BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Photos by Chani Bockwinkel

Jules Pashall is a somatic practitioner currently based in Rhode Island who uses fat as a resource for performance and transformation. They draw upon their Master’s in Somatic Psychotherapy to offer workshops called Fat as Muse that ask participants to feel their fat and draw upon it as a source of creativity. Here, Jules shares how their fat activism and artistry overlap, how experiencing and accessing fat can be an empowering tool for self-survival, and why it’s important to address our own internalized fat phobia.

Note: This interview was first published in Stance on Dance’s fall/winter 2023 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

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Can you share a little about your history and what shaped you as an artist and a mover?

My background is more in theater than dance. I did musical theater and singing, and then I shifted into devised theater, which incorporates movement and dance. I also shifted into burlesque. I was doing a lot of storytelling from and of the body, specifically for fat and queer people. A lot comes up when you invite people to tell stories with and from their bodies and I needed more tools for what I was inviting folks to do. I went to grad school and trained as a somatic therapist at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

When I got to school, I was coming from almost a decade of being a fat activist. I got politicized around fatness when I was 19 and started engaging with fat liberatory spaces and overlapping it with my art. My fat activism and my body-based art making were the same thing. When I got to grad school, I left a really fat positive and queer community and was suddenly around a majority of thin cis people, most of whom had never talked about fat before. While I was in school, I felt the need to take on talking about fat in a different way by doing a lot of interventions to bring fat into the conversations we were having around bodies. Most spaces where we focus on the body have ramped up anti-fatness. People also ignore fat as a part of the body when exploring or creating with the body.

How would you describe somatic therapy to someone unfamiliar with it?

I want to clarify I’m not a licensed therapist, as I did not pursue licensure, but I do have a master’s degree in it. Somatic therapy is a big umbrella term for lots of different modalities and practices, but its main difference from traditional talk-based therapy is that it focuses on centering the body. It’s a term for many “body-up” approaches.

How did you get involved in fat activism?

Necessity. I’ve been fat my whole life. I grew up in the 90s in an affluent white suburb of Boston where I had an understanding that fat was not okay. I got a lot of education around the idea that people don’t deserve to be treated badly for who they are and their identities, but it never occurred to me that fat was included in that framework. When I went to college, I read this book my freshman year called The Cult of Thinness by Sharlene Hesse-Biber and it blew my mind. It was the first time I was given a framework to think about the way people treated me for my size as something systemic. Like, “I don’t deserve to be treated like shit because I’m fat?! Anti-fatness is systemic and bigger than me?!” Growing up, fat felt like a personal failing. The thinking was “If you wanted to not be treated badly, you could just lose weight. Since you can’t lose weight, you deserve to be treated badly.” When I was 19 and read that book, a switch flipped: anti-fatness was bigger than me and how people treat me.

After that, all my papers and my performance art were about being fat. But it wasn’t until after college when I moved to Texas that I connected with other fat and queer people. It was powerful because I wasn’t having to educate people about my existence because there was enough shared experience. I became part of a radical group of queer people who were doing work on anti-racism, trans misogyny and trans phobia within the queer community, and cultural appropriation in the drag community. Fatness wasn’t separate. Fat queer trans disabled people of color were organizing and making a lot of art.

How would you describe your current artistic practice?

Right now, I’m invested in inviting people to engage with their fat creatively through dance, somatics, and theater. I am asking the question, “How do we tap into fat as part of the body that we make and create from and with?” That has looked a lot of different ways. Lately, I’ve been teaching a workshop called Fat as Muse that asks folks to engage with their fat as a source of creative material. I’ve been teaching that online and in dance spaces and non-dance spaces. Most of us outside the dance and somatics world haven’t been asked to feel our bodies, period, much less asked to feel our fat.

I also do one-on-one somatic support with folks. Because of the pandemic, most of my work is online. That’s been most accessible to folks, but I also travel to teach workshops.

How does your activism inform your artistic practice and vice versa?

In all the art I’ve ever made, my fat body is very central. The art I’ve made is always about my fatness and inviting fat people to make art about their bodies too.

How do your fat identity and your queer identity inform one another?

Coming into fat identity made space for me to come into queer identity by allowing me to process my trauma around desirability and body autonomy. The more space I make, the more gets discovered: I’m fat, I’m queer, I’m non-binary, I’m trans. It keeps opening. There’s this way in which the more I let myself emerge, the more I’m just telling the truth about what’s always been there.

Have you seen a similar unfolding with folks you’ve worked with?

Absolutely. When someone feels their fat, it invites them to have more sensation and awareness of parts of their body they often haven’t spent much time feeling. Or if they have felt their fat, oftentimes it’s with judgements around it being either bad or good. When I work with folks, I am inviting them to feel their fat with open curiosity, respect, and care. This kind of invitation opens a lot: memory, ancestral stuff, childhood stuff. We get detached from feeling our fat so when you are given the instruction to bring your attention to it, a lot can emerge that hasn’t been given space before.

I don’t prescribe that people have to feel and be positive about their fat. Fat, like every part of life on this earth, is complex and nuanced and deserving of space to be many things at once. My work is centered on reminding people that fat is on everyone of any size, period. Most of your brain is fat. It’s also in your bone marrow. There are so many layers to the invitation to feel your fat.

Oppressive systems thrive on disconnecting us from our bodies. Fat hatred, as it is linked and embedded with all other systems of oppression, is one tactic for disconnecting us from feeling our bodies. My agenda is to invite people to feel their fat so they can feel more of their bodies and access more of what we need to care for each other and survive. Accessing fat is one way to access what we might need to survive. I try not to get too grandiose about it, but that’s at the heart of it.

What are some steps that professional and educational arts institutions can take to make their spaces more welcoming to fat people?

The biggest piece that is foundational is tending your relationship with your own body and fat. So often I hear from folks that they’re totally on board with unpacking fat phobia. They see that it is wrong when they witness it outside of themselves, but struggle very much to internalize that: “Everyone else should totally be more loving towards their bodies, but not me.” I believe that if we don’t tend to our own relationships with our bodies and our fat, we can’t fully do that for others. It will seep out onto others eventually. If you are inviting fat people to work with you but you have not unpacked how you have internalized fat hatred, it will be felt. I trust people who work in the field of dance and the arts to understand that most of our feelings, beliefs, and thoughts are expressed nonverbally. If you are holding onto feelings about fat people or your own body and fat, it will be felt.

This is not a destination; it is ongoing and forever work for most of us. We keep tending it.

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Follow Jules on Instagram @fat.as.the.sea.

The post Fat as Muse, Fat as Invitation appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Tigress Osborn is a dancer and fat activist currently based in Phoenix, AZ. She has performed as a guest with Big Moves, a fat dance company and advocacy organization based in the Bay Area, for almost a decade. Here, Tigress shares how her dance life is entwined with her fat activism, and how fat visibility is a key component driving her work.

Saucye West and Tigress Osborne, photo by Lisa J. Ellis

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Can you tell me about your dance history and what shaped who you are as a dancer today?

The first time I danced publicly as an adult was as a guest performer at a concert for Big Moves, an Oakland based plus size dance troupe. I am not formally trained as a dancer. After years of performing in dance shows and festivals and even once on television, I still think of myself as someone who likes costumes and who is willing to dance in front of people. My training has been on-the-job, choreographing on myself and working with more experienced choreographers to put together solo or group performances, and primarily doing that through fat positive troupes like Big Moves or fat inclusive burlesque. Fat visibility has been my focus, along with showing off fat dancers in fancy costumes.

I originally heard about Big Moves when I was living in Oakland through a Yahoo group that was sharing plus size events. I went to see a concert of theirs in San Francisco. The emcee of that event was Marilyn Wann, a prominent fat activist who at the time was based in the Bay Area. She is known for Yay! Scales, which are deconstructed bathroom scales that give you a compliment when you step on them instead of a number. My friend won the door prize, so I took a picture of my friend and Marilyn and got Marilyn’s email address. I started to stay in touch with her as well as started following Big Moves and seeing what they were doing. This was in the early days of social media.

