Intra-acting fat suits, tutu flesh, and sweaty skins: material-semiotic clashes in Maguy Marin’s BalletGroosland

Costumes perform; they affect those wearing them and embody different cultural, historical, and material resonances that viewers interpret. One particular type of costuming has consistently provoked scholars: the fat suit. Compared to both blackface and drag, scholars have analyzed the fat suit’s problematic and radical nature. This article considers the fat suit’s dynamics within ballet by looking closely at French choreographer Maguy Marin’s Groosland. Premiered in 1989, Groosland continues to tour internationally, and like many of Marin’s works, presents overt social commentary. With a new materialist philosophical framework, I analyze Groosland’s material and discursive aspects and apply feminist philosopher Karen Barad’s concept of intra-activity to unpack their relationship to one another. I argue the ballet’s costume-dancer and costume-choreography intra-actions generate both subversive choreographic tactics and fatphobic stereotypes. Furthermore, in reflecting upon skin studies scholarship, I claim Groosland’s fat suits ignite an uncanny sensation by resembling human skin. This, matched with doll-like choreography, provides a posthuman revelation that exposes human objectness and, therefore, challenges perceived divides between nonhuman and human. Studying Groosland prompts larger questions surrounding the cultural construction of working-class bodies, fat bodies, and ballet bodies and ultimately demonstrates what one can uncover in considering fat suits as agential matter.