Alumna explores eating disorders in 1-woman play 'This IS my BODY'

Self-loathing permeates IU alumna Amy Fortoul's "This IS my BODY," a one-woman show addressing eating disorders, body image and sexuality. In a unique combination of movement and spoken-word theater, Fortoul sang, mimed and screamed her way through the poetic autobiographical script dealing with her struggles with bulimia and self worth this weekend at the Rose Firebay in the John Waldron Arts Center.\n"It's healing," she said at a post-performance discussion group Saturday. "It has to be. I relive it every time."\nThroughout the play, Fortoul reveals her personal problems with food and body image, both of which have been an obsession throughout her life.\n"I am bulimic. I have dieted and exercised my whole life. I have a problem with food," Fortoul reveals to a doctor in one part of the script.\nFortoul's dramatic performance points out people's inability to grasp the concept that an eating disorder is a disease. At one point, her mother walks in on her in the middle of a binge. Her face is covered with food and she is crying, but her mother says she does not have time to deal with the problem and leaves for an appointment. Later, her mother tells her to come to her when she feels like she is going to binge and purge, and Fortoul does so only to have her mother tell her to wait until she is done on the computer. Fortoul binges and purges before her mother comes to her aid.\n"If I had cancer, would you tell me to wait?" Fortoul screams repeatedly.\nIn one scene Fortoul stands before a slide show of ads from a fashion magazine that depict women with unrealistically perfect bodies and screams that she is fat.\n"(The slide show) made me cry -- that utter sadness of negative body image," said graduate student Jamie Warren.\nEventually, Fortoul comes to terms with her body and reveals herself in a nude scene and through a wet white dress.\n"I feel like you are a really amazing mirror for each of us, and I'd just like to thank you," said recent Ph.D. recipient Lisa-Marie Napoli after the show.\nFor Fortoul, working on this play has become a full-time job. It originally started as an ensemble piece titled "Naked Truths" in which different actors revealed their own personal stories about eating disorders. The piece eventually made it to Manhattan's Greenwich Village for a four-weekend run at HERE Theater -- the home of Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues." Recently, Fortoul decided the play would have a greater impact if she incorporated her own life story into the piece. "Naked Truths" transformed into "This IS my BODY." \nFortoul is working on using the show as a teaching mechanism at schools and universities across the country. She compiled a reading list about eating disorders and is currently proposing the reading to be done in conjunction with her performance in a body image curriculum. She is also working on receiving a grant from the National Eating Disorder Association. She said she wants to educate people about the severity of eating disorders and how their sufferers feel.\n"It took a long time for me to recognize I have a problem," Fortoul said. "It was this private struggle for so long. I realized there has to be some good from it."\nFortoul's promoter and IU alumna Kristen Miller-Knight said they were working on getting medical schools to require their students to see the show.\n"Medical students aren't getting much on this issue," Miller-Knight said. "They get a paragraph in a textbook."\nMiller-Knight said they were also sending proposals to different sports programs because many athletes face eating disorders in their effort to maintain performance weight.\n"Everybody's experience in their own skin is difficult," Miller-Knight said.\nFortoul said that although she has been free of bulimia since her participation in an outpatient program at Bloomington Hospital, she still struggles with negative body image.\n"Sometimes there are times that I look in the mirror and think I look really beautiful and I'm comfortable with my feminine curves, but those times are few and far between," Fortoul said.\nShe said her full recovery is an ongoing process and overcoming an eating disorder is different for everyone.\n-- Contact Arts Editor Jenica Schultz at jwschult@indiana.edu.