“Dance for me is the place where my body feels most at home and the most vulnerable at the same time”.
Clara Koehler
“It was just really cool to have this sport take over my life, in the very best way. It gave me so much confidence and made me so much stronger, healthier. I think working in hospitality really ate up a lot of my identity and having this dance side come back into my life was really amazing for so many reasons, particularly for the way I saw myself as someone who’s sexy, confident and has other sides to them”.
Kirsty Dale
“I both love being really in my body and I love studying art. I think about some of my favorite sculptures, where you do have women in incredible movement... I also just feel so empowered when I look muscular in a way and I think that can still be really beautiful and itself be feminine”.
Hannah London
“My smile, among many other things, is probably the biggest thing I was insecure about for years. When I would meet someone, the first thing in my head would be ‘what will they think about my smile?’ I used to not smile with my teeth and I would always cover my mouth. Over the years, I learned that this is what makes me, me. This is my special feature. And the more I openly smile to the world, the more it smiles back to me”.
Gabrielė Jasaitė
“I’m someone who has had a complicated history with food in the past. But I think I’m finally at a place where I don’t feel like I’m trying to attain a specific body... it feels almost odd because I think we’re so used to talking about our bodies all the time and now I feel weird because I don’t have much of an opinion on mine. I’m getting to the point where I really want to be body neutral in terms of just, whatever my body looks like that day, I’m okay with it. I find myself thinking so little about it which I think is somewhat itself also a privilege because to an extent that means that I don’t have to worry about how my body shows up in a space”.
Mariama Sidibe
“As a teenager, I always got a lot of compliments for my body. Growing up in Denmark and being a teenager in the 00s, the institutions focus on this in social gatherings, such as honoring bodies in youth clubs with prizes... I won (almost) all of them. Fast forward to present time, one year after giving birth to my beautiful son, I feel alienated towards my body. This is not the body I was complimented for, this is not the body I associate myself with. In my mind, I’m still the same girl who won those prizes, but the cover doesn’t match the book anymore”.
Christine Sander
