The theme is inspired by Frank Bidart’s poem about Ellen West, a real person who died of anorexia and became the first medical case for existential psychiatry in the 1970s. Trying to dissect Ellen West as a ‘clinical case’ Anorexia Socialis addresses the ways in which a person suffering from an eating disorder functions symbolically in western societies: dance and medicine, psychology and performance, all interweave in the intimate relationship we create with our bodies. 

The play focuses on the female body in order to refer to its weaknesses and imperfections, its mortality, its loneliness, the reality that surrounds it. The body that resists and succumbs, at the same time, raises many questions: Do I have a body or am I a body? What is the healthiest way of being ill? How do our desires become pathologies? How do we seek beauty?

Anorexia Socialis refers to desire and its suppression, to anorexia as a choice as well as a symptom of all those social structures that normalize us. The performance wishes to remind us that what we understand as “sick” or “healthy” is a social construction: in particular, a construction meant to direct us on how to live and to desire, on how to understand our bodies, our gender, our friends, the Other. Ultimately, the real issue is neither Ellen West nor anorexia as a medical term. The issue is the reconfiguration of desire in a world that becomes more and more anorectic.