The COVID-19 pandemic brought renewed clarity to systems of inequities beyond health. In the theatre and performing arts, artists and organizational leaders have soul-searched, read, and trained. They have sought to respond to invaluable feedback from consultants and advocacy efforts like We See You White American Theatre and to root out oppression from our collaborative experiences. The United States Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade propelled body sovereignty conversations to new decibels of intensity, reverberating through many of the subsequent theatrical seasons’ programming of plays, playwrights, and themes. In 2024, America has once again elected a president who peddles divisiveness, xenophobia, racism, and misogyny, championing the white supremacist ideas that a few white men are naturally superior to all others and therefore deserving of more rights and privileges. In a time when systems of power are overtly demanding most of us to be, in all ways, smaller: how do we create more space for ourselves and each other in the theatre?
I think this question has everything to do with attitudes about body size and sharing space.
For a while I have been thinking about a piece arguing a nexus of neocolonialism and body sovereignty in the performing arts hinging concretely on anti-fatness within the space that contains the art. What do contemporary performing arts spaces look like embracing fat acceptance? How could we collectively reimagine emergence of new venues interested in not only “What is this space?” but importantly “What is enough space?” But to get to those pursuits I must contend with the uncomfortable question: How has fatness remained fringe in postcolonial and “post”-COVID performing arts spaces?
I have found it is very difficult to root this piece in praxis. As I have discovered, there are not many models of fat justice and advocacy in theatre spaces themselves, and this work is mostly theoretical for me, personally. I don’t exist in this world in a fat body.
I am a white, cisgender, queer woman who exists in this world with an unearned privilege due to being thin. I have a history of eating disorders, disordered eating patterns, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorders that relate to appearance. These are the places where I enter the conversations on sizeism and lookism at large. I’m recovering, listening to fat folks, and learning the necessity for straight-size folks to advocate fat acceptance. I walk (more like stumble) in a path begun and championed by majority Black, Brown, queer fat activists and will probably utter notions some HowlRound readers know better than I do. I am open to feedback as I attempt to activate but not preach.
Fat Acceptance
I should back up to the terms “fat” and “anti-fatness.”
I don’t use the term “fat” in a derogatory way. That is a neutral descriptor as used by fat activist communities. Systemically, the theatre community, just like everywhere else, medicalizes the appearance of the body. If you haven’t read it somewhere else, then you can read it here: the terms “ob*se” and “overw*ight” are not cool, stigmatizing, and pretty arbitrarily assigning pathologies to larger bodies. Reporter and science communicator Ragan Chastain does a lot of excellent work creating clarity on evidence-based weight science and stigma. If nothing else, I hope this essay urges theatre folks and well-intended educators to eliminate these words from their vocabularies.
There are great people doing this fat acceptance work in other public spheres: the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance and the work of Tigress Osborne; journalists and authors such as Virginia Sole Smith, Christy Harrison, and Aubrey Gordon; and scholars and theorists linking anti-fatness to anti-Blackness, like Sabrina Strings, Ph.D. and Da’Shaun Harrison, to only name a few.
There is also some great work in theatre communication highlighting the intersection of anti-fatness and theatre, like this piece profiling actors navigating thin body standards/constructs in getting hired and Ryan Donovan’s new book, Broadway Bodies, that looks at casting in Broadway musicals over the last fifty years and interrogates the nature of implicit bias and discrimination with casting based on shape/size/ethnicity/color. There are people talking about representation of fat bodies in roles that have nothing to do with size. There are scholars locating intersections of fat studies and the arts, especially performance art, challenging audiences to contend with discrimination of fatness through movement and story. And there are theatre companies emerging like the Fat Theatre Project in Chicago, profiled earlier this year in American Theatre.
Who is talking about the container, the space of performance itself?
Enough Space
Unsurprisingly, theatre consultant agencies are among the few. I came across a resource packet from a theatre consulting firm that documented theatre specs and seat dimensions over the last one hundred years, as well as considerations and challenges for redesigning spaces that have landmark status, such as most Broadway spaces. I link to the packet above, but take care of yourself in reading as it contains explicit fatphobic language and goals, such as this closing statement, “Theatre is about communication between the performer and the audience, and between members of the audience. It’s important that the audience be close to the artist, and aware of each other. In the theatre, smaller is almost always better.” It could be argued Broadway isn’t necessarily the theatrical foreground for challenging ephemeral beauty and body standards anyway. Though there may be some progress in casting, most Broadway theatres follow a for-profit business model that enables choices like always casting Disney princess roles to look a certain way. I can disagree with the model and choices, but I can understand why for-profit theatre is not actively promoting body diversity.
That being said, the spaces that could be modeling and advocating body diversity, the places where theatre promises to be on the fringes—the festivals, Off-Off Broadway, and the ones that are working to champion fat acceptance—must reckon with the realities of small, intimate theatre spaces that are often in basements, up a few flights of stairs with no elevator access, or in confusing locations and buildings that are difficult to navigate to begin with. These are smaller contracts, small spaces, grassroots efforts. For those that really do want to advocate body diversity on stage and challenge the ideals of beauty standards and make an audience experience accessible for anybody…where is the money?
Everything in New York City reinforced the narrative of the importance to be smaller, in sharing and negotiating space, as well as my worth and belonging.
I lived in New York City for ten years prior to my current position as a theatre professor in the Atlanta area. And during my time there I remember phrases like “there’s skinny and then there’s New York Skinny.” I remember the reality of so many people bumped up against each other—a lot of money and a lot of poverty; a lot of ambition and a lot of crowdedness. I was entrenched in my own personal eating disorders, disordered eating, fitness obsessions, body image disorders, dysmorphia, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and breathing in the air of diet culture we all breathe in concentrated and poisonous amounts. Everything in New York City reinforced the narrative of the importance to be smaller, in sharing and negotiating space, as well as my worth and belonging.
Reflecting on these spaces where the cool, quirky, challenging, and innovative work is happening, I can’t remember fat acceptance. I certainly can’t remember fat advocacy in the composition of theatre spaces themselves. In practice, paradoxically, the places that are large theatre spaces and that can afford to pay for fat representation probably won’t, and the places that have small budgets are also small and often inaccessible performance spaces. This is the conundrum. This is what invites me to pivot the piece into the theoretical, into problem-solving and thought experiments—not necessarily what to think or do, but ways to think differently about space.
But there are steps that are being made in New York City. As of 26 November 2023, provisions in the New York City Human Rights Law protects individuals that live, work, or visit the city from discrimination based on their height or weight or body size. New York City joins Michigan; Washington State; San Francisco, California; Urbana, Illinois; Binghampton, New York; and Miami Beach, Florida as United States jurisdictions to explicitly ban size-based discrimination. This means public accommodations or alternative actions, when necessary, must be employed for most public spaces, including theatres. We will continue to see how this plays out with New York City theatre spaces and legal reverberations. Asking a larger bodied person to pay for two seats on an airline or at a theatre is discrimination. Asking a larger bodied person to ask for an accommodation if they don’t know that they don’t fit into the dimensions of a seat is still medicalizing the person and suggesting they do not “fit” into a fixed and true space, not to mention stigmatizing them in public.
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