Not long after, I opened a plus size night club event. It was a space for fat people to go dancing on Friday nights. Somehow, through my work with my night club, Big Moves invited me to emcee one of their shows. So the first time I was onstage with Big Moves, I was their emcee. Some of the girls who modeled for my nightclub got this idea that we should do a dance performance at the club. I was hesitant because what happens at a nightclub is it’s hard to get people off the dance floor for a performance, and then once the performance is over, it’s hard to get them back. So we performed together at Big Moves instead.

You’re also involved in a lot of fat activism. Can you share what your involvement is with Phx Fat Force and with the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA)?

I’m one of the co-founders of Fat Force here in Phoenix. My co-founder is Nicholet Deschine Parkhurst, who goes by Redstreak Girl on Instagram. She is a plus size fashion blogger. When I was moving to the Phoenix area, I reached out to her to get coffee. She wanted to put together a clothing swap. So we started Phx Fat Force by creating fat positive events in Phoenix, but it was right before the pandemic started. As a result, we’ve mostly been a small online presence and have been doing support work for other organizations like signing letters about fat positive media requests and things like that. We expect to get back to doing events next year.

My deepest involvement in fat community these days is through NAAFA. I became the board chair in 2021, and I’ve been on the board for a few years. NAAFA is the world’s oldest fat rights organization. It was founded in 1969. As the grand-elder of formally organized fat groups, NAAFA has been a lot of things to a lot of people, pro and con. This is an exciting time for NAAFA because we’ve committed to an intersectional approach in a way that the organization never had before, which means we’re reaching a lot of different people, and a lot of different people are reaching out to us.

How has your involvement in advocacy informed your dance practice, and vice versa?

Being onstage as a fat dancer requires a certain amount of unapologetic attitude about your body. You are aware that at that performance and in photos or videos later, your body and its perceived flaws could become more of a focus than your dancing. Without any politics behind that, it would be easy to say that I would have more opportunities in dance if I just lost weight. It would be easy to give in to diet culture as a way to be invited to dance. But for me, dance was always about fat visibility. The creative aspect of choreography and costuming was always more interesting to me than the physical aspect, which is complicated now because my body is having mobility issues. But being part of an inclusive dance community is what made it possible for me to even think of myself as a dancer. Instead of thinking, “I’m having mobility issues so I can’t dance anymore,” I think of it as, “I’m having mobility issues; how do I dance now?” If I wasn’t involved in the activist movement and had those constant conversations about accommodation, visibility, and an unapologetic attitude about living in the body I have, it would have been easier to stop dancing or maybe not even start in the first place.

When I was a kid, I never saw myself as a dancer. My older cousins made fun of me because they thought I was a terrible dancer. I had this proud moment as a sixth grader when I was on student council and we were planning a dance, and the teachers didn’t know why we were planning a dance because the students never danced, but I got people on the dance floor by dancing. It’s one of my favorite kid memories. And yet as I grew older and more self-conscious, it was so easy to get worried about people looking at me and making fun of me. It’s so easy for that to become ingrained in this culture.

I saw Big Moves before I ever danced publicly. The existence of this whole generation of fat dancers before me that I got to know through fat activism made it possible for me to envision that for myself and made me want to be part of creating that vision for other people.

What are some ways people talk about fat dancers that carry problematic implications or assumptions?

The most problematic thing is that people think we don’t dance, that fat dancers don’t exist. Or they think fat dancers can’t do the same things as other dancers. I can’t do some moves that other dancers can do, but I also know thin people who can’t do those moves. And there are thin people who can’t do some of the moves that I can do.

Then there’s the idea that if you’re fat and dancing, you’re doing it for weight loss, like we’re finally getting active. I’m not finally getting active. I’ve been dancing for 10 years and I haven’t lost any weight. And that’s not part of my goal.

Photo by Desmond Rodgers Photography

Are attitudes toward fat dancers getting better or worse from your perspective?

It’s really tough for fat dancers and other kinds of performers. I hear about that through my work with NAAFA as well as through folks I follow on social media. Part of how I know that it’s still really hard for fat dancers is it feels like there’s a quota for how many fat dancers there can be: If there’s one popular fat person dancing on Instagram or Dancing with the Stars, we can’t have another one until people get tired of them. We never say, “There have already been six thin groups, so we don’t need another one.”

I’m not as deeply immersed in the dance world as others whose primary activity is dance. But I can see there’s more opportunity for fat dancers in some ways. Celebrities like Lizzo push the edges of what people think is possible for fat people in movement. There are more opportunities through Instagram and TikTok to see fat people dancing, and that’s inspiring other fat people to think they can dance too, but those public fat figures are highly trolled, and not about whether they are terrible dancers, but just about what their bodies look like.

What terminology are you comfortable with?

I prefer “fat.” I believe both personally and representing NAAFA that using “fat” destigmatizes the word. It’s just a matter of fact; I am fat. I love euphemisms because I’m a creative writer and I think they can be fun. When people call themselves “fluffy” and things like that, it doesn’t offend me. But I like them in addition to “fat,” not instead of “fat.” I think we need to not use words like “overweight” or “obese.” They are medically pathologized and create the impression that there is a particular weight that is the right weight and you can be over that, which I don’t believe. I love when trolls try to shut me down by saying I’m “glorifying obesity.” I’ll use “obesity” in that context because I am glorious.

The term “fat liberation” is inherently intersectional. The fat rights movement started with words like “fat acceptance” or “size acceptance.” “Acceptance” appears in NAAFA’s name. We don’t use “fat acceptance” as much these days, but we’re not changing it for historical reasons. “Fat liberation” has always been intersectional. That’s the best modern term for people who have made a political commitment to fat positivity.

What are some steps that professional and educational dance institutions can take to make their spaces more welcoming to fat dancers?

One thing they can do is use fat people in their marketing. If an institution says they’re body positive but only shows one kind of body and never shows fat, old, or visibly disabled people, how do I believe you and how do I know I won’t be the only one?

Also, the creativity piece of costuming has been a lot of fun for me as a dancer, but one of the things that is traumatizing for younger dancers or new dancers is trying to participate in a mainstream troupe and having to buy different costumes than everybody else. Thoughtfulness around costuming and accessories is really important.

As far as space, if an organization says they are body inclusive, but when I go to your registration area all the chairs have arms on them, fat people can’t sit in those chairs. Or for choreography that uses chairs, don’t use a chair that is weight rated to only 200 pounds. I can’t do that choreography because it puts me in danger. Things like that are practical considerations about the physicality of weight.

Do you have an upcoming project or focus you’d like to share more about? What’s next for you?

I am concentrating now on NAAFA and its growth, but I would love to get back to dancing more. I have a dream of taking a class with Jenzi Russell, who is an amazing choreographer here in the Phoenix area. I am looking forward to the next annual Big Moves show. I have performed as a guest dancer in their shows for nine years, and I’ve done a solo and group dance every year, so I’ve performed with them almost 20 times. Otherwise, I take a casual line dancing class for fun. I’m not sure what’s next beyond that.

Any other thoughts?

My most public performance was as a backup dancer on Sweden’s version of Got Talent. It’s me shaking my butt behind this rap act. One of the things that was interesting about that experience was that none of the comments on social media were about my body. If that video had gone up in the United States, it would have 1500 comments along the lines of “how dare this fat girl.” Part of the reason I performed on the show was because my friend who was the rapper couldn’t find a dancer in Sweden who would talk about being plus size. He found one dancer who he started working with, and he referred to her as curvy and she quit because she was offended. So he thought he needed some of his American friends with their bold selves. That’s how I ended up doing the video.

One of the things I am most proud to have participated in was the Fat Flash Mob. It was organized by Juicy D. Light who is the founder of Rubenesque Burlesque. Juicy and Alanna Kelly co-choreographed this flash mob in San Francisco. There’s a short documentary about it called Fat Mob, and it talks about coming up with the mob and how it all happened. I love those kinds of public displays because they are for anybody. You didn’t have to be a trained dancer to learn the simple choreography. And it didn’t even matter if you had the choreography perfect. What mattered was we all came together to do something joyful.

