Post: #1

The women associated with ballet are sexy, petite and slim; they're able to bend and contort their bodies into all manner of shapes and positions. Too many they epitomise the feminine ideal of what a woman looks like.

Those of you from the UK may have seen adverts on Channel 4 for their latest reality TV show: Big Ballet. They're taking size 18+ amateur dancers and giving them 20 weeks to master the famous ballet Swan Lake.

What the producers hope to achieve with this series I'm not entirely sure of; surely they don't think that this fat acceptance TV show will make any difference to the ballet industry. There's no way this show is going to change anything. Ballet is known for putting it's dancers through greulling exercises in the pursuit of perfection. Fat people don't fit in with that, quite literally.

The Guardian is running a piece on it, which has some classic quotes in it:

Quote:"Baines is a size 18 and weighs 14 stone despite being just 5ft 3in tall. It was impossible not to worry about what would happen to her in the sometimes brutal world of reality TV."

Quote:"Loughman is far more worried about the dancers' fitness than how they look. "We've been plagued by injury. One girl tore a ligament in the very first rehearsal," she says. "Fitness was my main concern – waking up their muscles and joints."

Quote:"...Sleep gave an interview declaring them "quite frankly fat. They're too big to be dancers and they don't mind me saying it." Some of the women begged to differ and were quite upset. "I think he could have chosen better words, don't you?" said one. "More like, 'These ladies are real women and they are not the traditional stick-thin dancers.'" .

The delusion in these women is incredible, there is nothing about being 14 stone, and standing only 5'2" that makes them "real".

This show is all sorts of fucked up; enabling fat women to think that they can be elegant ballet dancers, only for them to be put through what I can only imagine is a traumatic ordeal. As a small kindness, they've reduced the ballet down to only 30 minutes long - the thought of watching 20 overweight women huff and puff through the entire thing makes me shudder.

The hilarity begins tonight! So if you seeing some fatties attempting to pirouette or the poor people who have to attempt to lift them buckling under their shear weight, then tune in.

Those american readers who're interested in the shambolic performance, can get it through the "Hola" extension to access the Channel 4 on demand service 4oD.

Post: #2

Sometimes I'm not sure where fat acceptance ends and fat shaming begins. I feel like any reasonably astute and perceptive fat person would be more offended and embarrassed by fat acceptance stuff than by fat shaming.

Post: #3

I can tell you right now, the real reason for making a show like this is not to create fat acceptance. It is so we can laugh at the fatties that want to be dancers. I applaud this sort of mocking of fatties

Post: #4

I can see the show beign something like this:

Post: #5

(02-06-2014 01:39 PM)Mekorig Wrote:  I can see the show beign something like this:

The adverts looked pretty much like that.

Post: #6

Post: #7

Maybe it's a secret way to get them to slim down? Show them how hard it is to do ballet as a land manatee.