Cake
Daddy
2018 (Outburst Festival, Belfast NI)
2019 (Midsumma Festival, Melbourne; Mardi Gras Festival, Sydney AU)
A delicious interactive banquet, Cake Daddy will plunge you belly deep inside one gorgeous Queer man’s experience of fat/ness, laying bare both the fortitude and fabulosity required to step into the world as a fat person today. Cake Daddy is about being fat in a fat-phobic world. It’s about not apologising for taking up space, not trying to diet, not trying to quiet down, not trying to change our body size or put out our perfectly beautiful FAT lantern.
Performer
Ross Anderson-Doherty
Writers
Ross Anderson-Doherty and Lachlan Philpott
Director
Alyson Campbell
Composer/sound design
Marty Byrne
Set/Costume/graphic design
Leho de Sousa
Stage/Production Manager
Siobhán Barbour
Concept and dramaturgy
Ross Anderson-Doherty, Siobhán Barbour, Alyson Campbell, Jonathan Graffam and Lachlan Philpott
Performances
-
9-10 November 2018
Black Box, Belfast -
3-10 Feb 2019
Theatre Works, Melbourne -
16-22 Feb 2019
Seymour Centre, Sydney
‘Alyson Campbell’s direction is subtle and effective. Tiny moments are made throughout the work that build and curve back to create an impact at the end. Care has gone into this work and passion, a committed team creating extremely relevant and impactful work, a work that needs to be seen more. [...] There is a real need for work like Cake Daddy. This work champions artists and individuals who are oft to find themselves on the fringe of a fringe minority. It is time for them to be heard.'
- Gavin Roach, Australian Arts Review
‘Five out of five cupcakes! A beautiful, vulnerable, hilarious, queer, fat-positive, visual and literal feast of a performance. With stickers.'
‘The production is a lot of fun, and is energetically delivered […] It also has something radical to say about our view of health and weight’
- Tim Byrne, TimeOut
Research
Baking Cake Daddy: transforming fat-phobia to fat-positivity with a slice of fat-queer subversive fun to fatten the stage (2022)
Ross Anderson-Doherty, Alyson Campbell, Jonathan Graffam
In Fat Studies - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society
This article examines the genesis, making processes and performance choices of Cake Daddy, a queer and fat-positive live performance work (Belfast, Melbourne, Sydney, 2018–19). The show was made in response to performer-creator Ross Anderson-Doherty’s experience of shock and fatphobia in the audience’s reaction to his naked fat body in a previous production. This experience–and the unpacking of it–proved a catalyst for Anderson-Doherty to respond in the best way he knows: through performance and his own form of queer performance pedagogy. Through a Practice as Research methodology we, who are also members of the Cake Daddy creative team, trace the queer and “fat” dramaturgical choices within the creation and staging of this fat-positive and celebratory production. This includes the hybrid cabaret-theater form of the production, its (at times) conversational/dialogic mode, the visibility and participation of audiences, the virtuosity of Anderson-Doherty’s singing and hosting, the sharing of deeply personal material, the flaunting of fat/ness and fat sexuality onstage and the shared act of committing to a fat-positive community pledge: all of these, we assert, lead to a fat-queer utopian performative moment. Borrowing from queer theory’s move to see queer as a verb, rather than a noun, Anderson-Doherty’s co-option of fat as a verb has brought this forth: Anderson-Doherty “fattens” the space–and in the performance’s final moments he teaches audiences to conjugate that verb together as a temporary community.
Further writing on Cake Daddy:
Cake Daddy:
Fighting Against the War on Fat
(2019)
Ross Anderson-Doherty
In AUDREY Journal