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To learn more, follow Tigress’ Instagram @iofthetigress.

Photo by Desmond Rodgers Photography

The post Entwining Fat Dance and Activism appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Jessica Judd and Matilda St. John co-direct Big Moves, a dance service organization in the Bay Area committed to getting people of all sizes into the dance studio and up onstage. They are also the co-artistic directors of emFATic DANCE, Big Moves’ resident performance company. Here they discuss how Big Moves has supported and reflected the Bay Area fat community for more than 20 years, some of the ways fat people are marginalized in mainstream dance spaces, and how studios and other institutions can make their settings more fat positive.

Photo by Lisa J. Ellis

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Can you first tell me a little about yourselves and what shaped you as dance artists?

Matilda: I danced as a child in my local dance studio where I did ballet. My parents were informed at a certain point that there was not going to be a future for me there because of the shape my body was taking as puberty set in. It was suggested I try other forms of dance, and I did move to jazz and children’s musical theater for a while, but still definitely got the message that dance was for thin people. I stayed away for many years and came back to dance in college a little bit, but I always loved dancing and watching dance. And then I found Big Moves post grad school in my late 20s through the first Big Moves performance of Bodies in Motion in 2001.

Jessica: As a little kid I was a gymnast and swimmer, and I started dancing at age five with tap and ballet and later jazz. I dropped out at age 11 and switched to competitive athletics. My sister, who is four years younger than me, continued to dance, and I always loved the shows, but I couldn’t fathom wearing a costume with people staring at my body. I was a much smaller person at the time, but it felt prohibitive and I was already struggling with disordered eating.

I had a bad shoulder injury my senior year of high school that abruptly ended my swimming career. In college, I did some dance in the form of aerobics and cardio funk classes. In graduate school, I took a jazz dance class because I needed a couple units. I loved it but it was a huge challenge because even at 23 I was older than everyone in the room and the biggest person. Having been out of dance at that point for 12 or 13 years was hard. The teacher was very encouraging, and I started taking classes from her and others at a studio in San Jose, and I stayed there for a number of years. I was always the biggest dancer.

I found out about Big Moves around the same time as Matilda for the first Bodies in Motion production in 2001.

How did Big Moves get started, and what were each of your entry points to Big Moves?

Jessica: The origin story of Big Moves is that in 2000, the founder Marina Wolf Ahmad was taking dance classes at Santa Rosa Junior College and was really frustrated with being the only fat person in the room and with the attitudes around fatness in dance. She wanted to do something about this and wanted to see fat people onstage. She founded Big Moves in November 2000 with a day-long fat positive dance clinic called Day of Dance, which we’ve continued every year.

In 2001, Marina commissioned a fat modern dance group in Canada called Big Dance to perform along with Fat Chance Belly Dance and Kendra Kimbrough Dance Ensemble. The show was called Bodies in Motion. That was my entry point.

My grandmother saw a preview article about it in the Oakland Tribune, told my mom about it because she knew my struggle being a fatter dancer, and then my mom called the number to buy tickets. That number went directly to Marina. My mom told her about me, and she wanted to meet me. At the show, Marina introduced herself and asked for my information. Several months later in the fall of 2001, I was contacted by her because she was forming a Big Moves advisory board and asked me to be on it. She was also teaching hip-hop for fat people at Dance Mission. That was October 2001. I showed up and never left.

Matilda: My entry point was also the Bodies in Motion concert. I’m a therapist in Oakland, and my business partner Beth Bernstein and I had done some writing together for Bitch Magazine and Bust Magazine about fatness in pop culture. She had a radio show at the UC Berkeley radio station called Body Talk and it was a fat positive show about how people relate to their bodies. Marina called her and asked if she’d like tickets to Bodies in Motion. I was Beth’s plus one. Until that point, my fat activism had been based in my head. When I saw fat bodies onstage, it was such a big deal for me. In 2002, I came to Marina’s hip-hop class and never left. That was right before the second Bodies in Motion.

How is Big Moves organized today?

Matilda: Big Moves is fiscally sponsored by Intersection for the Arts, a 501(c)3, and we’re a production and service organization. emFATic DANCE is the performance company. When we’re not in COVID, Big Moves produces four events a year. We present a day-long dance clinic called Day of Dance during National Dance Week each spring which consists of free workshops for the community. emFATic DANCE does a big show usually at Laney College in the summer with a lot of other fat performers. We partner with another fat organization, the FatFriendlyFunders, to produce a clothing and bake sale in late summer called Cupcakes and Muffintops. That’s been our big fundraiser and it’s a great entry point for people who might not have been in fat spaces before and who may or may not be interested in dance. And the last event of the year has been A Taste for Dance, which is a chocolate fundraiser and casual show around Halloween.

Jessica: A Taste for Dance was my first project for Big Moves. In San Jose, I was part of the South Bay Bisexual Organizers and Activists, and we had a chocolate tasting fundraiser that was successful. I brought the idea to Big Moves and we started A Taste for Dance in 2002 as a Valentine’s-themed event, eventually moving it to around Halloween where it found its sweet spot. It’s a fun themed event around candy and costumes and a lower bar to entry for folks who want to sit at a table with friends and watch performances interspersed with a costume parade, community fashion show, and time to socialize.

Our summer show is our big show. emFATic DANCE usually presents six pieces and we have several guest artists that span multiple dance/performance genres such as belly dance, contemporary, jazz, modern, burlesque, drag, spoken, word and live music. Its format is like a variety show/cabaret. The community events throughout the year are important because they provide more entry points than just having people watch us onstage.

Matilda: Since COVID, we did our Day of Dance last April virtually. I imagine we may do it again virtually or look into incorporating virtual attendance in the future. There’s more accessibility to having more events be virtual. But for now, we’ve just been rehearsing with emFATic on Zoom.

Jessica: Rehearsing on Zoom has been challenging because people are often in small spaces and have their kids and pets at home. We were working on some repertoire that we were able to reteach on Zoom, but I have stepped back from trying to create new choreography virtually and am focusing more on skill building. We are hoping to return to in-person in January or February.

Photo by Lisa J. Ellis

In the meantime, we’ve been focusing on tap dance. In the past, Big Moves has been mostly a jazz, musical theater, and lyrical company. That all takes a lot of space. I’m a tap dancer and another dancer with us is also a tap dancer. We’ve never had an opportunity to teach tap to the other dancers because of Big Moves’ cycle of events every year. So we are now working on learning to tap dance because it’s something we can mostly do in our small spaces. It’s a way to incorporate another style that we can become proficient in and perform.

Is there a specific project or performance that Big Moves produced that you’d like to share more about?

Jessica: Fat Rorschach was a piece we created for our 2014 summer production, and we also brought it to Dance Mission’s choreographer showcase and A Taste for Dance. Big Moves receives a lot of unsolicited feedback, and a lot is problematic. The piece was based on that. During the beginning years of Big Moves, we worked with modern choreographers in San Francisco. Not all their comments were stellar. We’ve also gotten inappropriate feedback in reviews and there are projections from audience members about what they feel and think about fat people. People have said questionable things, offensive things, things that were intended as compliments but were not. With Big Moves, people are not seeing one lone fat dancer among thin dancers, which people seem okay with. We have a lot of fat bodies, and it often causes very strong reactions. There are ways we’re sexualized, assumptions are made about our health, and we’ve gotten weird media requests.

We gathered all of that into a piece. We collected comments we’ve all received plus a professional review that referred to us as the “seven hefty women of Big Moves.” We had our dancers read the comments and the review and recorded them, ending on a positive note with things our audience had said to us that are legitimately good. We mixed sound over it and danced while the recordings played of what people have said. The piece was 14 minutes, and it was the first time we used text in this way. We’ve typically addressed the politics around fatness in our show every year, but this was the first time we really said all these things out loud.

