Lizzo
would have rather just hired her dancers through an agency. But, as she says on
the first episode of her new show that premiered on
Amazon Prime Video last
month, “girls who look like me just don’t get representation”.
اضافة اعلان
She is talking about “representation” in the
professional sense. However, broader questions of representation loom on
“Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls”. The eight-episode show follows a group
of aspiring plus-size dancers who recently competed for a chance to back up
Lizzo onstage and possibly join her tour as one of her “Big Grrrl” dancers.
Lizzo tells the
dancers that if they do not rise to the occasion she will send them home — or
she might not. A few episodes in, she tells them that they might all get to
stay.
“The No. 1 thing is
I didn’t want to eliminate every week,” Lizzo said in a Zoom interview.
“I’m looking for
dancers, not dancer,” she said, emphasizing the plural. If she eliminated a
woman every week, she said, she would not have anyone by the end.
A reality TV
competition that does not cut contestants may seem like a paradox, but Lizzo’s
career has always featured surprising combinations.
“I don’t have to
fit into the archetypes that have been created before like
Tyra Banks or
Puff Daddy,” Lizzo said. “They all did it their own way, and that’s what I’m doing.”
Lizzo’s persona as
a TV host is part demanding queen, part nurturing mentor. Several times
throughout the show, she delivers imperious one-liners to the camera, holds for
a few seconds and then bursts into laughter.
Lizzo’s warmer and
more supportive moments are tempered by her choreographer
Tanisha Scott, who
brings tough love and an exacting rigor to her rehearsals.
“I’m able to speak
to them from my own personal experience, to not give up and not also feel sorry
for yourself in any sort of way,” Scott said in a Zoom interview. Scott started
her career as an untrained dancer with a larger-than-average body and has
emerged as a rare success in her industry. She said she had to work 10 times
harder than other dancers to get where she is.
“So I wasn’t going
to be sweet and easy and ‘this is a bunch of roses’ and ‘we all got this,’” she
said. “No. You have to work for it.”
Scott credits
Lizzo with opening the door for the greater commercial viability of larger dancers.
“She’s making this not a trend or a novelty, she’s making this a business,” she
said.
One of the unique
elements of Lizzo’s show is how seriously it takes both the talents and
struggles of its aspiring “Big Grrrls.” Every episode features athletic feats
performed by larger-than-average bodies, including particularly jaw-dropping
acrobatics by Jayla Sullivan, one of the contestants. But the show doesn’t shy
away from the dancers’ injuries, insecurities, and occasional food issues.
Tonally, the show
lives somewhere between body positivity — a concept that has fully penetrated
certain corners of marketing — and body neutrality, a newer idea that
encourages people to accept and respect their bodies. The
entertainment and
dance industries are also in a moment of transition in their attitudes toward
larger bodies.
“There’s a movement
of plus-sized women coming to the forefront as leading roles as stars,” said
Nneka Onuorah, who directed the show and appears in an episode. “This show is
just the tip of the iceberg on that.”
Lizzo said she has
seen the change “on a commercial level, where bigger girls are being welcomed
in casting rooms.” “I’ll even hear things about, ‘Oh, we need a Lizzo type,’
which is really inspiring,” she said.
Still, Lizzo said
that there are still vastly fewer casting opportunities for large dancers.
“I’ve seen big girls being cast in music videos almost as a joke, not as being
taken seriously,” she said. “So I think it hasn’t infiltrated the actual dance
industry.”
Jessica Judd, who
runs an organization in the Bay Area called Big Moves that focuses on making
dance accessible to people of all sizes, agrees. Her group worked closely with
choreographers in the mainstream dance world for years until they grew
disillusioned by a pattern of fat-phobic comments and empty words about body
diversity.
“They absolutely
know what to say — they absolutely know they probably shouldn’t say out loud
that they only want a size 4 or below,” Judd said, “but then you look at who
gets cast.”
She recalled
comments people made about plus-size dancers being “brave” for getting onstage,
“that’s not the compliment you think it is,” she said, and the sense that
mainstream producers or choreographers were working with them to check a
diversity box, then going back to their uniform casts.
“I do not want to
be a perpetual prop for the mainstream dance world trying to work out their
issues around fatness and bodies,” Judd said.
To Judd, Lizzo’s
show is a major victory for representation but does not necessarily portend
anything for the broader dance world, where she has seen plenty of lip service
paid to body positivity but little substantial change.
“At the end of the
day,” she said, “not a lot of presenters, directors, producers, and
choreographers are necessarily invested in having fat people involved in their
organization.”
Lizzo agrees that
there is a long way to go for big dancers to be taken seriously and treated
well in the dance industry. In the meantime, she is focused on her own work.
“I just want people
to know that more than anything this is an incredible television show,” she
said, rattling off a list of the crew members who she worked with.
“I’m just fat,” she added. “And I’m just making a show about
what I need.”
Read more Music
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
