Rope cuts into a dancer’s copious flesh and distending rolls of blubber create a swollen, moving sculpture. What begins as grotesque – a bulbous, bulging body – slowly, gradually transforms into something more graceful.

Nothing to Lose, which premieres at the Sydney Festival on 21 January, is breaking boundaries by putting seven plus-sized dancers on stage. The show hopes to challenge not only the way that we think about fat bodies – but how we see them.

“[We want] to bring out the inherent unique movements of bigger bodies,” says the production’s artistic associate and fat activist Kelli Jean Drinkwater. Director Kate Champion of Force Majeure, the pioneering Australian dance company behind the show, agrees: “The body speaks volumes. You are in awe of the sense of these bodies moving.”

“Just putting a fat body on stage is a statement,” Champion acknowledges. She wants the audience to shed their assumptions about fatness and allow themselves to become entranced. But, in a world dictated by size 0 fashion models, glossy advertising, and a billion dollar diet industry, can we ever consider fat beautiful?

Nothing to Lose thinks we can. In the trendy Sydney suburb of Newtown dancers rehearse – all of whom unapologetically self-identify as fat . One woman thunderously flops onto the floor, time and again, collapsing to the boom of ominous music, her feet tied coyly with red ribbons. She does this with abandon. If nothing else, this is a celebration of the statuesque splendour of the fat body.

“I had noticed for quite a while that my eye was drawn to the bigger person on the dance floor. They were the ones who seemed to own the moves in a more intoxicating way,” Champion, 53, a svelte former dancer, who is half the size of her charges, recalls. “And I thought wow, why don’t we see that?”

Ahead of the curve

Larger people are, for the most part, rendered invisible in society. In her essay Headless Fatties (2007) British psychotherapist Charlotte Cooper points out that photographs used by mainstream media to illustrate the obesity crisis are often cropped, leaving just torsos. This objectification, she writes, renders people “reduced and dehumanised as symbols of cultural fear: the body, the belly, the arse, food.”

“Fat bodies are believed to be lazy, inactive, unattractive, asexual, unhealthy, unsuccessful and unhappy,” notes Cat Pausè, a researcher in Fat Studies at Massey University, New Zealand. Fat activism – which started in the 1960s as a call for equal rights and less discrimination – has endeavoured to replace societal shame with pride.