Body of Knowledge is a creative collaboration between a group of teenagers and a team of artists, initiated and directed by theatre-maker Samara Hersch. The project explores how to have complex conversations about sex, the body and the world in ways that are empowering, driven by real curiosity, including questions of boundaries, shame, healing, consent, pleasure, ageing.  

In ​Body of Knowledge​ you are invited to join a conversation.
This is a conversation between different generations that questions our assumptions about the body.
In particular, it looks at sex education and forms of body knowledge (vs. embodied knowledge), addressing issues such as sexuality, boundaries, pleasure, intimacy, shame, grief, consent, ageing and death.
It is equally a conversation about body politics and asks how our bodies exist in relation to each other, to our collective future and to the borders that lie between us.
The work takes place for an adult audience with teenagers from different locations, phoning in from their individual bedrooms. This remoteness and distance raises questions of embodiment and disembodiment and asks how we pay attention (or not) to our own bodies and the bodies of others.
The inter-generational discourse that is set in motion forces us to rethink the multitude of ways in which knowledge is produced, acquired and shared. Power is re-organised and re-imagined. The teacher and the student, the adult and the child, the performer and the audience, begin to shift and entangle.
Together we are here, in this moment, trying to work it all out…

The Artist

Samara Hersch is a theatre-maker from Melbourne, whose practice explores the intersection of contemporary performance and community engagement. She recently completed her Masters at Das Theatre in Amsterdam.  Samara often works with both professional and non- professionally trained performers as a way of opening up new conversations, methodologies and unlikely, intimate encounters. She has a curiosity about voice, sound and the ethics and potentialities of creating space for diverse perspectives to be heard. Previously, Samara has worked with a range of theatre companies in Australia including Back to Back Theatre, Chamber Made, Malthouse and Arts House.

www.samarahersch.com 

Body of Knowledge is a medium scale production of Be SpectACTive! project.