Matilda: The recordings ranged from comments like, “You would dance better if you were thin,” or, “There’s a tiny little dancer trapped inside you,” or, “If you lose 20 pounds, I’ll cast you,” or, “You are so brave.” To some degree, being a fat dancer onstage is inviting the audience to project their feelings about fatness onto you, and there’s a level that we consciously play with that, but sometimes people trap us after a show and work out their feelings one-on-one, like, “I used to be a fat person.” And respectfully, we don’t need to hear people’s diet journeys.

Jessica: After Fat Rorschach, some of our musical theater stuff got more elaborate in terms of scripts and acting. Our musical theater pieces are always rewritten with a fat theme, like Greasier, where there are the “good fats” versus the “bad fats.” Fat Rorschach allowed us to do these longer, more involved pieces.

Matilda: We’ve gotten more nuanced about how we’re talking about fat politics onstage; we’ve tried to create pieces that speak to fat experiences beyond a simple analysis of fatphobia, or the transition from dieting to not dieting. Though we do those too!

Photo by Lisa J. Ellis

You’ve already mentioned several, but what are some ways people talk about fat dancers that carry problematic implications or assumptions?

Matilda: One thing that Jessica and I have talked about over the years is what it feels like to be a fat dancer in a mainstream class. Teachers may or may not feel like you’re worth training and receiving corrections. There’s this experience of being better than the teacher expected, but you still don’t receive the same corrections as other dancers in the class. The first person who really cared to train me was Jessica.

Jessica: That’s why the studio where I trained in San Jose was atypical because the teachers gave me corrections even though it wasn’t the most fat positive place. What happens a lot is that dance teachers don’t have the same expectations from the fat students. Any mistakes that are made or technique that’s not there is blamed on fatness. Some dance movement looks different on fat bodies, which is hard for mainstream dancers and choreographers to understand. Things may look different, but that’s okay.

Matilda: Your first position might look different if your calves touch, for example. You might need a wider first position. And if you need to roll a part of you out of the way to get a deeper stretch, you just do that. There’s a level of matter-of-factness you need to effectively teach fat bodies, but not all teachers have that comfort. The lack of adaptability is an issue. Fat is so stigmatized, and dance spaces have historically been so hostile to fatter bodies, that a non-fat teacher might be reasonably nervous to suggest a modification based on body size. I think that gets very tricky for a thin teacher, whereas we can comfortably talk about it using our own bodies as examples.

Jessica: Another big issue is a lack of access to training. It is so hard to go into a dance studio and take a class if you are different from the majority of people there. This affects folks of color, queer folks, disabled folks, and fat folks. Choreographers and teachers don’t want to admit they have unconscious bias for thin dancers who look and dance a certain way. There’s the assumption that a thin dancer is trainable, but a fat dancer isn’t. Thinner people can be less skilled because they are perceived as having potential, but fat dancers must show up fully realized at the peak of their training to get cast or even considered.

Matilda: There’s also the idea that if we’re dancing this much, our fatness must be a temporary state. It’s difficult for people to wrap their heads around the idea that people can move a lot and remain fat. There’s an assumption that if people do the same dance, then their bodies will look the same, and that is very inaccurate.

Are attitudes toward fat dancers getting better or worse from your perspective?

Jessica: I think attitudes are getting better but they’re not superb. If you look on Instagram and Facebook, yes, there’s more of an acknowledgement of different bodies. What has not changed is the idea of the exception: A lot of folks still view a specific fat dancer as the exception to the rule. On Instagram, a fat dancer is a singular exception, like they’re an exceptional fat person. Groups of fat people don’t get the same traction.

What terminology are you comfortable with?

Matilda: We have moved away from using “body positivity” because that term is now more about non-fat people feeling good about themselves. We say “fat” and “fatty.” Not everybody is comfortable with that. I’m comfortable with whatever someone self-identifies with, but we tend to default to the word “fat.”

Jessica: emFATic DANCE has “fat” in the name for a reason. We might also use “plus size.” We choose the language based on who we’re talking to. But in general, we talk about fat justice, fat liberation, and fat politics. And we never say “overweight” or “obese.”

What are some steps that professional and educational dance institutions can take to make their spaces more welcoming to fat dancers?

Matilda: We need more examining of unconscious bias as it intersects with racism and disability, and really thinking about the ways fat phobia exists based on who is in the room and who is not. Given how most people who live in a bigger body can remember the first time they saw someone who looks like them running or dancing, representation is a huge thing. Fat teachers are a big part of that.

Jessica: Yes, we need fat teachers who are explicitly fat positive, and we need to make sure thin teachers are also explicitly fat positive. That includes ordering costumes that fit everybody in the room. Especially for children, not fitting in a costume can make them feel so excluded.

There needs to be more fat people in the professional world choreographing, curating, and producing through a fat liberation lens that intersects with disability justice, anti-racism, and queer justice. In disability justice, there’s the tenet “nothing about us without us.” Similarly, I do not want to see thin people addressing fatness or fat politics onstage without fat people directly involved as directors, choreographers, and performers. Unfortunately, that’s something we have seen.

What’s next for Big Moves?

Jessica: Stay tuned! emFATic DANCE is hoping to be back in the studio in 2022. A lot of places have returned to in-person but we’re not comfortable yet, though we will be back. We’re not dead despite our social media being out of date. Our last big show was July 2019, and our last Taste for Dance was October 2019. We were supposed to have our Big Moves’ 20th anniversary show in 2020 but could not, so there will eventually be some sort of celebratory season.

Photo by Lisa J. Ellis

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To learn more, visit www.bigmoves.org.

The post Building Fat Community Through Dance appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Amy Marie is a dancer and model based in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. She currently performs and teaches freelance, as well as works as a plus size model and plus size fit model. Here, she shares her experience forging a path for herself in both the dance and modeling worlds, and how she has come against prejudice for being a bigger person and for not being big enough.

Photo by Justin Schlesinger

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Can you tell me about your dance history and what shaped who you are as a dancer today?

I have been dancing nonconsecutively for 28 years. I started when I was three years old as a tiny ballerina. At a young age, I really got into it and wanted to stick with ballet. I did ballet for as long as I could until I folded under the pressure to lose weight and quit. I was mocked, mimicked, and ridiculed by my teachers and peers, by boys in class and in school. I grew up in Walnut Creek, CA, and the people who live there are predominantly thin. I was always the taller, wider, bigger body and stood out. After I quit, I still learned dances from music videos and sometimes choreographed for the cheerleading team but never felt like it was safe or acceptable for me to be a dancer. I never saw bigger bodies. There were no Lizzos. Missy Elliot was just coming on the scene. There was no one for me to look up to.

In college at Diablo Valley College and then at Cal State East Bay, I switched my major a few times, though it was always in the arts. When I started taking dance classes just for exercise, the professors started coming up to me and inviting me to be a part of projects as well as complimenting me on how I moved. It was weird to hear because I’d never heard that before. I danced with Kimberly Valmore’s Coterie Dance for a while. Kimberly is a professor at Diablo Valley College. But I was always the bigger and curvier dancer in every class or performance.

Post-graduation I tried to make my way as an independent performer and artist. I started my own company called AVID, which stood for Attentive Vulnerability in Dance. My goal was to focus on things that were vulnerable topics in order to bring visibility to difficult things to talk about, like bodies, gender, sexual orientation and preference, whatever I felt needed a voice in the moment. That company ended up dying out because of a lack of funding, momentum, and support.

I got in a toxic relationship that took me out of dance and I gained about 75 pounds. I was very unhappy and felt like my body couldn’t move. I didn’t understand all these issues that were coming up health-wise. When I had my heart broken and my boyfriend left me, I turned back to dance as a form of therapy. I went back to Cal State East Bay and started dancing with Eric Kupers. He welcomed me with open arms. I started making my way back into the community and danced with Antoine Hunter’s Urban Jazz Dance Company, a project by Dawn Holtan, and I joined Eric Kupers’ company Dandelion Dancetheater and Bandelion.

In 2019, I started teaching because I was tired of going to dance classes and not seeing teachers with bodies like mine. I’ve been trying to build a combination of classes that encourage all different levels and sizes of dancers to come move, learn about their bodies, and feel safe and welcomed. That was something I didn’t have for the majority of my dance life.

