Edinburgh Fringe Q&A: Katie Greenall

Tell us about your show. What can audiences expect?

Whilst initially being set up to seem like a campy show about synchronised swimming, BLUBBER takes the form of a quest, where ‘Katie’ loses ‘Body’ and embarks on a journey across strange lands, oracles and whales to find and reconnect with it. BLUBBER invites the audience to join me in rediscovering what care looks like for fat bodies, culminating in the audience being asked to take on an act of care for me.

The show uses movement, poetry, video design and live music scoring to create a landscape that treads between magical realism and epic destruction. The show’s design is centered around water, so audiences can expect to see me getting wet!

Whilst BLUBBER is specifically about my relationship with my fat body, I hope the show will resonate with anyone who has a complex relationship with their body – especially if it is marginalised in some way. I hope it also offers a glimpse of what care might be for you and your body.

Where do you draw inspiration from for your work, both in terms of creation and performance?

As someone who makes solo autobiographical work, my first inspiration always comes from my own experiences, with a primary focus on what it’s like navigating the world in a queer fat body.

When we were hosting the FAT SUMMIT, which was an outreach project alongside my previous work FATTY FAT FAT, which was at Fringe in 2019. I learnt about the Padded Lilies who were an all fat synchronised swimming group in America during the 90s. It sparked something for me, because I’ve always wanted to be a synchronised swimmer and spend a lot of time in the water growing up – and so the beginning of the show was starting to learn synchro.

I started to train with a group and I thought it was gonna be this very campy fun show about finding my tribe and having some healing realisations about my body. But the more the time went on, the more I realised it was about something a lot more complicated. It was about how severed the relationship between me and my body currently is, and so the show is focused around a quest to try and bring these two parts of myself back together again.

What are your thoughts on the festival in general and how do you feel about being a part of it this year?

I feel really excited to be back at the festival this year. I last was up in Edinburgh 2019 with my show FATTY FAT FAT, and it was the last Fringe before there was such a big break because of the pandemic, and so I am really looking forward to sharing my work with audiences there again.

I think with where the theatre landscape is at the moment there are so few places for work like BLUBBER to exist. I love what Fringe offers new work and the network of brilliant artists it brings together. It feels like venues and producers are looking for a show that is already made and ready to programme, but very few places are willing to support, financially or otherwise, shows that don’t fully exist yet. Especially work that is cross genre, ‘risky’ in someway or doesn’t have a celebrity in it.

We’ve been making BLUBBER for a long time, and it’s ready to meet audiences. The great thing about Fringe audiences is they seek out the unusual, they are happy to be challenged – I can’t think of a better home for BLUBBER right now.

Looking at this new show, how would you say it links to your previous work both personally and thematically?

I ended FATTY FAT FAT with the line, ‘I want my body back’ and we begin BLUBBER exactly where that line leaves off. The show starts reflecting on the fact that I feel further away from my body now than I ever have done before, and the show follows my journey to try and bring my body back to me.

BLUBBER is a hugely vulnerable and personal show and it’s a show I never thought I would make. FATTY FAT FAT felt much more in my comfort zone, built around a series of anecdotes and really felt like fat activism 101. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but it was my introduction to the fat liberation movement and was the first time I referred to myself as fat publicly. Through the people I met off the back of that show, the conversations I had and spaces I’ve been in, I was able to arrive at BLUBBER. In this show I want to talk about fatness in a way that I don’t think has been done before and has the intention to offer an alternative version of what care for bodies like mine might look like.

What show are you most looking forward to seeing in August, and why?

I am really looking forward to How I Learned to Swim by Somebody Jones in the Roundabout. Similarly it’s a show using swimming and water to talk about knottier themes, in this case, grief and acceptance. I can’t wait to catch it!

What’s the one piece of advice you’d give a performer coming to Edinburgh for the first time?

Drink water, eat vegetables and go and see the sea.

How can Edinburgh audiences keep up with you beyond the festival?

If you want to stay in touch with me beyond the festival best place to find me is on socials where you find me at @Katie_Greenall or my website.