Fat Dance | Dança Gorda

Fat Dance | Dança Gorda is funded by the British Council’s International Collaboration Grants, designed to support UK and overseas organisations to collaborate on international arts projects. FABRIC is a lead partner, alongside Corpo Rastreado (BR).

The project was instigated by the artists, and Fabric was thrilled to be invited into that process.

Jussara Belchior (BR) is a fat ballerina who also works as a choreographer, a collaborator in other artists’ projects, and a researcher of practices and writings in contemporary dance. Jussara's work deals with fat people, fatness and non-normative bodies, with a particular interest in the poetics and politics of movement and positioning yourself through dance. She has a PhD in Theatre, researching fat activism, and co-founded Escrita Performativa (2019 - ), a collective interested in academic artistic writing. She has worked in partnership with Anderson do Carmo, Coletivo CIDA, Selvática Ações Artísticas, Simone Fortes, Daniela Alves, Marcos Klann, and others. She was part of MANADA (2018 - 2022), a collective of fat artists, and was a member of Grupo Cena 11 Cia de Dança (2007 – 2017).

Magdalena Hutter (DE) is a documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and photographer. A graduate of the HFF Munich, she has been making films since 2007 and teaching filmmaking since 2012. In her documentary film work, her focus is on projects about art and artists, as well as on themes of belonging. In her teaching, she has worked with groups ranging from teenagers to older adults, with an emphasis on documentary filmmaking as empowerment for queer and refugee youth.

In addition to her work as a filmmaker, Magdalena is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University in Montreal/Tioh'tà:ke. In her research, Magdalena uses documentary film, conversations/oral histories, and movement research, and works with fat performers to highlight the knowledge that their respective practices can offer, as well as the knowledge that emerges when these practices are brought into conversation with her own work in film.

Gillie Kleiman (UK) creates experimental dance and performance work. For the past 17 years, she has been making shows, texts, events, and encounters at venues ranging from theatres and dance festivals to art galleries and community spaces. Her work for audiences aims to make contemporary dance more accessible, give people tools to engage with art confidently, and find new ways to share complex ideas, often by involving non-professionals in the performances themselves.

Certain themes appear throughout Gillie's work: friendship, the role and value of non-professional performers, the relationship between work and play, singing and songs, and carefully structured improvisation. She's fascinated by what makes dance special—both for dancers and audiences—and often brings out the playfulness and humor in these experiences.

For the past five years, Gillie has focused particularly on dance and fatness. This appears in her writing (including academic research), community projects (such as a long-term collaboration with four non-professional fat dancers in Newcastle), initiatives within the arts sector, and her choreography.

Visit Magdalena Hutter 

Visit Gillie Kleiman 

Visit nottdance Festival 

Visit Fabric Dance 

Music by Tom Harris listeningspace.xyz/

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com 

Fabric is an Arts Council England, National Portfolio Organisation. 

Transcript

Becky Bailey, Fabric: Welcome to Dance Moves People, a podcast from Fabric. It's a short series of chats between Fabric artists, friends, and collaborators to celebrate the launch of our 10-year strategy. In this episode, artists Jussara, Magdalena, and Gillie talk about their ongoing collaboration, centered around a shared interest in dance and fatness.

Jussara Belchior: Hi, I'm Jussara Belchior. I'm a dancer. I'm Brazilian. I'm fat. I'm a fat person. I've been a fat dancer since I was a child. I started dancing when I was around five or six years old. Then I studied ballet, modern jazz, until I found contemporary dance, which was much more interesting to me. I graduated in PUCI, which is a university in Sao Paulo, which is where I'm from. Nowadays, I live in Santa Catarina, which is in the south of Brazil. I moved here because I was part of a dance company for over 10 years, Sena Onze. I just graduated and then started working in the company, but through all this time I've been a fact dancer and this has always been some part of the conversation because people are not expecting to... To see a fat dancer, and especially in a dance company, I started talking about fatness specifically around 2017, when I created my own work, which is called Peso Bruto, which can be translated as gross weight. This was really something that shifted everything. I was introduced to the fat liberation conversation. I was being aware of other fat artists doing fat art. And this changed everything. I left the company. I went to do my PhD studies in fat dance. And since then I've been working around fatness.