I’m teaching a lot now, even to kids. I take the opportunity to inspire, motivate, and speak about confidence and positivity. I teach eight-year-olds to teenagers at In Motion Dance Center in Martinez, CA, and then I teach independently, either by renting space or teaching outside due to COVID. Those classes vary between flex flow, contemporary, and heels. The heels class in particularly is about confidence and making modifications for people who are bigger in a way that doesn’t make them feel left out. Sometimes modifications aren’t exciting. That’s one area where I’m always challenging myself is by asking how I can make modifications that are enjoyable for bigger bodies.

You’re also a model. How did you get into modeling and how has your dance experience informed your modeling?

People kept telling me I was photogenic, so when I was 20 or 21, I went to a casting call. I can’t tell you what prompted that, as there were no notable bigger bodies who I knew of. The casting call was for a beauty billboard in the Bay Area. I got cast, and it went from there.

In addition to dance, I also studied theater throughout middle school, high school, and college. Theater and dance have helped me get in tune with being a vessel of emotion as well as with facial expressions. Throughout the years, I have come across people who ask me to model their items. A lot of being a dancer is shifting effortlessly between shapes. That’s also true of modeling, whether it’s holding an item or letting a garment move. I use my choreography to create amazing images.

I started working as an independent plus size model 13 years ago. That meant finding my own work, which often meant begging and pleading photographers to work with me. I would sometimes even offer to pay their rate, and they would say no one wants to see bodies like mine. The rejections over and over again were difficult to hear. As much as I want to say I pushed through, it was start and stop and I’d sometimes get momentum and then I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to work with me.

A couple years ago, I signed with MDT Agency to be a plus size fit model. A fit model is what the industry uses as a life size doll. Instead of using a mannequin, companies hire fit models to try on their garments and then give suggestions and feedback before the items are mass produced. No one sees my face or my body except for the creative team, but my feedback allows the team to make clothing work for bodies like mine. When I started working consistently as a plus size fit model, my confidence went up; my body is important and does the work for myself and others my size so that we can enjoy garments and have them fit us properly as opposed to being too tight or a sack of fabric. I realized my body is special, valuable, and important.

Going back to your heels class, how do you make it more welcoming and accessible for bigger dancers?

I call my heels class Head Over Heels. My goal is for everyone who takes my class to be head over heels in love with themselves and their bodies. A lot of people will take my class who have never danced in heels. Others are veterans in dance who take my class to work on how they feel in heels and how their body moves. We’ve been doing class outside this past year because of COVID, but before that we worked a lot with the mirror and spent time admiring how our bodies look and move. We bigger and curvier people have never been given the opportunity to admire our bodies. I’ve had people of any size come up to me crying at the end saying they didn’t know it was okay to look at themselves like this.

Often there’s a photoshoot option at the end of my classes. Students use everything they’ve learned in class – posing, posture, center of gravity, how to move the hips, shoulders, torso, or head, even choreography – and put themselves confidently in front of the camera. People have said so many positive things after taking just one class.

There are a lot of heels classes that have popped up as a commercial way of dancing. But my class is about more than learning choreography or technique. It’s about learning about your body and feeling comfortable and confident in it.

Photo by Tess Unsinn

What are some ways people talk about dancers in larger bodies that carry problematic implications or assumptions?

The phrases “for a big body, for a large body, for a fat body” are problematic even though I use them as well. We shouldn’t be categorized as separate. Sometimes we need modifications, sometimes we don’t. Social media has made it readily available to see all the bigger plus size curvy ballerinas. But now there are the dancers and then there are the fat dancers. That is my biggest problem; it’s now separate and not equal.

Another problem is that oftentimes plus size dance companies tell me I’m not plus size enough. I’m in this zone of being not thin, but also being not big enough to get support for being a plus size dancer, so it’s hard for me to make my mark because there is no lane. There are so many companies that only have fat dancers or non-fat dancers. I wish we could all get comfortable with the idea that a dancer is a body that moves, and those bodies can look differently.

This is especially true of ballet and modern dance companies and schools. The styles of dance that are more accepting are hip-hop, Latin dance, and competition ballroom. A lot of times I’ll go to a modern dance class and I’m one of the bigger bodies. I’m an XL, size 13-15, so in between very large and not large, and I’m still one of the biggest people in the class. That tells me there’s still work to be done. We need to make ourselves visible and get in class. We stay home because we feel unsafe or judged, or do things on our own, or join dance companies that are exclusively about fat acceptance. But then we’re separate.

Are attitudes toward dancers in larger bodies getting better or worse from your perspective?

I think attitudes are getting better because social media is bringing about a tiny bit more awareness. I’ve come across people all over the world who have similar stories as mine and don’t dance anymore. Maybe hearing my story has helped them go take a dance class. That’s why I continue to advocate and share my story, to inspire whomever I need to inspire.

What’s happening now is there’s a stereotype of what an acceptable fat body is. A popular person in commercial dance is Amanda Lacount; she is all over the LA scene and is popular on social media and music videos. Her body is apple-shaped where her limbs look fairly thin and then her torso is fatter. I see that other bigger dancers who are popular have the same body type. I wish there was visibility of other big bodies: bigger chested bodies, tall bigger bodies, bodies with bigger stomachs, thighs, or bottoms. Right now, there’s a little more acceptance of seeing plus size bodies, but only in a certain way. I’m hoping we can stop being narrowminded about our acceptance.

What terminology are you comfortable with?

I use terms that are familiar and easy for people to understand, like “plus size,” but I wish we could get to the point where I am just a model and a dancer, not a plus size model and dancer.

It doesn’t offend me when someone calls me fat, whether it’s negative or positive. I have fat on me, I’m a curvy body, I’m a plus size body. I’m not a skinny body. In that regard, words don’t bother me. But I know they bother other people. I’ve been reading about body positivity versus fat acceptance versus body neutrality. We’ve been trying to define all these words and movements we’ve created to empower, encourage, and uplift one another. Now there are unofficial committees that go around saying, “This term or that term is wrong,” when really it was all supposed to be about empowerment. For the longest time, there weren’t bigger bodies performing onstage.

But then there’s this disconnect because if your body changes and you happen to lose weight, you’re betraying the plus size and fat community. That is a conversation that is complicated but probably needs to start happening more. In 2017, I lost four people in my family, my dog of seven years died, and my relationship of seven years ended. It was difficult to find a reason to eat or live. I started reevaluating who I am, how I was living my life, and what’s important to me. I became vegan and was going to the gym out of survival mode. In a year, I lost 65 pounds. For a while, people were saying, “You’re not big anymore so you can’t advocate for us anymore.” But there’s still work to be done. I’m still bigger and struggling with trying to find support in all the right ways.

Like I said, it’s a conversation that needs to be had. It’s not about being judgmental or critical, but consuming bad food isn’t healthy for a body of any size. We need to be healthy so that we can keep dancing. I love dancing and modeling, and I can’t do those things if I feel lethargic and my joints hurt. However, whenever articles are written about me, I get criticized for promoting obesity. They don’t know what I eat or how often I exercise or what my conversations with my doctors are. It’s complicated.

What are some steps that professional and educational dance institutions can take to make their spaces more welcoming to dancers in bigger bodies?

I would love and prefer to see a variety of bodies being studied and addressed instead of just commercial bodies. I remember going to see ballet performers when I was young who would always be thin and have the same kind of look. I would change the curriculum to show many examples of who a dancer can be. It starts with the director, producer, or choreographer. We need the people at the top to help us show many different types of bodies. It’s going to involve more than just one person in a dance piece or one ad or one campaign. It has to be ongoing. For generations, we haven’t seen what we’re trying to see now, so we have a lot to undo.

Do you have an upcoming project or focus you’d like to share more about? What’s next for you?

I haven’t started it yet, but I want to create a piece about that in-between space for bodies that are too big but not big enough at the same time. I’m very active on social media creating and sending messaging about confidence at any size. The most recent project I’ve worked on is empowerment of women throughout the ages. As soon as that finishes, I would love to explore the too-big-but-not-big-enough idea. I do a lot of virtual launches, so maybe I can create something that starts that conversation and see where it goes.

