Thinking Big

LET'S face it, if you were told that a prima ballerina weighed 15st and had vital statistics of 47-39-47 you be slightly stunned. Move over the anorexic army which normally dominates Swan Lake, because not one, but 20 Russian dancers of considerable size will be performing on Sunday when The Big Ballet tests out Scarborough's Futurist Theatre's stage, if you'll pardon the expression.

And that much weight certainly helps you get into the splits, jokes principal dancer Tatyana Gladkaya who says: "It's surprisingly easy to do the splits when you have 120 kilos of down force."

Although Gladkaya sees the funny side of larger women attempting some of the world's best-known ballet pieces, her fellow leading dancer, Yurkowa Katya, makes the serious point about not fitting the stereotypical shape for dancing: "It's very hard living your whole life being teased, to then go on and find the confidence to perform on stage in front of many people, but now we are all happy and cheerful about this."

The big message is that words like "chubby" and "overweight" are frowned on, the dancers prefer the term "fat" and laugh when it's used as an insult.

Katya says: "From childhood all of us were large and often taunted as children. We would like to see more sport activity and facilities for larger children, so it's the perceptions about larger people's abilities that needs to change."

Gladkaya adds: "We have all gained enormous confidence since we became a troupe, so, hopefully, our stories are an inspiration to fat children."

Some will be surprised to discover that Big Ballet was started 13 years ago in Perm, a city of 2m in the Ural Mountains, by Yevgeny Panfilov, one of Russia's most prominent choreographers, who deliberately set out to prove that fat, untrained youngsters could become dancers. It is perhaps a strange irony that Panfilov was stabbed to death in 2002 in his apartment. The motive was thought to be robbery. His big project continued and Gladkaya comments: "When Big Ballet started this was our first audition and many, many people under 80 kilos were rejected and turned away. Now the minimum is 100 kilos."

Big Ballet has acquired a somewhat smaller number of groupies, who follow the show on tour, and audiences tend to be slightly more male than female. Some myths do remain. The dancers claim they would be ill if they lost weight with Katya's view being: "We eat normal amounts of food and the same kind of food as everyone else. It's our genetics, in our genes, that we don't lose the weight like other people do and the food is stored as fat."

Show director Natalie Lenskikh is a little more direct: "They eat all the time, they are always eating..."

So the question turns to the age old rivalry between the people seen as fat in society and today's Size Zero ballet dancers.

Katya says: "They are extremely jealous of us. Generally the feedback they give when they see us perform is very good as we move in very similar ways, splits, etcetera, and so they are able to appreciate what it takes for us to dance like this, se we have appreciation of each other's work.

"Personally, I have been dancing since childhood, I always loved to dance, so when Big Ballet was formed it was a great opportunity. The Big Ballet works very well for the heart and soul."

But Gladkaya goes on to admit that the company's choreographer is very petite and works with traditional ballet companies "so we know we have a good teacher.

"Really, everybody has a right to express themselves how they like, so we will do that anyway."

* Big Ballet, Scarborough Futurust Theatre, Sunday, at 8pm. Box Office: 01723-374500 or

01723-365789