Gillie Kleiman: I am Gillie  Kleiman. I'm a choreographer. I live in Newcastle upon Tyne in the northeast of England. I am fat. Shocker. I've been fat most of my life. I did make a small solo when I first graduated from my undergraduate that was about being a fat dancer. And I performed it a lot, actually, in loads of different places. And then I sort of got interested in other things, really. I did know about fat activism and fat liberation movements, but I was a bit nervous of them for some reason. I think I was still very much dealing with living in a fatphobic world and finding my way with that. And I also did a PhD, which is about an unrelated topic, but sometimes it feels quite related, actually. And for that, I was and I still am very much interested in performances made by professional artists where the performers or other collaborators are not professional artists. I really like thinking about how This kind of work can help us imagine different kinds of futures in relation to what is labour and how we organise our access to resources or sense of professional self. So I'm still really interested in those themes, but they kind of appear in different ways now. In 2020, I was thinking more and more about fatness and really wanting to attend to it in my work. So when the Live Art Development Agency did a call out for the DIY project they used to do, which was like an open project where artists could get a little budget to run a professional development project for other artists. And I'd participated in DIYs before and I'd run one before. So I proposed to do a fat performance DIY and my idea was that a group of fat performance makers would meet. The partner organisation we were given was Colchester Arts Centre. We'd meet in Colchester over a weekend and we'd share resources, share practices and be together. But of course this was in pandemic times, so we ended up doing it online. same kind of format where everybody put in a giant pot, in my big spreadsheet, things that they found interesting in fat performance or wanted to share, wanted to look at together. And then I made a kind of curriculum over the course of several weeks. And it was great. I mean, because it meant that me as someone who was like really quite new to fat performance, but quite experienced at facilitating, I felt like I could help us navigate this, but I was like really fresh faced. and all these things were like quite new to me and also a lot of the people were really new to me and it was incredibly exciting to meet all these people from like really a lot of different places in the world coming together like at all kind of time zones to be together and think about flatness and performance. And at the end of that series of workshops on the last session, we were kind of thinking together about like what next, like who wanted to do things together or what people were interested in, what kind of support they might need or what kind of collaboration they might want. And I was really interested in doing a kind of academic book project about fat performance because I'd tried to look for these things and there wasn't something. And I was like, OK, well, I'm putatively an academic, I can do that. And Magdalena and you, we're putting our hands up too. So we've been working on that since 2020 and it's coming out next year.

Magdalena Hutter: My name is Magdalena Hutter. I'm a documentary filmmaker and a camera person. And I'm also hopefully soon finishing up a PhD in the interdisciplinary humanities where I'm using documentary film to do research creation about fatness as method in dance and movement art, which means that I've over the last years gotten to talk to a number of fat dancers doing incredible work to find out how they do their work and how being fat influences their work. And I'm also fat. I'm a fat filmmaker. I'm sometimes in Berlin, sometimes in Montreal. And I got to document these two in this project over the last year.

Jussara Belchior: So we did this project called Fat Dance, Dança Gorda, which was funded by the British Council. It was a partnership between Corpo Rastreado, which is a production company from Brazil, and Fabric from the UK, which is a dance organization. They put us to work together, me and Guili and Magdalena. We got to do Two residencies, one in Brazil and another one in Nottingham. And we got to work with fat dancers in Brazil and in the UK. In Brazil, we worked in Sao Paulo for two weeks in Casa Farofa, which is a place that Corpo Rastreado runs. We worked with Lucas Moraes. Tandara Conté, Susana Araúja, and Rodrigo Gila. And then we did the residency in the UK in Nottingham with Hilde Harland, Noah West, Tracy West, and Melissa Lauriello. And we got to work for two weeks in each place, paying people to work with us, fat dancers, developing fat art. And we got to work with my research and also Gili. We led a week each in each places. And we got to have a sharing in both places. Even had a little time to talk with the audience, especially in Brazil. It was also really interesting hearing about what they think when they see a project of fat artists dancing together.

Magdalena Hutter: And I got to go along for the entire project and got to be there both for the residency in Zophallen and the residency in Nottingham and film the process. And now in the edit, finishing a short documentary about the project. That better be done by the end of the month because then we're trying to show it.

