SABRA LANE, PRESENTER: You're unlikely to come across a professional dancer who's anything but taut and trim. But a new dance theatre production making its debut at the 2015 Sydney Festival is challenging the perception of what a dancer's body should look like. It's called Nothing to Lose and features a cast of people who are not ashamed to be fat. Monique Schafter had a sneak peek at the rehearsals.

DANCER: You are a fat bitch.

DANCER II: Are you gonna eat that?

DANCER III: Um, who ate all the pies?

MONIQUE SCHAFTER, REPORTER: They mightn't have the rippled abs or firm butts of pro' dancers, but these guys will be busting out moves in front of huge crowds at the Sydney Festival.

They're part of a new dance theatre piece that aims to question our assumptions of what a dancer's body should look like. It's called Nothing to Lose.

KATE CHAMPION, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: I have gradually noticed that when I was out socially, that my eyes were drawn to the dance floor to the person who was the biggest on the dance floor because they really owned how they moved. And I started to think, "Why don't I see that on stage?" ... I started to think how limited traditional dancers' bodies are in expressing the full scope of the human condition.

MONIQUE SCHAFTER: Award-winning director-choreographer Kate Champion didn't know what it was like to be big, so recruited the help of artist and fat activist Kelli Jean Drinkwater.

KATE CHAMPION: Kelli Jean can give me information that I just don't understand. You know, how bits move or how it feels or how feet get more sore, more quickly, carrying more weight.

KELLI JEAN DRINKWATER, ARTIST & FAT ACTIVIST: Or how incredibly flexible we can be.

KATE CHAMPION: Incredibly flexible.

KELLI JEAN DRINKWATER: Surprisingly flexible and strong.

ALLY GARRETT, PERFORMER: If you look you can really see my dimpled thigh. So part of the show is about getting an opportunity to see the types of bodies that you don't usually see.

MONIQUE SCHAFTER: Ally Garrett is one of the seven core plus-sized performers whose personal experiences are explored in the piece.

How do you describe your body?

ALLY GARRETT: I use the word fat because to me it's just another word. I say I've got brown hair, I'm average height and I'm fat. Green eyes. Yeah. ... Whether it's the experience of going into a shop and grabbing the biggest item that you can see and just checking for some elastic, "Will this fit?" Getting yelled at when you go down the street. Often when I'm out exercising, that's when people will yell at me the most. And sometimes I'm like, "Well, what do you guys want? Do you just want me to sit at home? Can I not win as a bigger person?"

KELLI JEAN DRINKWATER: We're so constantly bombarded by the obesity epidemic and the obesity debate in such a negative and skewed way, that, for me, this is a long time coming to have this opportunity to actually explore that experience and explore these people's lives without that kind of negative lens.

KATE CHAMPION: A lot of these subjects are hard to avoid, but the things that aren't driving it: it's not a health message, it's not a freak show and I'm trying for it not to be driven by its politics, although it is inherently political.

KELLI JEAN DRINKWATER: Instantaneously there was this palpable camaraderie and this sense of relief that we were all here, we were being taken seriously as performers and we were able to really express ourselves physically without judgment and people are really interested in that and that was such an incredible experience.

MONIQUE SCHAFTER: How do you think audiences will respond to this piece?

KATE CHAMPION: If they do come with face-value judgments or ideas of fat people, that they see a side that they didn't expect and that they possibly look at them in a different way.

KELLI JEAN DRINKWATER: There's an incredible joy in this show and we do have, luckily, a cast of hilarious people, which is a bit of a cliche that all the fat people are really funny, but we are! (Laughs)

SABRA LANE: Monique Schafter reporting.