Body and Stumps at the Victoria Fringe

Body and Stumps

at the 2021 Victoria Fringe

Tickets available online only at victoriafringe.com

Metro Studio Theatre • 1411 Quadra St

• Wed Sept 15 8:30 pm
• Thurs Sept 16 6:00 pm
• Fri Sept 17 8:30 pm
• Sat Sept 18 8:30 pm
• Sun Sept 19 6:00 pm

Award-winning performance artist and ancient forest activist Tasha Diamant has been using her naked body to reveal connections between micro+macro vulnerability in performance+public spaces since 2006. 

                                                    "Body and Stumps" promo

Fire, pandemic, and an NDP government spending zillions to violently arrest peaceful unpaid people protecting the very very very last of our ancient trees is patriarchal, capitalist, colonial, ecocidal, genocidal wake-up time. 

These have been constant themes in Tasha's work.

Tasha's culturally critical lens has a way of getting past your “this is normal, right?” programming.

Special guests from the blockades To Be Announced (watch this page)

On the road to Waterfall Camp, July 31, 2021.

About the artist:

• In 2014, Tasha Diamant became the first person in the world to stand naked on the street with the Extinction Symbol, which she did monthly for years afterward.
• Before Extinction Rebellion.
• Before Greta's skolstrejk.
• Tasha has been deeply involved in the movement to save ancient forests+support forest protectors.

*Content warning: nudity and police violence.*

Fifth Schmancerversary

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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

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

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.

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

Blog Post Reading #4 + AnthropoScenes

Here I am reading another blog post. This post was written on March 26, 2006, the day after I did my first Human Body Project performance. It's entitled "Post-nakedness (1): support and embracing awkwardness"



Also, here are some videos from the AnthropoScene Collective's first two AnthropoScenes!