August 23rd, 2024Project adapts ‘big, beautiful female theory’ for stage

Daylesford playwright, theatre maker and social worker, Rebecca Lister (pictured above) will collaborate with writer, visual artist, poet and critic Eloise Grills to adapt Elouise’s 2022 illustrated memoir “big beautiful female theory” into a play.

The project has been funded by an $18,000 grant from the state government’s Creative Projects Fund and will take Grills’ work from the page to the stage enabling a far greater audience to engage with this ground breaking material.

The book is a feminist exploration based on Elouise’s personal experience, of how fat bodies have been idealised, fetishised and demonised and the impact of this in a society obsessed with the narrow appearance ideal.

Beck, was putting together a creative writing program as part of her job as a counsellor for Eating Disorders Victoria and wanted someone to speak on body image.

Her search located Elouise who happened to be living in Daylesford at the time. Beck read the book, thought there was material for a stage production, and a friendship was born.

The two will work together over 11 months to develop a production draft and they plan to hold a public reading in Daylesford for industry professionals and others in May 2025.

Eloise Grills, now Ballan-based, is an award-winning artist and writer whose illustrated memoir ‘big beautiful female theory’ was published in Australia by Affirm Press in 2022.

The book was shortlisted for the 2023 Stella Prize, shortlisted for the 2023 Indie Book Award for Illustrated Nonfiction, highly commended in the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for Nonfiction and highly commended by the judges of the 2021 Peter Blazey Fellowship.

Rebecca Lister is the co-artistic Director of arts company Anvil Productions and a counsellor at Eating Disorders Victoria.

She is also the monthly MC of intergenerational storytelling show Generation Women and the monthly host of live chat show ‘On the couch with Beck Lister’.

Her book, co-written with Tony Kelly, ‘Growing Pineapples in the Outback’ was published by UQPress in 2020.