Kate Champion is one of Australia’s most inspiring and original dance makers. She’s worked with actors who can move, movers who can act, the old and the young, but for Nothing to Lose, her latest and final challenge with Force Majeure, the company she founded 12 years ago, she’s collaborating with fat activist Kelli Jean Drinkwater on a new work involving people whose size would almost certainly rule them out for most regular dance companies.

“I had noticed in clubs and at parties that often the bigger person on the dance floor was the more captivating,” says Champion. “I’ve been in works myself that have had a larger performer in them, and often the audience ends up mentally isolating the fat person on stage. So I found myself wondering what impact would a whole cast of bigger performers have? What would it say?

She came across Drinkwater on the net and saw that she had a film premiering in Sydney called Aquaporko! which follows a fat synchronised swimming team. The two met and hit it off at once. “I probably had inklings of the representation of larger people in society through the media – there’s an assumption that fat people are...