I grew up dancing. My mom was a top dancer from Tahitian and with her encouragement I spent from the age of about six until I was eighteen taking some kind of dance class. Self-consciousness and the stress of my teenage schedule eventually sapped the joy. I quit as soon as I went to college.
Two years ago, while looking for a new way to exercise, I discovered a group of dance and aerobics teachers who were queer, happy, and rejected the idea that you had to look or move a certain way to dance.
Bevin, its founder Fat kid dance party, is one of those teachers. Not long after I found her videos myself, I learned that Heather was also a fan and we began planning Fat Kid Dance Parties as a wellness perk for Scarleteen staff and volunteers. After our first live class, I knew Bevin was someone I wanted to interview, and she was kind enough to talk to me about fat liberation, queerness, community, and more.
How would you describe body liberation and fat acceptance activism to people who may only be familiar with the term “body positivity?”
Every human being has a body. That’s the deal. We only get one in this life. There are systems of power and control that benefit from each of us feeling dissatisfied with our bodies. Literally the beauty industry is worth 570 billion dollars (USD) and the weight loss industry is worth 142 billion. So many companies profit from self loathing and trying to “fix” the one and only human body you will ever have.
The concept of body liberation is that each person is released from the task of creating harmony with your body.
Lipophobia as a system affects fat people more than thin people, but thin people still experience damage from lipophobia. There are other -isms and phobias that also intersect in the body that are connected to the experience of liberation: racism, ageism, ableism, classism, religious persecution, purity culture, transphobia, misogyny, homophobia, etc.
The concept of fat acceptance is this each the body is worthy of love and care. Everyone benefits from the work of fat acceptance, but of course people who experience more marginalization for inhabiting a fatter body will experience more relief from the systemic oppression that crushes them under lipophobia.
I strongly believe that no systemic change happens until individuals (that’s YOU and me!) create harmony with our bodies. There is a relaxing part of you that exists and knows that you deserve just the way you are.
The good news about the colonialist nightmare you were born into that lies to you about your body is that you can get relief from thinking this way! The colonial nightmare has held your belonging (a real human need) hostage to your conformity to standards of beauty that are literally all made up. Every time you think something bad about your body, you hallucinate this colonial nightmare.
Since these beauty standards are made up, we might as well take them down. We didn’t come here to fix a broken world. We came here to build the world of our dreams. We cannot dream freely while believing that there is something “broken” that needs to be “fixed” about the body or ourselves.
What was the original inspiration for Fat Kid Dance Party?
I took an aerobics class that was advertised as “all levels” and it wasn’t at all. I could see ten things the instructor and studio could have done to make it more accessible to more people with different physical abilities. I had two decades of event planning and nightlife production experience. Since 2007 I have been blogging, podcasting and talking about body liberation. I saw aerobics as another means of helping people learn how to feel free in their minds and bodies.
I took a few more classes and could just see how I could put together a course with all the things I know about creating experiences. I could only have tried to dream so boldly because of queer and colonial ancestors who had shown me to create this thing in my heart, even if I had never seen it before.
When you first started Fat Kid Dance Party, were there other classes or instructors that you drew from or consulted? Or did you feel like you were in uncharted territory?
All the above! I was so nervous to do this. I was a drag performer for a long time and a 55 minute class was ten times longer than a drag act. So much to memorize.
I started teaching FKDP (Fat Kid Dance Party) on March 2, 2017. All my life I have turned to dance aerobics during competition times. During my greatest frustration I bought Hip Hop Abs on DVD from an infomercial and did it for months to give my emotions an outlet. During a different breakup it was a Taebo VHS tape.
I LOVE dance aerobics and if there’s one thing I’ve loved about a class, it’s probably been FKDP’s choreography or culture. I have been unknowingly preparing to create this class all my life.
Richard Simmons is so entertaining, aside from all the weight loss talk. I knew I needed his enthusiasm.
I was teaching in Los Angeles right after he imagined the world. His former students came through my class and were generous enough to share their experiences and I learned a lot about how to build community! My self-service check-ins after Zoom classes are inspired by how Richard would check-in with his aerobics Regulars.
