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Fat Performance is the first published edited collection dedicated to fat performance. The text connects materials from across scholarship on fat performance and provides the readership with routes into this area of artistic practice and scholarly enquiry. It presents fat performance as a diverse field, created by and with many different kinds of fat people and using numerous strategies for meaning-making through performance.
The chapters include contributions from scholars, artists, and activists thinking and writing across dance, theatre, live art, community practice, comedy, photography, film, health contexts, and performance in the everyday. The writing forms and research methods are as diverse as the performance forms, including conversations for the page, image-led essays, autoethnography and poetry, as well as conventional academic formats with conventions drawn from history, critical theory and philosophy.
It offers a long-overdue and inspiring foundation for scholars, artists, and activists interested in fat performance, presenting the first anthology dedicated to this vibrant and underexplored field. With its rich international scope and multidisciplinary, intersectional approaches, the volume showcases an exciting range of performance forms and demonstrates the expansive potential of Fat Performance Studies.
'The book itself is its own form of fat performance, creating an elaborate, imaginative, and at times avant-garde collage that offers its audience provocative claims and past-due readings that make fatness a crucial point of examination in performance studies. With several stand-out offerings, the book creates a mosaic of potential methodological frameworks for fat performance futures. Fat collaboration and kinship making is at the heart of this book and nourishes the reader as they digest the feast on offer. Fat Performance transforms us from readers into active audience members who are in for an immersive dinner and show.... Fat Performance is a triumphant attempt at moving toward the serious consideration of fatness and performance, entangling the two with an urgency that hopefully jiggles the full bellies of all who come across it. Brava! May they all take a bow. And my compliments go to the chefs.'
— Sarah Berry Pierce, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society
'I absolutely loved the book - every chapter is unmissable, hearty and heartening, and so expansive in its approach to what fat performance can be...my personal highlight was the chapter on fisting, which I thought about for days afterwards.'
— Selina Thompson, Artist and Performer
Dr Jussara Belchior is a fat dancer living in Blumenau / SC, Brazil, working as a choreographer and a researcher of practices and writings in contemporary dance. Her projects deal with fat people, fatness and non-normative bodies and she is interested in poetics and politics of movement and positioning yourself through dance.
Magdalena Hutter is a documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and photographer. Magdalena is a PhD candidate at Concordia University in Montreal/Tioh'tà:ke, Canada, where she uses documentary film to do research-creation about fatness as method in dance and movement art, exploring the potentials of fatness in these art forms and developing frameworks for fat screendance.
Dr Gillie Kleiman is a choreographer and scholar living in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Her performances, events, and pedagogical encounters are presented at venues and festivals nationwide and beyond, and are often focused on the figure of the non-professional dancer.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Caleb Luna
Introduction
1 ‘You Have a Revolutionary Act’: A History of Fat Performance Art
Stefanie Snider
2 But Is It Healthy? The Fat Activist Dance of Disrespect
Charlotte Cooper and Kay Hyatt
3 fatness, writing, and performance: the unmaking of the unfinished body/text
Miro Spinelli
4 Three Steaks and a Cake: Fat Mad Queer Crip Communing in Cindy Baker’s Dreams
Lindsay Eales, Cindy Baker, and Kristin Rodier
5 Camouflage for Resting
Camila Fontenele de Miranda, Translated by Magdalena Hutter
6 Contemplating Fatness and Ecological Interdependence: Laura Aguilar’s Nature Self-Portraits
Eleanor Roberts
7 Fat Fists Fisting Fat: An Excessive Queer Performance Manifisto
Phoebe Patey-Ferguson
8 Time Loupe: Taking a Closer Look at Fat, Dance, Film and Temporality
Magdalena Hutter
9 The Black in Fat: A Conversation Between Ebony Oldham, Da’Shaun Harrison, Marquisele Mercedes, Mary Senyonga, and Rob Barry
Ebony Oldham, Da’Shaun Harrison, Marquisele Mercedes, Mary Senyonga, and Rob Barry
10 Sometimes, Representation Doesn’t Matter: Fatness, Normativity and Audience Expectations
Sofia Apostolidou
11 The (Mis)Use of Fat Performance in Weight Stigma Interventions with Health Professionals
Rachel Fox
12 Fat Burlesque as Gender Exploration: An Autoethnography of Corpulence and Feminine Flaunting
KB Heylen
13 Heavy Investigations: Moving Between Weight and Weightlessness as a Fat Dancer
Jussara Belchior Santos
14 Fat Theatre Audiences: Finding Comfort at Sofie Hagen’s Fat Jokes
Emily Underwood-Lee
15 Community Dance as Fat Activism
Gillie Kleiman
16 Fattening the Frameworks of Australian Performance: The (Re)shaping of Community Through Fat-Queer Resistance
Kelli Jean Drinkwater and Jonathan Graffam-O’Meara
Notes on Contributors
Index