Fat Fables
Fat Fables Premiered at the 35th SummerWorks Performance Festival
Fat Fables is a collection of fat queer stories, written and told by fat queer people, about our lives, bodies, and beings. We draw from our fat histories, speak with our fat ancestors, and dream our collective fat futures.
Stay tuned for next season of Fat Fables, info coming soon!
Applications are now closed for the Winter 2025 Fat Fables cohort. Keep posted by following us on social media or coming back to the website for more updates.
Part One: Creation
Participants will meet weekly for 9 weeks, working together to create and devise a full-length performance.
This phase will be focused on creating work, learning new performance skills and dramaturgy. Each week will start with a shared meal, followed by writing exercises or guest artist workshops.
Part Two: Dramaturgy
After the Creation phase, participants will shape the performance through dramaturgy workshops in June and then longer, more regular rehearsals throughout July.
Part Three: Performance
In August, the participants will present their performance at The SummerWorks Performance Festival. This part of the program focuses on performance skills, exploring staging and incorporating design elements. During the festival, participants will share a community meal with the broader theatre community and engage in dialogue around the importance of fat 2SLGBTQIA+ spaces and community.
Fat Fables Story
We (Morgan and Jules) met through The AMY Project in 2017 when Morgan was a participant in the AMY Creation program and Jules was the assistant director and stage manager. We connected on our lived experience of being fat and queer. We named the reality that a lot of spaces that wanted to be inclusive, especially in theatre, left fatness out, and that when there were fat spaces they often left the other parts of us out, our race, our queerness, our transness ect. Having both had the experience of being participants in AMY, being able to tell our own stories with support and mentorship we were then empowered by our mentors to explore what a space for Fat 2sLGBTQIA+ people would be like.
When we began this project, the world and our lives were vastly different. In December of 2019 we ran a one day workshop for Fat Queer and Trans folks. We had incredible conversations with the folks who attended and it inspired us to take Fat Fables further and explore a longer process with more people. COVID hit and we had just applied for our first grant with ArtReach. We were successful in the grant but we had to shift the way we would work due to lockdown restrictions. In 2021/2022 we met online bi-weekly with the first co-hort of Fat Fables. We wrote, we had conversation, we made silly jokes about all the names of things in a world that was all fat friendly and we produced a zine!
Following this first co-hort and having learned new ways of navigating a world with COVID, we were determined to offer this program in person and to culminate with a performance. It has been our dream to see and be a part of a stage full of fat queer and trans bodies. We were successful in a second ArtReach grant and set out to do this program in person and rekindled a long standing partnership with SummerWorks that The AMY Project has held.
Our goal for Fat Fables was and continues to be to create community for fat queer and trans folks, to tell stories, and to dream of a fat future where we all thrive. Fat people deserve to be visable, to be seen and to be artists on stage, we are more than just the side character, the grandma, the mami, the tree, etc.
As we learned about Fat Liberation Movement leaders, activists and trans theorists like Da’Shaun L. Harrison, who wrote Belly of the Beast:The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti Blackness, we felt the need for a space that allows for the multitude of intersections that exist along with fatness to be centred and uplifted. We believe in the power of storytelling and that it can transform a space, such as theatre, that historically denies the existence of fat bodies.
It’s been over five years since we started this project and we are so happy to be here on stage telling these stories. We hope you leave with a full heart and a full belly.
In fatness,
Morgan and Jules
As Featured In HowlRound Theatre Commons
Check out this conversation for HowlRound Theatre Commons between the founders of Fat Fables and AMY’s current leadership team, Morgan and Jules, as they discuss what drove them to create the program.
our proud partnership with summerWorks
This will be the ninth year of partnering with SummerWorks to present an original show as part of the SummerWorks Performance Festival .
Participating in the festival is also a way for our participants to learn more about the Toronto performing arts community. Through the generosity of SummerWorks, our youth participants can attend numerous performances, partake in artist discussions, and work to build a strong network.
our Generous funding partner ArtReach
ArtReach is an organization that supports community-based arts initiatives that engage youth from equity-deserving populations who have experienced exclusion in Toronto.
In addition to funding, ArtReach provides free capacity building initiatives that aim to strengthen the community of young artists working towards social change in Toronto. Examples include grant-writing supports for youth applicants, mentorship for funded projects, and free workshops as part of our Grassroots Organizing and Leadership (G.O.A.L.) youth capacity-building series.
Grab The First Issue of the Fat Fables Zine
Created by the 2021 ensemble, this zine is packed with poetry, essays, collage and more. All funds received from the zine will go towards the program and its staged productions.