CANCELLED: SCHMOPE at Vancouver Fringe Nov 26-Dec 5 2020

CANCELLED DUE TO COVID

ANNOUNCEMENT

Tasha Diamant performs 

Schmope at the Vancouver Fringe

Nov 26-Dec 5 2020

Ticket info https://www.vancouverfringe.com/ticket-info/ 

Program description: Phenomenal woman. Superhero. Schmancer survivor. Brilliant performance artist/improviser/tragicomedian Tasha Diamant uses her naked body+miraculous self to create offerings pushing back against an oppressive culture. Radical vulnerability as medicine. Montreal Fringe creativity award winner 2018.

Times and Place:

Performance Works

1218 Cartwright Street, Granville Island

Vancouver, BC

Thu 26th Nov 7:00-8:15 pm

Fri 27th Nov 9:15-10:30 pm

Sat 28th Nov 4:30-5:45 pm

Sun 29th Nov 7:00-8:15 pm

Thu 3rd Dec 9:15-10:30 pm

Sat 5th Dec 2:00-3:15 pm

"Your work is the most interesting and powerful and important work that I've seen at any Fringe."

–Charles Adrian, creator of Ms. Samantha Mann

"Our winner is a show that isn't comfortable in its contradictions and cares so deeply it just can't give a fuck! Fierce nonchalance and the full power of extreme vulnerability: it challenges everything we believe about theatre and undermines all hierarchies. It is the ultimate feminist act and the ultimate act of fringe."

— Geoff Agombar, Montreal Fringe juror

"You are a role model."

— audience member

"When confronted with work to which I've had a visceral reaction I need to go deep within to confront the part of me that’s mirrored. Although there are many solemn moments, the performance is surprisingly life-affirming, with moments of laughter... Profoundly moving and relevant."

— Janis La Couvée

"The definition of sincerity."

— audience member

Ticket info https://www.vancouverfringe.com/ticket-info/ 

Standing by the cement "Corona" pipes in Squamish, BC, 2019 (pre-Corona virus). Photo by Nicole Gurney.

"Plot" summary:

I start out sitting in the theatre as the audience comes in. Just regular lighting with perhaps a bit of stage lighting as well. I chat with people or not. When the show starts I say a brief intro and remind the audience that I will get naked. I get undressed and put on my Extinction Symbol "outfit," as I have done on the streets many times. I talk about whatever comes to mind, usually about the street activism/performances that I've done. Then eventually I take the Extinction Symbols off and I speak extemporaneously. I discuss: big emotions, extinction, capitalism, colonization, how this is the most destructive culture that has ever existed, fun stuff like that. I share my own challenges with being an adult and mother in this culture. Sometimes I am quiet. People are invited to contribute. No one is asked to do anything.

"Marketing" angles:

I am the first person in the world to stand on the streets naked holding the Extinction Symbol (as confirmed to me by the symbol's creator). The Extinction Symbol was created in 2011 by an anonymous British artist known as ESP. I had been doing monthly naked Vulnerability Vigils in Victoria, holding a sign with the word VULNERABLE (and other words). When I learned about the Extinction Symbol in 2014, I started to hold that. It is now, of course, an international symbol used by activists worldwide. 

I am a Stage 4 cancer survivor (I prefer to identify as a schmancer schmurvivor). I have lived more than 5 years since diagnosis. My doctor says I'm a miracle patient. My cancer is inseparable from who I am and have been as an artist. My ongoing performance art project is called the Human Body Project and, obviously, cancer is part of MY human body project. The connection between how our culture is destructive and brutal and how I feel in my emotions and body is something I've felt since I was a child but only really deeply explored after becoming a mother. I've felt very alone but, you know, what with the casual end of old growth trees, air that is unbreathable from other dying forests, SO MANY SCAPEGOATS and marginalized people, and the global pandemic... more people are finally connecting the SAD FUCKING dots.

If, for some reason, you read about me and think I must identify as libertarian, anti-masker, anti-vaxxer, conservative-leaning, credulous of anything Fox news or Rebel media would cover, or even a nudist, and that appeals to you... you're probably going to be disappointed.

I am also a visual artist and just finished painting a beautiful mural in downtown Victoria.

COVID 19:

For information about Vancouver Fringe's excellent Corona virus precautions here's a link. https://tickets.vancouverfringe.com/

Vulnerability Vigil and Mural Opening: Nov 22 1-2pm Victoria, BC

BEAUTY AND RAPE: NO SAFE SPACE

I recently finished painting a mural in the driveway of Heart & Hands Community Health Collective and I am holding a...

Vulnerability Vigil and Mural Opening outside.