Gillie Kleiman: It's a long process. But for me, you and Magdalena are just much more expert in fat studies. than I am and it's been an incredible education for me to be in collaboration with these two people who know much, much more than me and are able to guide me to references or being like incredibly detailed conversation about other writers' texts and unfold what those conversations are about fatness and performance or fatness and dance or fatness and, you know, the writers in the book write about different aspects of performance. And that's been very nourishing and important for me as I kind of organise my own relationship to fatless and dance and try to make my own interventions or make things possible for myself and others in the very tender space where fatless and dance cross over.

Magdalena Hutter: I think I flinch every time you say the thing about me being more of an expert, because I don't feel like an expert in fat studies at all. Like I've been doing this PhD, but in a university that doesn't do fat studies. And it very much feels like sort of only having skimmed the surface, but it's a spectrum though, isn't it?

Jussara Belchior: Yeah, but it's also what's interesting about a field. The field is so interdisciplinary. The fat studies can talk about many fields. I also sometimes don't feel like I'm an expert. And also because I can read in English and there's much more stuff to read in English and Spanish than Portuguese, which is my mother language. But there are some people that are translating references. So it's kind of like putting together a puzzle and looking for pieces that sometimes you don't know where they are.

Gillie Kleiman: It's interesting though because I only really read in any like meaningful way in English and Magdalena you read in lots of languages so like we have a sort of different also a spectrum but it's like I'm just thinking about that text by Charlotte Cooper, where she talks about how fat studies could be called American fat studies or fat American studies. I can't remember which way around it is, because so much of the discourse around fatness has come out of just like one humongous country, but one country with one kind of set of interlocking cultures. And even thinking about fatness in the United Kingdom, even though they're both Anglophone cultures, they're completely different universes. And I think there's a danger a bit in imagining that the best solution is always to translate what's there rather than to write from this new to the discourse perspective. And I guess maybe it very much relates to the kind of cross-cultural exchange that we've been engaged with on this British Council project. And yeah, it's funded by the British Council, which is a British funder, a UK funder. So it kind of brings an apparatus of British culture and the kind of aims and foci of British foreign policy or something. I think we've all seen how both fatness and dance are really, really, really different in Brazil and the UK. And then when you think about fatness and dance as one cluster, then you start to experience just how different the perspectives are.

Magdalena Hutter: This might be a tangent, but I think in talking about the DIY and the book next to one another, I just had a thought of how both of those experiences were sort of, for me at least, like the thing that you were saying, Gillie, about how you built a curriculum from the things that were sent to you from the participants. And there's a bit of a mirroring for me happening with the book where I learned so much in editing this book with the two of you and in reading and rereading and the contributions and communicating with the contributors, which I think has given me perspectives on fat performance that, you know, that's why we wanted to do the book because otherwise they wouldn't be there. So there's something about both of those experiences feeling just extremely important for me personally and my work and how it's a very different kind of absorbing of knowledge and bringing together of knowledge than making a list and trying to read it all. Maybe we should do it like snappy things we noticed. Yeah. Pre-collection of different things. We noticed in the residency in Brazil and the residency in the UK. Well, I mean the clothes. That was huge for me.

Gillie Kleiman: Brazilians will wear absolutely tiny clothes and it's all sorts of bodies. And it doesn't mean that there's no fat phobia in Brazil because we heard about the fat phobia in Brazil from our collaborators there. But for me, it was like really surprising to see how bare bodied people are. And I got to see so much of interesting, amazing fat bodies that just would not happen in the UK. Just doesn't happen.

Jussara Belchior: Because you don't mean only with the collaborators, you also mean the street. Oh, yeah. Walking, wearing different clothes. Yeah.

Gillie Kleiman: Skin and fat, like fat tissue. Amazing. And it wasn't even like hard summer. It was like spring. But I think also like, even in the like, how we dealt with our own bodies in the rehearsal room, where people got changed, for example, in Brazil, everyone was getting changed in the same room. Like there was really very little shyness. It was very practical. Whereas in the UK, kind of typical dancers maybe don't mind getting changed in the rehearsal room. But I'm not even really sure about that.