Any other thoughts?

I’ve talked mainly about dance, but modeling is a big part of my life. Right now, I’m also in that in-between with modeling. I lose out on opportunities because I’m not big enough. It hasn’t stopped me, but I have to do mental gymnastics with myself: Should I purposefully try and get bigger so I can have more opportunities? At the end of the day, that would be such a false narrative. I want to be healthy.

I’m at a crossroads in a lot of different ways: I’m not completely commercial, but I’m not completely experimental; I’m not thin, but I’m not fat enough; I’m not old, but I’m not young anymore. I have toes in all these different identities.

Photo by Justin Schlesinger

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To learn more, visit amymariela.com.

The post Promoting Acceptance of All Sizes appeared first on Stance on Dance.

An Interview with Cathleen Meredith of FATGIRLSDANCE

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Cathleen Meredith is the founder of FATGIRLSDANCE, a viral dance movement out of New York City. What started in 2016 as a year-long experiment learning the choreography to a popular song each week, teaching it to a group of non-trained plus-sized women, and then posting it on YouTube has evolved into a platform that promotes the visibility of fat dancers everywhere. Here, Cathleen shares how the year of dance was transformative for the dancers who participated, how negative stereotypes about fat people are untrue and cause physical and emotional harm, and how everyone can benefit from body positivity.

Photo by Elliott Ashby

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What are some of the ideas behind FATGIRLSDANCE?

Our theme is we’re dismantling the negative perceptions of fat bodies through the language of dance. In dance, people get to see fat bodies move. I have nothing against plus size modeling, and I’ve done some myself, but I want to see fat bodies in motion. Seeing fat bodies in motion is what people tend to turn their noses up at; all our layers and our fat jiggles. Sometimes the idea is even subversive to ourselves. In dance classes, there’s often a mirror, and fat dancers have a hard time seeing their own bodies in the mirror.

How did FATGIRLSDANCE get started?

I wanted to write a book. I’m a writer. I started writing it and it felt inauthentic, so I set it aside. I came back around to it a few years later. I needed something to write on that I knew. I was looking for a plus-size dance group that I could follow and research. I couldn’t find one, though later I found tons of them. But the universe wanted me to create FATGIRLSDANCE. I’m fat, so I figured I could be my own subject matter.

I did lyrical and praise dance at church, and I have a musical theater major and performing arts background, though I focused more on acting and directing. I would dance for fun. I love dancing; you can’t get me off the dance floor. I’m originally from California, and when I moved to New York, I started taking hip hop, West African, and modern dance classes for fun. There was always a sense of “Oh wow” from the other dancers. It wasn’t because I was a good dancer, it was because I’m a fat dancer. I got that same reaction in church that I got in dance classes with semi-professional and professional dancers. All of them are surprised not just because I’m dancing and I’m dancing well, but because I’m in the front. I’m not ashamed of my body and I didn’t realize that was an anomaly for a long time. Even though I’m fat, I didn’t hate myself. Later I did research and learned that 91 percent of women – all women, not just fat women – hate their bodies. To be in that nine percent and also to be fat made me a unicorn.

Back to starting FATGIRLSDANCE, my best friend (who is also a fat girl) and I decided to start an online experiment and see what came out of it. We would learn a really hard dance choreographed by some of the toughest choreographers in the industry every week for a year. At first it was just going to be me and her, but all these other people started joining. We ended up getting international attention and doing a commercial with Shondra Rhimes. Kleenex wanted to give us a deal. All these different brands and businesses started taking interest in us just within the first year.

After the first year ended, I thought I would pack it up and write the book, but that’s not what happened. People really gravitated toward FATGIRLSDANCE, and I ended up travelling and teaching dance classes all over. I never thought I would get paid to dance and teach. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized it’s less about me teaching a dance class than me teaching an experience where you and your body can be joyful.

There’s a huge disconnect between our bodies and our brains. Dance forces us to have that connection. You’re thinking about what your body is doing and you’re looking at yourself in the mirror. All your hang-ups about your body are going to first come to the forefront. And then the more you interface with your body, the more you see yourself and think, “Oh wow, look at me move.”

When FATGIRLSDANCE first started, our classes were restricted to size 16 and higher, though it eventually became open to everyone. In the beginning, girls would come all covered up wearing sweaters. Over time they started to show up with their midriffs showing, shaking their asses to the camera. It healed that disconnect.

Over that first year, I also saw the dancers change in their confidence. Women were quitting jobs, getting divorces, getting in relationships. I realized there was something to this that was more than dancing, though it was all about dancing. It wasn’t about losing weight. It was about being happier and feeling pride in thinking, “I never thought I could do that.”

The point of putting the video of us dancing each week on the internet was to show others what fat bodies can do. Fat bodies are not lazy. Fat bodies can sing, dance, jump around, hike, do the splits, have incredible sex, we can do it all.

I finished the book last year and now I’m shopping it. It’s been an intense journey. I never thought I’d be doing this kind of work, but the way people gravitated to it, I know now it’s what people needed. And it’s not just fat girls; I’ve gotten love from the LGBTQIA community. We have been socialized to have a negative relationship with our bodies, but the quality of life that gets raised once you heal that relationship is amazing.

Photo by Kisha Bari

How is FATGIRLSDANCE organized today?

We used to have regularly free classes on Thursday nights in New York City, but they’ve stopped because of COVID. I got a grant to produce a big event on October 29th at Dream Center of Harlem, the space I’ve always used that lets us use it for free. I hope to bring the classes back after the event. Until COVID, we’d teach a dance each week and then videotape it and drop it on YouTube with a teaser on Instagram.

Otherwise, there’s an online component where people send in their footage doing any dance and we drop it on Instagram. People send us footage from around the world. We have a few formal ambassadors in Canada, London, Bali, and Brazil. And then everyone else can send us footage. It’s turning into a visibility platform on an international level.

What are some ways people talk about fat dancers that carry problematic implications or assumptions?

The biggest stereotype is that we modify the choreo for fat bodies. Sometimes we do, but in general we don’t. We’re not all able to hit the splits, for example. People on the internet comment little nit-picky things, like we’re moving slower. It isn’t true.

Beyond that, the biggest misconception I hear is that a fat body equals an unhealthy body. That’s not necessarily true. Not all fat bodies have high blood pressure, for example. I think the health and wellness industry and some of the medical industry have influenced us to believe that if you’re fat then you’re unhealthy. Doctors are always surprised I don’t have diabetes.

So people assume we’re moving to lose weight. We’re not allowed to move our bodies just for fun. There has to be some sort of ulterior motive. People assume we’re going to get thin by dancing every week. That’s another misconception – that we never work out or do planks or burpees.

People think that fat equals lazy, fat is unhealthy, and fat is our fault. None of those things are true. The visibility of fat bodies dancing assists in educating people. I’m not lazy. The flip side is we work so hard to prove we’re not lazy that we don’t give ourselves self-care. That’s also true for me as a Black woman; I’m trying so hard to beat the stereotypes that I don’t get any self-care. It’s the reason why projects like FATGIRLSDANCE are so important. Learning how to love yourself authentically means you can work your ass off and you can take breaks and you can turn off the bullshit. You can just be. You can just dance for fun. If you take the misconceptions to be true, they can be incredibly dangerous.

Are attitudes toward fat dancers getting better or worse from your perspective?

Because FATGIRLSDANCE is visible online, I’m prone to ugly trolls, but I also live in a utopia. I know a lot of plus size dancers, more than the usual dancer. A lot of dancers I know, I’m the only fat dancer they know.

I’ve gotten so many audition calls – Target, Katy Perry, Lizzo. All these people are looking for full-figured plus size dancers. Celebrities weren’t looking for fat dancers 20 years ago. Is that a shift? Absolutely. But what we’re not finding is just a call for dancers, and everybody can go. They’re specifically looking for plus size dancers because they want an inclusive look. I have found that I can’t even be mad at them because of the self-hating patriarchal culture I live in. Everyone is drinking the Kool aid, even us. We have to stop drinking the Kool aid before we can tell them to stop drinking it.