Sunday, November 22, 2020

Heart & Hands Community Health Collective

851 Cormorant St

Victoria, BC (so-called)

1-2 PM

Link to Facebook event

 It will be the first time that my two art practices that have defined so much of my adult life will come together.

I started holding the Extinction Symbol in my monthly Vulnerability Vigils in 2014, after I learned about the symbol. ESP, the anonymous artist who is the symbol's designer, has told me that I'm the first person in the world to hold the symbol while naked.

Please wear masks and practice physical distancing.

I am raising money to support the Native Youth Sexual Health Network (https://www.nativeyouthsexualhealth.com/), an organization by and for Indigenous youth, that works across issues of sexual and reproductive health, rights and justice throughout the United States and Canada. 

https://chuffed.org/project/mural-opening-fundraiser Also, consider bringing cash and we'll count at the event.

Some Backstory:

Less than 48 hours after I finished the mural, police informed Christina Chan, owner of Heart & Hands Community Health Collective, that a man had sexually assaulted a woman in the space in the middle of the night.

This hit me like a punch in the gut.

These things happen all the time, of course, but proximity makes it more personal. Add to that the disparity between the brief satisfaction of creating a beautiful, potentially healing space versus the brutality of what transpired so quickly after.

I have still not fully processed it. Because there is ALWAYS SO MUCH TO PROCESS and processing (feeling+thinking+analyzing EVERYTHING) is my area of expertise.

This Vulnerability Vigil will be a time to hold and feel these seeming opposites in our consciousness: beauty and rape, humanity and inhumanity, loving expression and colonization, etc. I invite you to process with me. I will also hold space for the victim and the perpetrator.

More Background:

For those who don’t know, I'm an advanced maternal age mother, 59, with two daughters who are almost 14 and 19. I'm diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, all reproductive organs removed. I've lived more than 5 years past diagnosis. “Miracle patient.”

For the past 15 years, I have also been doing an extremely challenging (for myself especially, but for audiences also) performance art/activism project using my naked or nearly naked body to share and create space for vulnerability, under the umbrella title of the Human Body Project. I am, in fact, the first person in the world to stand on the streets naked holding the Extinction Symbol as part of my series of public Vulnerability Vigils.

I have dealt with super-intense mental and emotional struggles my whole life and I’m only alive because of my socioeconomic circumstances and my will to continue being a mother to my kids.

In the 90s, my 30s, before I had kids, I was a serious visual artist. I lived like a millennial before millennials. In some ways, it was the worst possible time art-world-wise to be a painter. But I was relatively successful. A lot of it had to do with the luck of privilege (upper middle class people in my milieu and in the 90s people had some disposable income), but still. Towards the end of my decade of serious painting I started having a desire to paint murals but it never happened (kids and ill-fated career in academia).

Recently I’ve been looking more closely at my isolation, invisibility, and lack of rewards in my roles–and they are very much heavy, culturally-weighed roles–as a “wife” and “mother.” I came to a deeper realisation that I need to do more things for myself, things that I want to do.

So I asked Christina if I could paint over the aged, faded mural that was there. I’m really grateful she said yes. Christina is a friend who, like myself, has been through some intense chronic illness, surgeries, and ongoing fragility.

We are also PHENOMENAL WOMEN working outside normal parameters and EXPLICITLY pushing back against an oppressive culture. Heart & Hands is a healing space.

People have said that my visual art brings them joy.

Haha, no one says that about my hundreds of performances and street actions. The Human Body Project work is challenging and fucking DEPRESSING because it’s about what people are finally starting to face: OUR GLOBALIZED DESTRUCTIVE COLONIZING CAPITALIST MISOGYNIST DIFFERENCE-HATING CULTURE IS WINNING.

So, hey. Come to see the mural but also come see ME, a person who has been doing the work for a really long time.

Come to the property, in the Canadian legal system sense, of another woman who has been doing the work a really long time. 

But, really, come be part of a creative space, a disruptive space, on the unceded traditional territories of the Lekwungen peoples (today known as the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations), a people who once looked after the world and weren’t super big on rape.

Thank yous:

Again, thanks to Christina Chan, owner of Heart & Hands Community Health Collective. And big thanks to my mural painting helpers: Fraea the Banshee, Sophia Howell Diamant, Ruby Sawyer, Catherine Wright and Faeron Wright-Jones.

Cancelled Upcoming: 

My show Schmope at the Vancouver Fringe miniseries Nov 26-Dec 5, 2020.

Phenomenal woman. Superhero. Schmancer survivor. Brilliant performance artist/improviser/tragicomedian Tasha Diamant uses her naked body+miraculous self to create offerings pushing back against an oppressive culture. Radical vulnerability as medicine. Montreal Fringe creativity award winner 2018.