Jussara Belchior: I don't know if I remember people changing. I think people were almost wearing practice clothes all day long.

Gillie Kleiman: In Brazil?

Jussara Belchior: No, in the UK.

Gillie Kleiman: Yeah. But even the practice clothes are sort of looser in general.

Jussara Belchior: Yeah.

Gillie Kleiman: With exceptions.

Jussara Belchior: I also remember you talking about this relationship with the body sweat. Yeah. Because in Brazil, the place that we were working had no air conditioner. So everywhere was hot. So the producers were also sweating. So it's a different relationship that when you see someone else that is working in the office still sweating. British people hate visible sweat. It's not that we like it, but it's...

Gillie Kleiman: unavoidable yeah but it's seen as extremely embarrassing in the UK to be visibly sweaty okay it's just body yeah it's just body could be like the strap line of it's just body get over it

Jussara Belchior: There is also a great difference between the language. We talked about this before because we had to have a translator in Brazil. Having a translator makes things move differently because there is time for translation. both ways. So we have the luck to work with Magdalena that speaks Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, and also English besides other languages. So it was lovely to have Magdalena as well to help us with the translation.

Gillie Kleiman: Yeah, I think it just made it quite sort of stilted. And because I was the only person who didn't speak Portuguese in the room, I felt like I was having to be efficient with my language in a way that I'm generally not. It was harder to foster relationships with these new collaborators quickly because it was always mediated. With some of them, they knew some English and I was willing to try and listen to what they were saying in Portuguese and guess as best I could, based on very little. And we could sort of figure it out, but not with everyone. And I felt I became a very weird version of myself. But I think the other thing I wanted to say about the collaborators maybe in those relationships. was really like from the selection process, understanding even through that, like how people think about who a fat person is and how people think who a dancer is. And we had lots and lots of applications in Brazil to take part in the residency, over 20. Obviously, Brazil is an enormous country as well with lots and lots of people in it. And in the UK, we had like seven or eight. you know, I have been trying for almost five years now to try and understand who's here in the UK, who's working as a professional dance person and is fat, and really, really trying hard. And even with that, I couldn't find more people who could apply. And I think part of that is maybe a tighter notion of who a dancer is in the UK. and who would call themselves a dancer or put themselves forward for a dance project. Yeah maybe it's that and also maybe more of a shyness or discomfort with using the word fat to describe oneself or being included in a project that deals with fatness.

Jussara Belchior: This is what I see as well, like that how people relate to being from the dance field here is different. We worked with collaborators that were working with dance, but also working with theater or performance art. And it is really common here. I also remember the first round of introductions in Nottingham during the residency. I remember that I introduced myself saying that I worked in the dance field, but I didn't say contemporary dance and everyone else said contemporary dance. And I remember thinking about how this doesn't make much of a difference to me, even though it is contemporary dance what I do, and it can't be read as something else. But I think there is a difference in how we, at least, not only because we allow ourselves to jump from different fields, but also because we have to, because where the money is. So we have to adapt our projects to get fundings or working with different people. I also think that somehow shapes how we interact with arts in general.

Gillie Kleiman: I wonder whether it's because I don't know whether people are sort of naming contemporary dance because what they're saying is I work with dance as art rather than dance as entertainment. And just because of the context nationally here, especially around, you know, the framing of the creative industries rather than arts and culture, and a real pressure for people who want to make meaning with others to engage with the creative industries. So, you know, like for dancers, it might be working with tech or with music. but also like to work more explicitly in entertainment fields. Like, you know, I've worked in higher education for a long time and the whole field of higher education in the UK has changed a lot in dance and young people, they want to work on cruise ships or they want to work on huge tours or they want to work more explicitly in the field of entertainment than in art, you know. So I think people who do work in contemporary dance are really trying to stick some borders around the field in order to protect it a bit.

Jussara Belchior: Yeah, for it still to exist, right? Yeah. I can see that.

