoke excitedly about the “cool” brands or models of the guns.

I was very distressed by their (societally ingrained) way of dealing with a potentially unsafe situation by showing off their knowledge of guns instead of heading straight home or consoling each other by discussing their fears.

But mostly, I wondered why, if the police outside the building looked so relaxed, the police inside the building were heavily armed?! Especially after learning afterwards that the robber had been armed with only a knife.

We also learned afterward that the lockdown was “precautionary.”

When the police came out at the end some of the men looked very pumped and excited.

It looked to me like the whole thing was some exercise in adrenaline.

I could be projecting.

In any case, I really question the use of such heavy artillery IN A SCHOOL to find a knife-bearing robber who no one really thought would be there. This is how accidental police shootings occur. I feel the police put those children in more danger than the robber did.

I also feel that the unnecessary escalation of violence that occurred is harmful to the psyches of everyone touched by that situation.

I appreciate police as first responders and people who have to put themselves in harm’s way. And I get the difficulty of deciding in the moment about potential threats. But I’d really like to hear a response regarding the thinking behind this, as well as thoughts from educators and other parents.


Sincerely, Tasha Diamant, mother.

MONTHLY vulnerability action/#NUD/vigil Mon Feb 26 3-4pm BC leg

For February's MONTHLY vulnerable action in the streets, I will be Naked Ugly Dancing #NUD in the vicinity of the black Queen Victoria statue on the BC legislature lawn. 

(Because capitalism, feminism, imperialism, colonialism and probably other isms.)

#NUD
Near the black Queen Victoria statue on the lawn of the BC Parliament
Monday, Feb 26
3-4 pm

People can join (dressed or not) if they like. #uglydancing in public is vulnerable even with clothes on.

For me, it all started with pain and the extra awareness of motherhood.

I see my work as pushing back against the most damaging culture in history (my culture).

I have refused to allow myself to be diagnosed as mentally ill, my "mental illness," which is emotional pain, is that I feel this: none of us has made it until all of us has made it.

The Naked Ugly Dancing is about dancing out the ugly, showing up in vulnerability, not having to be pretty and MORE! Because I can do, think, and feel more than one thing at once!

Facebook event
humanbodyproject.org

CANCELLED

CANCELLED

The next MONTHLY action will be near the black Queen Victoria statue on the BC Legislature lawn
3-4 pm
NEW DATE: Feb 18, 2018 (NOT Feb 17)

I will do some #nakeduglydancing 
People can join me if they want.


It’s my version of embracing vulnerability, dealing with desperation, creating a portal to a new paradigm, pushing back against a damaged/damaging culture, dancing out the ugly, and MORE!

Check out my latest video if you haven't already https://youtu.be/hGWAhxZK3VA

Women's March #yyj Jan 20, 2018

Women's March #yyj Jan 20, 2018

#NUD at Women's March

I'll be #NakedUglyDancing at

The Victoria Women's March
Saturday, January 20, 2018
11am-1pm
Centennial Sq (Victoria City Hall)

"We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Anyone welcome to join me dressed or un.
#NUD at Women's March Facebook event


Also, I'll be in Herstory presented by Riot Grrrls Burlesque Revue on Saturday, Feb 3. Tickets at Eventbrite  
Herstory Facebook event

Last month's action. 6th anniversary of Vulnerability Vigils/monthly actions. Photo by David Howell.

6th Anniversary of Vulnerability Actions+New Video

I'm not the highest functioning person since ye olde Stage 4 Kanker wake-up call... but I do get out and about once a month to disturb the masses.

Here's my latest YouTube video of last month's street action. By chance, I caught a lot of audio of police (even more than the month before). I like to think that I provided some education.

Also, on New Year's Eve Day, December 31, 2017, I'll do a 6th Anniversary Monthly Action (aka Vulnerability Vigil)
3-4 pm
BC Legislature Grounds (Victoria) or nearby
Everyone welcome. Dressed or not.
Link to Facebook Event

For this piece of shamanic street performance, I plan to cover my naked body with "HELLO my name is" labels.

As most of you know, I started monthly Vulnerability Vigils on January 1, 2012. I've held at least one public vigil monthly, except when I was very ill. Vigils have evolved.

But I continue to use my naked body as a medium to share vulnerability and as a cultural/political statement.

Loneliness+futility, I've found, are part of the art.

