Tuesday, November 20, 2018
Fighting theatre's anti-fatness problem
Exeunt Magazine: I’ve never been one to shy away from who I am or how I am perceived. Granted I haven’t always been so loud or owned my identity in the way I do now, but I wear my ‘stuff’ with pride – I am a working class, femme, uneducated, dyslexic, queer, poly, fatty.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
this article brings up a point that many people in the world, and especially in the entertainment industry forget. I think the author is right when they say that this ideology starts in society. It is interesting to me that in a society that has come around to trying to accept those who are different than what we have normally encountered, that being fat is still so entangled with being sad or failing. I also think the author of this article brings up a good point when they say that they came to theater because we are known to be the most accepting community out there but all we do is amplify the problem. Just like there has been a push for diversity in the arts because art should represent all types of people, we should be including different sizes along with this. Just like it is sad to think about how people are judged for what they look like and where they come from, it is just as sad to think that our loving community is leaving a group out too.
I thought this article was incredibly interesting. The arts industry is often advertised as a place where people can be themselves without shame but, in reality, societal standards and expectations often negate that principle. Most well-known performers fit into a very narrow idea of what it means to be beautiful, and those who do not are often in roles in which their bodies are the central part of their characters and are often ridiculed. I think, as a society, we have a lot of work to do to acknowledge the many many different ways of being beautiful and we need to move away from the very limited description of beauty that has hurt many people and has stifled many performers’ abilities to have a legitimate career in which their bodies are not the focal point of their personalities. I see some progress in this area but it is one that is rarely discussed and should be acknoweledged as a significant issue with a perfectly easy solution.
The public's most universal quick remedy for fat performers is, "Oh, you're not fat." As if that automatically means ugly, or having low self esteem. In the theater world it's incredibly important, to have a strong sense of self-confidence or there's no way you could ever go out and perform, however whenever someone doubts your own confidence, you feel much less welcome. Fat people always play characters like the comical sidekick, or the gluttonous evil king. In shows we are mocked and given roles that don't really have any meat to it. For a developing theater culture that is trying more and more to cast based on talent and not on physical appearance, this should also extend to body appearance. In this age of appearances, audiences begin to expect that the performers they see will be fit, but in order to break this expectation we need to fix the problem's within society and start casting in a way that is truly blind. As a performer who is studied in a very physical sense every night, we need to break the stigma that these leading, valuable parts can only be played by the attractive starlet. Especially since so much of developing a character involves what the character looks like, and if the audience cannot accept that then it makes it very difficult for the performer to feel proud about what they've done.
Post a Comment