Gillie Kleiman: You know, I do wonder a bit about if there was another imaginary project and we opened it up to people who do dance of all different sorts, of course it would be a very different project because in this project that we've done, we've been exchanging through our own research. So it needed to be people who have the skills, qualities, experience to be able to engage with that research. So someone's been a hip hop dancer in videos, start to say they're not a great dancer, but they just do a different job. They do such a different job. Yeah, my thought was like, oh, I wonder if we found more fat people who are dancing. But I'm actually not that sure, because it makes me think of a couple of years ago. Magdalena and I were watching Eurovision remotely from each other. And the Italian group came on and they were like, there's this thing and three thin dancers and one fat dancer. And we were so excited.

Magdalena Hutter: I mean, this conversation makes me think about something that the three of us have talked about over the time, which is around access to training for fat dancers. And that maybe, like you said, you have a different interpretation also of what training constitutes for them, like between Brazil and the UK, but that across the board, getting training as a fat person, if you want to be a dancer, is highly unlikely, if not impossible. I don't know if you want to... Not necessarily advisable.

Gillie Kleiman: Like someone interviewed me lately and they wanted me to talk about body image and dance, and I did explain to them that I'm not very interested in body image, like that's not my work. You know, I'm happy if people have a positive sense of themselves, but I don't feel like that's my job. I'm an artist. I'm not a therapist. And this woman really wanted me to care about this, even though I'd explained it many, many times, that that was not what I was interested in. I wouldn't be able to add anything to the conversation about that. Then at the end of the interview, she said to me, so do you have any encouraging words for fat people who would like to get into dance? And I was like, no. How can I? How can I? I have words of warning. Like, you have to be like this and you have to be ready to deal with an awful lot of crap. Like so much nasty crap. You can't fight it alone. You're going to have to find your friends. You know, I cannot, in good faith, encourage a fat person who already has to deal with fatphobia in the world. That is enough for anyone to deal with, fatphobia in the world. And then going to dance? No, no, I think it's a bad idea. I mean, I also think it's a great idea and I want more fat people to dance and I want to make that possible. And I want to do whatever I can to make that possible. And I want to change what dance can be. And I love dance. And, you know, I'm very, very motivated to try and make it more possible for all kinds of people, fat people and other people to engage in dance. But I can't in good faith say, this is going to be sweet for you, babe.

Jussara Belchior: It was also just pointing out that during our applications, when we did the call for people to sign in to be a collaborator in the project, we have to specify that we are interested in working with people that are fed, not them fed, because there is a difference. because the dance field would consider people fat when people are just not super thin. I participated once in a talk, and I was talking about my experience as a fat dancer, and then this person who was not fat, told me that they were a fat dancer, and people at the audience was saying, but you are not fat. And then the person was arguing so hard that they were fat and that they had to listen. I'm not the one who is going to say, no, you're not fat. But there is a difference to experiencing fat phobia in everyday life. feeling like crap in dance class because you are considered fat in dance class.

Gillie Kleiman: This really came up in another project where Magdalena was also there. It was like an open thing for fat dance artists. And there were several people in the room who considered themselves fat, but would not be identifiable as fat in the world. And Magdalena made the point of like, well, maybe we just need to make that a category. Like, so that's a specific category. Because actually, like, it isn't nice for them in dance land for some of them. It's not pleasant, it's not comfortable, but it is absolutely not the same as me walking into the same studio. It's a completely different thing. And like, it's not to negate their experience, but in a way it serves to highlight just how body fascistic dance as a field is. that actually it's a very narrow, extremely narrow group of people who are allowed to dance. And I think like this whole, the past half decade of this work has really, taken me really almost all that time to go from the position that I was in for most of my dancing life, which was I love dancing. It is great. Dancing is a thin person thing. So I have to therefore be exceptional. I have to be excellent. I have to be technically really good. I have to be extra, extra creative. I have to be dead articulate. I need to make loads of friends. So I'm like, wait a second. That is absolutely unacceptable that an artistic field would be accessible to one group of people. Like that's not, it's not true that dance is only a thin person thing. But in my experience of working in the dance fields in the UK, it's like, well, we'd take that as an assumption. Take that as read.