Mini-marathon of hopelessness, Monthly Action, Nov20 noon-2, VictoriaBC

Monthly Vulnerability Action

All welcome.
Monday, November 20, 2017
noon-2 pm
Pandora Ave between Vancouver and Cook streets
Harris Green Park, Victoria, BC
(an area of town where you might see/ignore gatherings of people who have dropped through the big cracks of our indifferent, casually violent culture)

COMPLIANT ACCOUNTABLE HUMAN MOTHER 
ALIVE with BLOOD and SKIN
uses DEMOCRACY and PRIVILEGE
to DEAL and HEAL
SYSTEMIC FIX?
HOLY SACRED PARADIGM
PRECIOUS VULNERABLE EARTHLINGS
US

Since 2012, for monthly Vulnerability Vigils on the street, I created signs to hold in front of my naked, exposed body. The words above in block letters are some of those signs.

My street actions have evolved. For Monday's action I plan to lay the signs in a kind of running track oval around Harris Green Park at Pandora between Vancouver and Cook. I'm going to run/ugly dance around the oval for a while. I am inspired by Terry Fox and Steve Fonyo and really want to push against the anthropocene by running across Canada in a naked Marathon of Hopelessness. But, for now, I'll do a mini-marathon.



...making the healing paradigm visible on behalf of the collective...
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YouTube channel HumanBodyProject

So I Took the Kids to the Terry Fox Exhibit

I recently took the kids to the Terry Fox exhibit at the Royal BC Museum.  I cried. The Terry Fox story is incredibly touching and beautiful. What a shining example of humanity he was.

But I was also VERY irritated. I like to think Terry would be ticked off too. 

I cried for the reasons we are all moved by Terry Fox. The artifacts are inexplicably heartrending. A shirt. A prosthetic leg. His mother's calendar! The letters from kids!! He was so young, so beautiful, so brave, so real. And then he died. 

Our culture eats up that shit. That's the part I found so irritating. First of all, we like our heroes to be pretty, check. Preferably white, check. UNCOMPLICATED, check.

Terry was a nice middle-class kid, a jock, a Canadian "every-young-man." We learn he was sometimes crabby on the road. Take that Canadians! Our hero was sometimes crabby. 

It's telling that the promo video for the exhibit prominently features Wayne Gretzky--alive but with the nice (fake?) clean brand intact (if not fake, certainly unknowable and easily digested).

I'm totally guessing but I bet Terry would prefer to see a Steve Fonyo exhibit or a Terry Fox and Steve Fonyo exhibit. (I would.) 

Over and over, throughout the exhibit, we learn that Terry did not want to become *Terry Fox*. He was just a guy who knew he had work to do and was determined to do it. Selfless, sure, but he didn't want to be made into a big deal.

Now Steve Fonyo. There's a guy who's been through some shit! 

He didn't die! 

After he ran all the way across Canada on one leg, he struggled with addiction and committed petty crimes. I'm not saying he doesn't bear responsibility for his choices, but, wow, what a comment on fame and heroism. 

And projection. Steve was no Terry in the looks department. And a more damaged guy. He got nationally dissed for riding Terry's coattails. What? Only one person's allowed to run on one leg? 

Eventually his Order of Canada was rescinded. How petty and punitive can we get?

I can't believe I'm agreeing with a Toronto Sun opinion piece, but give the guy his Order of Canada back. Back in the day, he ran across Canada on one leg and raised $13 million dollars and his life has been shitty ever since.

Steve Fonyo, his accomplishments and subsequent struggles with fame and post-fame should have been an equal part of the Terry Fox exhibit. His enormously successful 1985 run was inspired by Terry. 

His complicated life, though plausibly quite different to how Terry would have lived his, would add more poignancy and authenticity to the unasked for divinity of *Terry Fox*. 

Terry, the young man, was 22 when he died. He didn't have a lot of time to get complicated. In some ways, that's the saddest loss.

I think we do Terry a huge disservice, making him this nice, clean, lovably crabby cancer poster boy. 

(I've learned that filmmaker Alan Zweig has made two recent documentaries about Fonyo: Hope (2017) and Hurt (2015). I need to see these movies.)

But I reserve most of my irritation for the outdated idea that money will cure cancer.

In Terry's day, Cancer Inc. was not the beast it is today. Yes, we need money for research. Yes, we need more research. 

But as a Stage 4 Ovarian Cancer Survivor, an incredibly sensitive human being, and former beaten-up Education Inc. disposable lackey (i.e. feminist contract or "adjunct" instructor in cultural studies-type classes in post-secondary institutions), I know I got cancer from trying to behave and fit in a culture that hates who I am.

This is a sick culture and no amount of scientific research will fix that without acknowledging the corruption and giant house of cards that is contemporary global capitalism, which contaminates EVERYTHING.

I LOATHE with every single breath in my body that the sole response we continue to teach to our children in this day and age is to throw money at a GIANT COMPLICATED PROBLEM without having the ability or desire to teach complexity much less disruption or resistance. 

Including Steve Fonyo in this exhibit would have been a step in that direction.