Fat Girls Don't Dance

Poet Maria Ferguson revisits one of her first artistic passions—contemporary dance—to explore the relationship between body image, fitness, beauty and performance. In this funny yet purposely exhausting one-person show, Ferguson puts her body through the wringer by enacting various dance and physical fitness drills.

Ferguson explains that she always wanted to be a performer. On the surface, she realises this very ambition by singing and dancing along to songs by Craig David and Culture Club. Yet beneath this, she also develops a language and discourse on imagination and dancers’ bodies; what punishing expectations dictate conventional definitions?

It becomes clear that Ferguson is deconstructing the points at which impossible beauty standards for women, popular culture and the performativity of physical endurance intersect. She repeats and re-performs her lines and training routines over and over again to scrutinise how habit turns to control turns to loss of control. It’s particularly applicable at the Fringe, when performers have a fixed time slot for a whole month, a central point which all other routines orbit.

Thus, the very act of performing a show about control gradually begins to convulse, before churning into chaos. Yet this conception of losing control against the social pressure to maintain discipline is never fully challenged. Particular tropes, such as running on stage to the point of fatigue, have been used time and again by performers aiming to literally demonstrate—and thereby critique—endurance. Ferguson herself is completely disarming and intends to create neutral ground for dialogue, but too often does this performance rely solely on formula.