A smiling woman steps on to the weighing scales in front of the stage. She is glamorous with bobbed blond hair, gleaming nails and a trendy red trouser suit. She is exactly 84kg, she states. It is an opening gesture reminiscent of an old-school diet club like the one her mother first took her to at the age of eight.
Letícia Rodrigues’s show is autobiographical, albeit dramatised through a character called Gorda who, like her, is Brazilian and has been deemed overweight for most of her life. So she is planning to lose the fat in each of her shows. The weigh-in will be followed by a weigh-out at the end of the hour. The goal is to be 116 grams thinner and so the show is also a training session, she says.
She then whips off clothes, jogging, dancing, jumping up and down to the beat of Britney Spears whom Rodrigues wanted to look like as a girl, partly because she desired a career in song and dance, too.
Directed by João Pedro Ribeiro and Rodrigues, this is a show that glints with satire and absurdism but is also ruled by dark forces: shame, trauma and rage at a world that has disallowed a girl to grow up loving her body. Rodrigues apparently wrote it after failed castings in Brazil due to body size. She is not body positive, she declares, as she sets about her maelstrom of exercise, which ranges from boxing with a plastic swan to juddering, expressive movement. For that she would have to love her body – and “I hate living in here”.
Rodrigues’s show is hard to watch at times but it is also essential in an age when society and the media surveil female body-shape. Performed in Portuguese with English surtitles, the production is part of the São Paulo Showcase and chimes with other extreme-sport shows at the fringe this year, except it is clear that this one is ironic, and truly volcanic. It ends with a ballet sequence that is poignantly, sadly, beautiful. This does not seem like a reclamation of the body but a commentary on the kind of ones we see on stage – and who is deemed inappropriate to be there.
The songs of Spears are spliced with Swan Lake, and the show becomes less narrative and more experimental, which renders it abstract but also deepens its emotional power. Rodrigues performs it mostly naked: she is presenting the body that society wants shrunken or erased.
Brave, incendiary and full of genuine shocks, this is exactly what a fringe show should be.
At Zoo Southside, Edinburgh, until 30 August
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