Magdalena Hutter: It just continues to baffle me that is still the assumption that there can be an art form that is so fundamentally about the body. And then all of the bodies that are allowed to do it are expected to look the same. It's just like, There's this art form called painting, but you're only allowed to use blue. It seems a little bit limiting, is what I'm trying to say. When you think about it like that, what I end up thinking is, what a shame for dance. Yeah, totally. And for everybody who doesn't get to see other bodies moving and making art through dance, it's just, all of that is missing. It doesn't get to be developed. connected to other things.

Jussara Belchior: Yeah, and it does impact how we perceive fat bodies in everyday life and how fat people move, like just walking around the street every day, because there is no reference to the unapologetic fat moving on the street.

Gillie Kleiman: I think when we started working together, the conversation about GLP-1 drugs, about weight loss jabs, was really, really new. And they seemed quite rare. And now we're in a situation where in the United Kingdom, like hundreds of thousands of people are being prescribed these quite dangerous drugs that cause pancreatitis and have no long-term effects. in terms of, like, body size reduction. And I feel really, really scared. I feel, like, personally scared that the treatment I will receive will be even poorer as I move through the world. Either, like, you know, from people in the street or, like, my doctor. You know, like, I'm terrified of medical fatphobia, as most fat people are. But I'm really, really scared for the gains that we've made in fat culture. And I feel like I'm just learning it now. And then is it going to go away? And, you know, I went to my first fat swim on Saturday, which is like a really important, like iconic form of fat activism. And is that the last one I'm going to go to? Because everyone's going to take a Zempik. And I'm worried about what that means for all kinds of body diversity and the kind of solidarity that exists between fat people and disabled people. Also, there's, of course, a crossover between fat people and disabled people, fat people and trans people, like people who have non-normative bodies. I'm concerned about the weakening bonds of solidarity and what will be lost and who will lose out. I actually think it's frightening. But for me, it's also like, well, we've got to do this. You know, we must continue to make as much fat culture as possible and be as visible as possible. I mean, it's also unfair because it's that same thing of needing to be exceptional. Like we have to be even more articulate. We have to be even more well-referenced. We have to be even more arm in arm with each other. Also internationally. I think we're at the start of the fight, not at the end of it. With this particular round of nonsense. We're still checking who is with us. Yeah, we're losing fat bodies to look at. You know, we had Lizzo to look at.

Jussara Belchior: Yeah.

Magdalena Hutter: When we started talking about training and you said, like, this is what young people looking at dance think they need to do to be able to dance. My mind went there. I was like, wait, does this mean are we just not going to get any fat dancers anymore? Because there's going to be so few who by the time they decide that this is what they want to do are already at a point where they're like, this is my body and this is the body I'm going to make my art in. Or is it now just expected, as it always was, of people to lose weight to get to dance? And it feels like with the weight loss drugs, the new ones, it feels like being fat was always as a body diversity, slightly separate, because there's this idea of you can do something about it. And also there's always this narrative of like it being your own fault because there's all of these very simplified ideas of like how fatness comes to be. And I think it just sort of intensifies this pressure to, well, if you can do something about it, then you have to do something about it. You're the one who needs to change, not the system that's keeping you out. No matter what the long-term risks may be that nobody even knows about yet.

Gillie Kleiman: Well, and when the system is giving you the drugs, it's kind of... Thinking about dance training and the very high rates of very scary eating disorders in the dance student population, which I think is an international phenomenon, not just in the UK, but it's definitely something that is really worried about in the UK. I think it's very funny that dance as a field has not recognised that has to be at least part of the reason that eating disorders are so prevalent. Of course eating disorders themselves are very complex mental illnesses and they're not caused by one thing. The research does suggest that while not everybody who goes on a diet has an eating disorder, everybody who has an eating disorder has been on a diet. So there is some kind of relationship there and I think it's kind of funny that Dance hasn't realised that maybe if you didn't bully people for their real perceived or imaginary proximity to fatness, then maybe not so many young people in our care who are being trained to look after their bodies in a particular way might not get so ill when we're responsible for them in those training environments. And I think dance needs to shape up. I think it really needs to shape up. It's embarrassing that we haven't done better yet. And one of the things I think about UK dance, one of the things I think we should be really proud of is dance and disability. We have wonderful spaces, we have brilliant artists. It's imperfect. There's still, of course, loads and loads of ableism and exclusion, but I feel really excited to be in the orbit of these artists who make their work in a way that disabled artists internationally maybe don't always have access to. And it's funny to me that we can't sort of translate some of those principles into this other population of which I am part. I guess I am explicitly interested in fatness, like I think it's an interesting topic. But I also know that I've made lots of different kinds of work that have kind of different questions around them. Some of them are questions that run through lots and lots of projects and some of them are questions that emerge for that moment. And I know that other people kind of think all my work is about being proud, even though I wasn't looking at that at all. And I know that's an experience that people with different kinds of marginalisation also have, that it feels impossible to speak of anything else because it sort of doesn't matter, because everything will be read through this question anyway, because we're so unusual.

