An ongoing interdisciplinary inquiry and art project created by Tasha Diamant
4th Annual Human Body Project
At the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival
August 13-23, 2009
Human Body Project video (2 minutes)
Barack Obama observes that the global empathy deficit is far more serious than the financial one. As a mother, it feels intensely urgent to me that we humans address this issue. This project, me volunteering as a “sample human,” is my way to do whatever I can do.
I am an artist. For ten years I lived on the edge trying to make it as a painter. I am also a longtime yoga practitioner, a college instructor, and a former journalist. My events reflect who I am, my wisdom, and my depth. Rather than a separate public persona, I show up as a real, struggling human. The events are in the moment, workshop-like, contemplative. One participant said it was like a new religion, sacred.
I use my 47-year-old naked body (no plastic surgeries, two babies, flabby, not what you’d call titillating) to create a felt, visceral experience of shared vulnerability. I also write about my life, as authentically as I am able to, on my blog.
It’s hard! I am not comfortable without my defenses. Who I am is a heartful person. Or, at least, this is what I want to own as a human being and what I want all of us to own as human beings. This is the most vulnerable thing to be. I have learned that being naked is way easier than being openhearted.
Sacredness, authenticity, heartfulness, these attitudes or qualities are mostly missing from how we live. For instance, I often feel painfully disconnected when I participate in or am complicit in the many superficialities and detachments from heartfulness that life presents. But how do we create or deal with or engage with heartfulness? I certainly haven’t been taught how. In fact, I learned quite the opposite: not to deal with these qualities, not to “go there.”
It is a profoundly difficult dilemma that must be understood in a visceral sense, beyond intellect and cognition. Our separation from sacredness has led to everything from individual health problems (such as my own, which I sometimes write about) to global issues like climate change and poverty. It’s mine, but it’s yours too.
When I conceived this project in 2006 I decided to commit to do at least one annual public event until I die, partly as a chronicle of my sample human body and the changes that take place in it over the years. I also hope to continue to provoke a serious consideration of vulnerability, our own, as humans in a body, and, by extension, the troubled planet’s.
Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” By choosing to use my own body and life experience, I have chosen to “be” and represent that which we all share: physicality, mortality, fragility, and vulnerability. It may be mine you’re looking at, but it’s yours too.