Cultch Femme Fest 2024 Features Female-Identifying Artists

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Festival Femme 2024: Fat joke

When: April 25 to May 5, various times

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Where: Vancity Culture Lab, The Cultch, 1895 Venables St., Vancouver

Tickets and information: Thecultch.com

women’s festival is Cultch’s seasonal showcase of work by women-identifying artists, covering everything from traditional theater to hybrid performance art.

Now in its seventh season, Femme Festival 2024 features four unique works by Canadian artists that delve into topics ranging from Métis history to the experiences of immigrant communities and contemporary issues of identity.

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Among the works premiering at this year’s festival is Fat Joke.

Presented by Cultch and Neworld Theater in association with Rumble Theatre, it is the latest work from the playwright and Studio 58 graduate. Cheyenne Rouleau. Active in the Hollywood North scene as well as local comedians, Rouleau’s show blends elements of comedy, personal history, facts and myth-busting to peel back the layers of everything “fat.”

The word is being reclaimed by fat activists, fat studies in academia, and the fat community to return it to its original purpose as a descriptive term similar to tall, short, or skinny. It is also being revived to politicize it in response to its negative connotations in society.

Vancouver-based actor Rouleau spoke about the development of Fat Joke since the project began in 2019.

It began as an office staff exchange exercise in which she confronted fatphobia in the workplace with a talk on the history of anti-fatness, anti-blackness, and other related topics. From there, she created a PowerPoint presentation that she presented to friends and colleagues for feedback. This reached Chelsea Habelin of Neworld Theatre, who contacted Rouleau to commission him in the full-length play.

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Dramaturized by Rumble Theatre’s Jivesh Parasram, Fat Joke premieres in the Vancity Culture Lab in Cultch next month as part of Femme Festival 2024.

Q: How did you come to create Fat Joke?

Rouleau: As a woman, as a young fat woman, I always felt like there weren’t many roles for that demographic. I decided to create something that could be part of the theatrical canon so that people like me would have something interesting to do on stage. The parts I go out for can be grouped into several categories. In theater, it’s the roles of mom, maid, and nurse because apparently that’s what suits our bodies. In the movies, I have the secondary role, peculiar and fun, of the thin and naive, but who has no life beyond that.

Q: So you wrote yourself a lead role so you could be represented in reality?

TO: They don’t produce hairspray every season and other lead rolls like that are few and far between. It’s a little better in theater, but in film, if you’re a fat person with a lead role, the role is usually about your weight or your struggles with it. It’s not a fair or honest representation of what most people are really like, let alone the other cultural implications.

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Q: Taking BMI as a measure, almost most people fall into the “fat zone”, don’t they?

TO: That graph was drawn up by a eugenicist who only measured white men. White women, men and women of color, who have fat and weight differently, were not included. He was a mathematician, not a doctor, and was based on a formula that has no relation to health. It’s crazy to me that a thought experiment with a bad math equation is still used as a way to qualify for surgeries, health insurance, etc.

Q: Is that an example of the type of material you cover on Fat Joke?

TO: Some, but not too preachy or a TED talk or anything like that. Mainly it will be my story, my life story with many jokes. But I will include information about how we got to the place we are today and contemporary fat activism.

Q: You have included a glossary of the terminology discussed in the work, which is unusual. Why is that?

TO: It’s really hard to reach people when you talk about fat because the word has a lot of stigma. I thought it was important to make it clear what the words I’m talking about on the show mean so that we don’t have to explain it too much and people can feel comfortable with it. If you’re not familiar with the fat activism movement, it can be quite confrontational. This makes it easier.