Fat people are one of the few marginalized people who are still completely okay to make fun of. You can’t really make jokes about trans or gay people, and you haven’t been able to make jokes about Black people for a long time. But if you make a fat joke, people still laugh, even fat people. There’s a certain acceptance of it. We are seeing people in certain places elevating full size bodies and making great strides, but we’re at the very beginning. There’s still so much misinformation about causation of fat bodies. It’s so much more complex than people think. We all try to work out, but there are food deserts and genetics, I could go on. We’re going to keep feeling ugly until we all get better educated.

What terminology are you comfortable with?

I wish people would use the word “fat” more. My movement is called FATGIRLSDANCE, so obviously I don’t have a problem with it. We’re fat and it’s what we are and it has to stop being pejorative. I like “body positive,” “fat positive,” I love all those terms. I also like “body neutrality.” Not everyone is going to get to loving themselves if you’ve had a toxic relationship with your body. It’s going to take some work. Neutral means we’re going to show up and take some time to get to love. It’s less pressure.

Do you have an upcoming project or focus you’d like to share more about? What’s next for FATGIRLSDANCE?

FATGIRLSDANCE was the book I tried to write before FATGIRLSDANCE happened. It’s fiction based on actual events. I wanted it to be fiction so there’s the possibility of people latching onto the story. I didn’t want it to be like a documentary because we have a lot of that, but I don’t think we have enough fat stories in the entertainment realm. The book follows three primary characters and two sub primary characters as they go through the year of dance along with some fake stuff because it’s fiction. But it’s very much based on what happened to us. It took a lot to finish it and I’m very proud of it. I’m currently shopping it in the realm of commercial fiction.

In terms of FATGIRLSDANCE, I want to build more workshops, but I really want to bring back the regular classes now that the world is opening up a little more.

Any other thoughts?

Loving your body is more than just some woo-woo body positivity shit. Loving your body is as important as eating your greens. It’s based in science. Your body can’t exist in a vat of negativity. It affects your nervous system, digestion, immune system, and sleep. It’s not just woo-woo bullshit. If you like green juice and exercising, start liking body positivity too. There’s a lot of science to back up loving your body. And if anyone needs to hear that, dancers do. Dancers aren’t doing any favors by talking shit to themselves on a regular basis. You’re not doing anything for your long-term health. It’s a process; you’re not going to start loving your body the very next day. But if you’re committed to trying, you’re doing a lot of good physically and mentally for your body.

Photo by Kisha Bari

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To learn more, visit fatgirlsdance.com.

The post The Power of Fat Girls Dancing appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

KT Kusmaul is the founder and artistic director of Body Home Fat Dance, a company that creates performance and offers dance classes centering the fat community of Portland, OR. Here, KT shares how she started Body Home Fat Dance to build a space for fat dancers to feel safe and welcome, how she relishes exploring the unique traits of fat bodies in performance, and why she seeks body liberation, not body positivity.

Photo by Leah Nash

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Can you tell me about your dance history and what shaped who you are as an artist today?

I grew up taking dance classes. Even though I thought I was fat at the time, I wasn’t in a particularly large body, but I was large for a ballerina. That set the stage for understanding that I was never going to be good enough or have the right body. So when I was about 20, I quit dance. I’m 43 now, and things might be different these days, but in the 90s there weren’t opportunities for bigger dancers.

I didn’t dance for about 15 years. I filled that gap in my life with other things that were movement-based. In my mid-30s, I started taking dance classes again, and it was terrifying. I’m not just a little fat to be a dancer; I’m a lot fat to be a dancer. And I’m older. I was going into these classes and using all my energy just to be there and be okay with being there. People from dance backgrounds have a lot of learned shame around bodies and what’s acceptable. I never felt safe but I forged ahead even though it didn’t feel like a healing space.

I dabbled and tried a lot of different studios and techniques. I love modern dance, and I wanted to do choreography and structured warm-ups. I tried a bunch of studios around town, even adult beginner classes. I have since found belonging in butoh and experimental movement, but I couldn’t find that at the time, and I didn’t know where to look.

How did Body Home Fat Dance get started and how is it organized?

Body Home grew out of wanting something to exist. I didn’t feel qualified to rent a studio and teach dance, but out of desperation I needed to create a space. Full of imposter syndrome, I started teaching classes and showing up as who I am. And for a few years I had sold out classes and built a great community. Some of the participants had never danced before and wanted to be in community with other large bodies, while others were like me and there had been a rupture and they felt like they were no longer able to dance. That was how Body Home started. It was just a weekly community movement class.

I started Body Home within a year of finding dance again. I feel really lucky because the intersection of my identities was a real gift in this instance. I’m queer, fat, and non-binary, so I’ve always been in a community of DIY artists. What we want and need, we have to make for ourselves. I did a lot of drag and burlesque in my 20s and 30s. In those practices, you just share what you got and make something out of it. I think that’s why I felt able to start Body Home.

Currently there is not much happening with Body Home. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was teaching online classes, but I hated it. I didn’t feel fed or inspired like when we could gather face to face. It drove home how much the classes were about being in community. That didn’t translate for me online.

Is there a specific project or performance Body Home Fat Dance has presented that you want to share more about?

Out of meeting all these people at Body Home’s classes, I formed a small collective of 10 people or so. We started exploring movement in fat bodies. We got a residency at Performance Works NW. That was where the magic happened. We did a lot of exploring the problematic narrative of “we dance even though we’re fat.” That’s fine if that’s somebody else’s empowerment story, but I want to know what my body does specifically because I’m fat. How do I hold my flesh in my hands and move it and feel it ripple and jiggle? I wanted to explore that subversive side that fat people hide. You’re not supposed to see me jiggle or get out of breath. It’s embarrassing if you see me get up from the floor. Or there’s the feeling of not wanting somebody I’m partnering with to endure my weight. But what if we did that? Is there a safe way to do that? We came at it with curiosity. We explored our bodies in a way we hadn’t had permission to before.

It didn’t have to be beautiful. It didn’t have to be about loving our bodies, which is something that comes up a lot in the body positivity movement. Loving ourselves isn’t going to save us from systematic oppression. I don’t put much energy into loving my body, though that’s a nice result. For me, it’s about exploring the interesting, creative, emotive things my body can do specifically because I’m fat.

I can really only do that exploration when I’m with other fat-bodied people. I have this one dancer I worked with who has this big doughy belly. She can lay on her side and manipulate her belly by smushing it into the floor. I was jealous that she could do these cool things with her body. But when we go back into the world, her belly being larger than my own, she experiences more oppression than me with access to chairs and clothes as well as judgement from people around her. But in that creative space, I’m jealous of her belly.

Out of this research, I developed a piece called Weighted Bodies. It’s an iterative piece; there have been three versions so far. In its most recent iteration, it was a 20-minute piece that explored jiggling and undulations with a beautiful cast. Honestly, creating this piece made me think about sharing power in collaboration. I am the leader and my name gets stamped on things, but creating Weighted Bodies was a collaborative effort and as a result we had to process the concept of who gets credit.

We performed a short version of the piece in an early form at PDX Dance Collective Choreographers Showcase. Then I had the residency at Performance Works NW and that’s where we developed most of the piece and performed the next iteration. And then we created a third version that we performed at arts festivals in Seattle and Portland in 2019.

Photo by Leah Nash

The response was almost entirely positive. In Portland, a lot of fat community came to support it. They hadn’t seen themselves represented in art. People in the audience had amazing stories about seeing bodies like theirs and then going home and jiggling in front of the mirror. It spoke to people in a profound way. The arts community in general responded well because they had never seen fat dance like that before. I had only seen one production before that was similar and that was in Australia. The closest thing to negative comments we got were those patronizing remarks like, “You’re so brave.”

What are some ways people talk about fat dancers that carry problematic implications or assumptions?

