Starving for Perfection

The highly acclaimed "Starving for Perfection", choreographed by, and featuring Julie Pike-Edmond,
Wendy Hamel, and Fontaine Dubus, confronts struggles with body image and eating disorders. Audiences have called it a stirring, insightful, and masterful dramatization.

Exit has toured this recent work at Lesley College, Merrimack College, The Firehouse Center for the Arts and The Yellow School Center for the Arts.

Read more about Starving for Perfection and consider the possibility of Exit performing this powerful piece at your educational institution. Click here for a letter in PDF format with more information. Media is also available for your review in the form of video. Please contact Fontaine Dubus for questions or to schedule a performance.

View the Starving for Perfection photo gallery

An excerpt below from
Two sides of modern dance
By Sonya Vartabedian
Staff Writer, Eagle Tribune, Friday, January 31, 2003

"Starving for Perfection" is built from the written word.

Struck by what they saw as powerful, and decidedly negative, personal essays by Lesley
College students assigned to write about their bodies, Dubus, Hamel and Pike have
transformed their words into dance.

"It was incredible how critical they all were," said Dubus.

Each of the dancers selected particularly poignant paragraphs from the essays for the
program. Dubus' piece, set to the music of Kronos Quartet from the movie "Requiem of
a Dream," focuses on bulimia. Pike's centers on the roommate of an anorexic girl, while
Hamel portrays a woman with anorexia who is living in a complete illusion in regards to
her appearance.

Dubus said that each dancer approaches the central issue from different angles, but by
the end of the piece they all reach a certain level of moving beyond the struggle, whether
that means rising above it or succumbing to it.

The 25-minute piece combines straight monologues, movement in silence, as well as dance
set to music. Life-size wooden frames secured to castors were built as props to roll around
the stage.

Saying she never sets out to push a particular message with her work, Dubus believes
reactions to the piece will be wholly personal.

"There's a whole range of moments that any person who ever looked at themselves in the
mirror can relate to," she said.

She would love to tour the program to junior high and high schools in an effort to bring the
issue of eating disorders to the forefront.