It’s the 18th anniversary of when I started this challenging ecofeminist performance art project, the Human Body Project, and the one-year anniversary of my most recent re-diagnosis of Stage 4 cancer. Shout out to me! Is it super sad that I’m the only person marking these anniversaries and sending off a missive into the maw of the interwebz? Lol. It feels sad to me but maybe it’s just normal. Which is also sad.
Yes, I continue to be sad, so before you either read on or don’t, I am producing a sequel to last year’s very successful, but not in a financial sense, Humans of Fairy Creek: A Variety Show, and we need money to make it happen. Please consider helping us. Here’s the GoFundMe link. Please feel free to forward. More at the end of this piece.
Sales! I missed my calling.
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Some brief thoughts 18 years on:
The Human Body Project started in response to my pain as a mother in this culture and my inability to express what I was going through as I tried to care for my child. I did not have words for what I now simply know is a violent culture. But I had my body and voice. Using my naked body to share and create space for vulnerability, a process of bearing witness to self and culture, I have done more than a hundred “performances” and street actions.
As an educator who values experiential learning, I saw the Human Body Project as protest art, yes, but primarily as a modality for healing. I struggle now to see it as such. It has been a vehicle for truth, though.
I truly thought thousands of people would join me. Instead, I think it’s mostly been a whole lot of messy projection. As a therapist friend once said to me: “Our behaviours and personality come from a place of protecting ourselves from even the awareness of vulnerability. We're so busy acting against vulnerability, we can’t see it."
Showing up naked and experiencing so much projection was WAY BEYOND my capacity but I forced myself to do it because it felt urgent that I do all I possibly could to create a shift. I have paid a price.
But we’re all paying prices now. Normalized live-streamed genocide. Summer days when we can’t breathe. “Inflation.” Collapse of public health care. No housing. Algorithmic hate. And so many lies.
I dedicate my anniversaries to Aaron Bushnell whose last words were: “Free Palestine.”
Bushnell was an active service member in the US Air Force who died last month at age 25 after setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. As he walked towards his death, he said: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide.” And: “This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
The whole time he was burning a police officer pointed a gun at him.
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Humans of Fairy Creek 2024:
With regard to what our ruling class has decided will be normal, logging of the last ~2% of BC’s old growth forest ecosystems continues and the provincial NDP government continues to lie about it. I am in the process of producing a sequel to my 2023 Victoria Fringe show, which focused on this atrocity.
As I was going through chemotherapy last summer, I produced and directed Humans of Fairy Creek: A Variety Show with 10 core participants. All of us had been involved in the Fairy Creek Blockade to stop old growth logging here on Vancouver Island–the largest nonviolent civil disobedience movement in Canadian history–some of us had been arrested and brutalized by police.
It was a huge success as small theatre events go, although it lost money. We had several sold-out nights where people came to endure difficult truths. So I’m still at it, but filling the theatre this time.
We are crowd-funding to help make a modified and re-devised version, Humans of Fairy Creek 2024. We have spots in the Edmonton and Vancouver fringe theatre festivals and we plan a Victoria run, as well. Maybe you would consider contributing to a political theatre project telling crucial stories that have been shockingly and inaccurately underreported? If so, here’s the GoFundMe link.
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Brief cancer update:
I finished intense IV chemotherapy in September. I'm on a daily oral chemotherapy drug and doing pretty well. I feel grateful to have access to high quality cancer care. I think of cancer as part of my human body project.
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Thanks for reading if you got this far.
May all humans be free from oppression, especially children.
Tasha
PS I've been fooling around with cartoons...
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