Jussara Belchior: I have experienced a lot of the questioning, like people surprised that I'm a dancer, or people assuming I'm a teacher. Or when I say I work in the dance field, people assume I teach, not that I dance. And people being surprised that I'm telling me, oh, but I can't do what you do, as if I'll be so So pleased to hear it. And I constantly have to explain to people that I'm a dancer. I've been practicing to do what I do. It is not like I just stood up and did something. Even though I felt like there was a change when the conversation, in fact, the activism was bigger or stronger, I felt a little different, but I also feel like this difference was so superficial and so fragile that when COVID hit, people were so scared of gaining weight for staying at home. And this was my first shock, like, oh, so everything we talked about before, it didn't stick. So you were worried. Because sometimes to me, I know that it might be weird saying like that, but sometimes to me it feels like people are more scared of gaining weight than people were scared about being sick with COVID. So I don't know where I'm going with this, but I assume that we still have to do this. I can imagine we can run from this idea that our work will always be about this non-normativeness of our body. I don't know if it is how you say it, but about being non-normative, because it's going to be a slow change when it comes. And I believe it will. I want to believe it will come. but it's going to be slow to get there. So I don't think we can see it, but we have to keep doing it. Like being optimistic and pessimist at the same time, I think.

Gillie Kleiman: I think there's a lot of sort of culmination points ahead and there already have been. Magdalena and I made a little film. So that's already a thing that exists in the world. And that in a way was attached to are thinking to that point, you know? And then you and Magdalene have done some work together. Yeah, the book, the endless book project, like that will be a big culmination. But then also even getting to the point of being able to put together the British Council application, getting to do that project, felt like the culmination of a lot of things. And then in the context of the British Council project and then kind of offshoots around it, there are also like artefacts that will emerge, artworks or, you know, Magdalena is finishing now a documentary short about the project. So that will be another artefact, but then also mine and Jew's artworks that then will be developed with the frame of the project. So in a way, it's like not a line. It's a kind of organic, weird, ever growing thing. And we haven't actually had a conversation about like, what are we going to do when we finish the book? But I imagine that we'll sort of keep trying to find ways to make things happen together.

Jussara Belchior: I was actually thinking about it because the project came in a great time for us to... We're not finished with the book, we still have a lot to do, but I believe it's past midpoint, so we're closer to the end. Yes, please. It is quite challenging to create ways for us to work together since we live so far apart, always in different time zones, but it's something that I really cherish. I like the relationship that we created and the rituals that we create for our group. And it was so nice that we got to work together in person. It felt so distant when we first started putting together the book that we would be in the same room working.

Magdalena Hutter: I mean, in some ways I feel like the book project even though we also still need to figure out, you know, what are we going to do with this? Where do we want it to go? How do we want to bring it to people? That feels a little more straightforward to me because basically we were like, there is a book that isn't there that we would like to read. And because it's not there, I guess we have to make it come into being. And for the outcomes of the British Council project, I think we're just starting to think about where this could all go. Because at the core, it's about the collaboration between Gillie  and Ju, and about you two developing your pieces, doing research, getting to work with people both in the UK and in Brazil, and about developing the artistic relationship between the two of you. But of course, people should get to see what's happening and get to see what you do in the future with that. And I think that's a really interesting point to be at, to be like, oh, wait, where do we want this to go? Who actually needs to see this? Who wants to see this? Who maybe doesn't want to see it, but has to see it anyway.

Becky Bailey, Fabric: Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do like and subscribe to help us reach more people. And keep an eye out for the next episode.