Stegosaurus // ES Productions

The breadth of shows engaging with eating disorders at the Fringe in 2017 reflects the rising rate of admissions and treatment for anorexia, bulimia and newer, less clinically defined conditions. Presenting her story through a simply illustrated and focused monologue, Ersi Niaoti documents obsessive bingeing, harsh denial and destructive behaviours and their impact on her life. Tiny moments reinforce the everyday reality of conditions like these - a long pour of coke into a bucket like the sound of a purge, and the flick of a lighter an obsessive distraction. Her performance recounts a story familiar from several other shows, the continual denial of her own body’s needs and a warped sense of her own health and attractiveness. It focuses on bodily detail, on the bile and liquor of the condition, rendered in sharp language. She describes her personal climate as arctic and her visible bones as her jewellery. The bony ridges of an emaciated frame give the piece its name, a child’s observation on the changes in a loved one’s body.

The rise in eating disorders, amongst men as well as women, has been linked to the continual comparison engine of social media and shifts in popular culture. Obsessive gym going, personal grooming, and the obsession of taking the always best-facing picture perpetuate and reinforce a culture the encourages unfavourable measurement of your worst against the best of others. Clean eating, thinspiration and Tumblr goals lead more and more to a culture like that referred to in Professor Renee Englen’s psychological research as ‘beauty sick’. And whilst there are no simple answers to public health crises, continual comparison distorts perception. To observe something is to influence it, a continual pressure to change your body in the hope of better results.

Niaoti’s monologue focuses on her very personal experience of anorexia, bulimia and depression, but whilst the metaphor and language of Stegosaurus is affective in its subjectivity, the experience it documents is an increasingly familiar story.

-       Lewis Church

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Stegosaurus

The Reality of Anorexia – b-eat (Beating Eating Disorders)

NHS Digital - Eating Disorder Admissions

Eating Disorders Rising All Around the World – Eating Disorder Hope 

Eating Disorders in Men - Guardian

When Beauty Obsession Becomes A Disease – Pacific Standard Magazine

Facebook Use and Poor Body Image - UNC Healthcare

FAT GIRLS DON'T DANCE // Maria Ferguson

There's some crunk dance moves happening in Maria Ferguson’s first one woman show, Fat Girls Don’t Dance, it’s an autobiographical account of her struggles with food and body image and how this has affected her dreams of becoming a professional dancer.

Stuck in a job cold calling for Which magazine Maria is day dreaming of supplying the dance floor with some sick moves. She sings "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid as if a plea for inclusion to the world of performance.

There’s more sick moves when Maria gets home but these involve vomit, as the audience witnesses her battling with her eating disorder, obsessive exercise and calorie counting. Like every thinspiration instagram post she contorts till her collar bones protrude and runs desperately as if searching for that ever elusive thigh gap, her brows knit with determination or maybe confusion as the Meghan Trainor song "All About the Bass" resounds across the stage, a positive body image and self-acceptance anthem which entreats her to embrace herself at any size.

A beloved but expensive dance class involves tap, ballet and modern but also French Fancies, Custard Creams and wotsits. Through repetition and Tourettes-like physical tics, Maria describes her auditions, which are always met with a mantra of “too fat to play pretty, too pretty to play fat.” Maria is caught in a mental and physical loop of auditions for the indistinguishable female performer’s holy trinity of Holby City, Casualty, Eastenders.

Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon" is Maria’s Bulimia musical touchstone, a song to be sung so she recognises dangerous behaviors, but also to comfort shattered dreams and the painful daily realities and challenges of bingeing and purging.

When even record breaking Olympian Simone Biles suffers body shaming, the challenges of maintaining a positive body image seem insurmountable to most women. Fat Girls Don’t Dance is a touching, brave and at times uncomfortably honest performance that entreats the audience to challenges the impossible aesthetic of professional dancers.

- Lucy Orr

Fat Girls Don’t Dance is on at 14.50 at Underbelly, Cowgate (Venue 61) Hearing Loop. https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/fat-girls-don-t-dance

Stripping away negative body image | Lillian Bustle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME-c0l8oTkY

Proof That You Can Be A Wildly Talented Dancer At Any Size http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/05/fat-girl-dancing-video-talk-dirty-to-me_n_4730408.html

Girls with anorexia turned away by NHS because they are 'not thin enough' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/03/girls-with-anorexia-turned-away-by-nhs-because-not-thin-enough/

A resource for professionals and carers of people with eating disorders http://www.thenewmaudsleyapproach.co.uk/

HELP // Bae

Some 25 years ago, at the peak of his band's chart fame with Sit Down, Tim Booth of the band James did an interview with one of the weekly music papers in which he mentioned having reached “the enlightened state of fuck it”. It's a glorious – and evidently memorable – phrase, whose echo resounds through Help: a set of sketches by new comedy duo Bae that promise the audience an aura shakedown and a double serving of kale-flavoured happiness.

There's much to satirise in the lifestyle and self-help industry, whether it's the advice to steam your vagina given on Gwyneth Paltrow's blog Goop or the Hemsley sisters' preoccupation with the consistency of stools. In creating their parade of seminar leaders, chat-show hosts and Ted-style talkers, however, Bae are as concerned to unmask these women's micro-aggressions, insecurities and failures as they are to expose their teachings as quasi-mystic mumbo-jumbo. From the Californian guru who consistently speaks over others to the vaguely Teutonic woman who recommends groping as a method of winning people's attention and admiration, not a single one among them is beguiling as a personality.

The problem with this approach is that it risks creating the impression of heteronormative white privilege laughing at anything other than itself, by presenting Buddhism as intrinsically funny and lesbianism a lifestyle choice, and equating being “a bit of a mess” with being a loser. It also avoids the question of why people, particularly women, might find or even seek a salve in alternative therapies, “clean” eating, yoga or mindfulness. The politics underlying the self-help industry are fraught, with capitalism and neoliberalism creating the conditions in which mental health problems flourish, before selling the “cure” to considerable financial gain. Is mindfulness a way of numbing the brain to acceptance of rather than anger against social problems, or a step aside from conventional western ideas about how to live? Complicated questions underlie this material: by inviting us to join with them in declaring “fuck it”, Bae avoid the more difficult discussions that might point the way to actual enlightenment. (MC)

Help is on at 11.45 at Just the Tonic @ The Mash House until August 27th (not 20th). See venue for accessibility information - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/help

Debunking vagina steaming: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/30/sorry-gwyneth-paltrow-but-steaming-your-vagina-is-a-bad-idea

Debunking “clean eating”: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/bake-offs-ruby-vs-the-hemsleys-the-bad-science-behind-clean-eati/

Debunking monetised happiness: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/12/happiness-capitalism

The pros and cons of mindfulness: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/23/should-we-be-mindful-of-mindfulness-nhs-depression

Mindfulness put to the test: http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/my_trouble_with_mindfulness

Stella Duffy on the benefits of mindfulness and yoga: https://stelladuffy.wordpress.com/2016/07/29/the-quiet-after-the-raging/