Fat Performance

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.

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.