My dear friend Emelia founded Pony Sweat Aerobics a few years before FKDP and was very sweet when answering questions about building a clientele. She had built an aerobics following based on body positivity and being “super non-competitive” and that made me realize that it was possible that the fat-centric aerobics movement could be a thing in the world.
How was the reception when you first debuted? And do you feel like the overall response to Fat Kid Dance Party has changed over the years?
People came to my first class! And for a long time the classes were 2-3 people. I continued to perform, create more choreography and be consistent. Classes started to become more regular and then, thankfully, people started talking about it!
My biggest struggle is telling people about the classes and explaining what they are and why they should come. It’s aerobics! It’s for anyone of any size who is willing to believe that all bodies are good bodies! But people get weird when they retrieve the word “fat,” and they get weird when they work with other people.
The best is when someone lends you their audience – a person who tells their friend about it and invites them to class, a podcast interview, a journalist writing a story (hey, thanks Scarleteen!).
In July 2017, not even six months before the class, a video about the class on PopSugar went viral. 4 million views on Facebook alone in one week. It was a blessing to get attention, but I didn’t even have a website for the course yet! It proved that people wanted it where they lived and inspired me to crowd fund my own first series of training videos!
After the viral video, I had consistently larger classes for a few weeks, added a second weekly class, and then settled into the range of 3 to 20 people per class. This is still the number I see in Zoom classes. But I foresee a time where it is more popular as more people wish to create harmony with their bodies instead of using movement to change their bodies.
I’ve noticed that you, along with trainers like Emelia at Pony Sweat and Erica Nix, are creating not only positive spaces, but also distinctly queer spaces. Do you think there is a reason for this overlap?
Queerness is not only about sexuality, but about going against the obligatory ways of experiencing the world as a human being. Emelia and Erika are the most magical kind of queers whose weirdness inspires others (queer or not) to be their full freaky selves.
Belonging is a human need, and when we grow up queer (and/or other marginalized) we often trade our authenticity to fit in. When you grow up and find community with other queers and oddballs, it’s electrifying.
I’ve learned that just because someone is queer doesn’t mean they’re a safe person, but when queerness, body positivity, and belonging align, it’s a truly beautiful human experience.
How do new participants generally react to the less “conventional” aspects of the lesson, such as making Muppet faces or pretending to be the cat?
Fat Kid Dance Party Aerobics is intentionally and explicitly an inner child therapy. Parts of this project will be uncomfortable. Doing stupid things with other people is unusual.
The regulars in my class roll with it and enthusiastically embrace the silly! Newcomers are exposed to a lot more than silly moves for the first time, what I’m looking for is if they leave the class smiling. Joy is the product of my work. Got through all those awkward first times with a smile on your face? Almost everyone leaves smiling.
The mix of songs during the lesson is so eclectic! How do you choose your music?
I love all kinds of music! I intentionally spend time in nature walking every day. I listen to music on these walks and I’ll start to feel like a song could be good for class and go on a playlist. I play with them until I feel the choreography coming through.
In my experience, being in the classroom really mimics being a little kid and loving being in your body and moving in it, which many of us lose thanks to the negative messages we get as we get older. What messages, interpersonally and culturally, do you think we could adopt to help people maintain this connection with their bodies?
All bodies are worthy of love just the way they are! We can only have one body in this life and having a peaceful relationship with it is a quality of life. If people could learn to honor the wisdom that comes from our bodies as children and understand that each body is unique, I think we could transform our society.
What advice would you give to people who want to create more venues like Fat Kid Dance Party?
The person who creates the concentration creates the tone. Do the work to truly believe that all bodies are worthy of love just the way they are! Practice doing the uncomfortable thing! The inner work we do shows in the spaces we create.
If you could go back in time and give your teenage self some advice, what would you say?
I would give her a copy [the book] Individual habits. Doing things in bite-sized chunks gets things done, and I had an intense perfectionism that slowed me down and sometimes froze me throughout my teenage years and younger adulthood. I didn’t realize that you can’t beat yourself up to success, what works is building yourself up to success. The most successful, happy people talk to themselves like best friends. I wish I could teach my younger self to do this because I wasted a lot of time fighting with myself.