You’re not supposed to be fat and be a dancer. You’re not supposed to even be an average build and be a dancer. You’re supposed to have a very specific body. You’re taught to be self-critical and compare yourself to bodies around you. The dance world is one of the most toxic body-loathing places I’ve ever been. Choreographers looking to cast dancers in their performances have that internalized. Arts programs have that internalized. Walking into a dance class is a terrifying experience. I felt this pressure to prove myself: I better be fucking good to show I belong there. But the truth was I hadn’t danced in 15 years.

I don’t want to be too critical of the social media body positivity movement because I wish there had been more representation and imagery of fat dancers when I was young. But it carries forward the narrative of “even though,” like, “I have extensions and can do turns even though I’m fat.” I’m glad for those dancers to get the attention they deserve, but I want to create space for people who don’t fit those narratives about what dance is.

There’s so much fat stigma that people deal with every moment of every day. A lot if it is external but a lot is internal because we have been constantly receiving messages that our bodies are gross or ill or incapable. As a result, fat people often become disembodied. They don’t feel like dance is an option. Creating dedicated fat spaces is important for people to see other people like them and feel like it’s possible to show up.

Are attitudes toward fat dancers getting better or worse from your perspective?

I’m no expert on what’s going on with younger dancers, but I get the impression that there is more opportunity and there are more conversations. People in their teens and 20s who want to pursue dance have more opportunities than I did 20 years ago. On the other hand, I live in a radical liberal bubble here in Portland that has large a fat liberation community, so it’s hard to know what’s going on in other places. I’ve personally felt a shift here in the Pacific Northwest with arts organizations that want to engage me. I don’t think that opportunity was there before.

What are some steps that professional and educational dance institutions can take to make their spaces more welcoming to fat dancers?

One of the biggest things would be having teachers who are in larger bodies. If I went to a studio and I knew they had teachers in larger bodies, even if it wasn’t the teacher of the class I was taking, that would feel more comfortable.

Another thing is if you’re putting on a production, make sure there is seating that accommodates larger bodies. Most theater seating is not comfortable for people over a certain size. Chairs with arms are especially risky, as well as chairs that are too close together. Sometimes theaters have chairs that are drilled into the ground. In the past, Body Home Fat Dance has rented chairs that have a higher weight capacity and created a well-spaced row in the front, which isn’t perfect, because then people can’t sit anywhere and might feel on display, but it’s what we’ve tried so far. I put a sign out that said, “These chairs are reserved for our friends in larger bodies.”

It would be great if studios had an ethical commitment among teachers to not use fat-phobic language. If we’re doing sit-ups, for example, why do we have to talk about “flattening the belly” or “fat blasting,” as if the only goal of exercise is to lose weight? Studios could even make dedicated classes for larger bodies. There are some yoga studios that have “yoga for bigger bodies,” which can be an entry point. And if you’re going to sell t-shirts, make sizes available beyond an XL.

What terminology are you comfortable with?

“Body positivity” or “fat positive” are really popular terms right now, but it’s not the language I choose to use. I don’t want to feel positive; I want to be liberated. If society doesn’t stop making my life hard, that doesn’t solve the problem, even if I like myself better. I like “fat liberation,” “body liberation,” or “body sovereignty.” I’m not scared of the word “fat,” and I use it freely to talk about my work, but I interchange it with “people in bigger bodies.” It’s a bit more neutral. There’s debate about who gets to say the word “fat” and whether non-fat people should say the word “fat.” For me, if I’m having a conversation with someone who has a shared analysis, then I’m okay with the word “fat,” but if it’s someone saying, “I made a cake but I couldn’t possibly eat it because I don’t want to get fat,” then that is not okay. I think the safer term is “people in larger bodies.”

Do you have an upcoming project or focus you’d like to share more about?

I’m getting ready to make another big pivot personally and professionally. My day job is a nurse, and I am in grad school to become a psychiatric nurse practitioner. I’m hoping to find a way to bridge all the therapeutic and creative movement work I’ve been exploring through Body Home Fat Dance with my newfound knowledge about our nervous systems and mental health. I’m hoping to do that as a psychiatric nurse practitioner with a private practice while continuing to offer my dance classes that are meant to be just fun. I want to empower people to explore their nervous systems and explore how movement can re-embody them. People in fat bodies often get messages that being in their bodies isn’t safe. I want to help them meet their body again.

Photo by Naomi Ishisaka

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To learn more, visit www.bodyhomefatdance.com.

The post Seeking Body Liberation, Not Body Positivity appeared first on Stance on Dance.

I have a friend with a young daughter who is maybe five or six years old. The little girl has been asking to take ballet classes, but my friend is hesitant because she doesn’t want her daughter to develop a negative body image. Having grown up taking ballet classes myself, I retorted that it is difficult to grow up as a female presenting child in our society and not develop a negative body image.

But I must admit there is something unique to ballet, and to dance more generally, that emphasizes and prizes certain physiques over others. It’s no secret that the dance world doesn’t have a great track record of encouraging positive body image, nor the adjacent fields of fitness or entertainment for that matter.

Be honest: How many times have you casually said you feel fat, or compared yourself to others in a room and felt too big, or watched one of the infinite examples of very thin people in television and movies, or even in a dance show, and told yourself you were going to exercise more and eat better? Many of us have felt these ways because the messaging in our society is clear and everywhere: Fat is bad. I can honestly say I am guilty of all the above. I am even guilty of defending the fat acceptance movement while privately dreading the idea of becoming fat.

This is not okay. This is called fat phobia, and it can be as negative and harmful as racism, sexism, homophobia, trans-phobia, or ableism. It prioritizes some people over others for things they can’t control and then punishes them. But what’s particularly insidious about fat phobia is that weight is considered something people can control. We’ve all heard it: Fat people just need to lose weight. They just need to eat healthier. They just need to stop being lazy and exercise more. They just need to control themselves. We say these things without regard for hormones or food deserts or genetics or systemic factors like the influx of artificial sweeteners. We say it knowing that shame has never been a healthy motivator. We say it without compassion. I have been guilty of this too.

The dance world is a pretty liberal place. Many companies and presenters are working hard to understand and address their internalized racism and sexism. More women and people of color are being empowered by taking on leadership positions in dance institutions. Though we’re a long way off from attaining equity, there are clear strides toward recognizing the systemic harm done to people of color and women. Less common but still apparent are strides toward welcoming trans and nonbinary dance artists into mainstream spaces, as well as making spaces accessible and open for people with disabilities. But almost ubiquitous in the dance world – across genres and geology – is a predilection for thin bodies over fat bodies.

This predilection for thinness is among the most deeply rooted aesthetics in dance. We often dress it up as a desire and esteem for health, but I believe that fat-phobia is less about health and more about virtue-signaling. In a field where control and mastery of movement is valued, the ability to control weight is considered a virtue. Instead of this control-obsessed paradigm, can we let people be the arbiters of what they need to do to feel healthy without judgment or shame? There are myriad ways thin people can be unhealthy, both physically and mentally, but we don’t seem preoccupied as a society with shaming them.

Over the next several weeks, Stance on Dance is featuring the voices of self-identified fat dance artists from across the US. It has been a pleasure and an honor to profile these dancers and to learn what their experiences have been navigating stereotypes and prejudice. It has been saddening to discover the numerous ways they receive signals that they are not welcome in classes, auditions, even theater seating. And it has been eye-opening to learn how these artists are creating community and space for themselves and other fat dancers. I hope you enjoy reading and learning from these interviews as much as I have.

We dancers often say things like “Anyone can dance.” I envision a world where we start to live up to that truism and mean it. I envision a world where parents can confidently enroll their kids in any dance class and never worry about that ugly self-conscious body image problem rearing its head sooner or later. I even dare envision a world where dance can be a safe space from all the other fat-phobic signaling that the fitness and entertainment industries continuously feed us. Until that world manifests, let’s make a promise to each other and to ourselves to never flippantly use the word “fat” in a derogatory way again. Fat people can dance, and they look damn good doing it.

The post Let’s Take an Honest Look at Fat Phobia in Dance appeared first on Stance on Dance.