“You are not a victim, it is not a sad story,” says Alexandra Broeder to the nine young performers who stand in two rows in front of her with expectant looks. They rehearse for The Omen, Broeder’s latest project. Since 2017, Broeder has been working on performances about complex issues in psychiatry. This is how she made it confrontational last year TheGiftwith the then 22-year-old Anouk, about euthanasia for psychological suffering. The Omen is a theatrical manifesto about the social and spiritual meaning of anorexia. For the text, Broeder based herself on conversations with the performers, who have or have had anorexia, and her own experiences with the disease.
After the rehearsal, Broeder and three of the players, Alysha (18), Esmee (22) and Bo (30), talk about the performance in the rehearsal room of the cultural student center CREA in Amsterdam.
Why did you want to make this performance?
Brother: “You are always presented with the same story: that anorexia is caused by social media, or by corona. But those are not causes, those are triggers. It is also not a recent development at all, women deciding to stop eating. That’s been happening for centuries. In my view, it is a much more fundamental problem, and I wanted to explore what underlies this problem at a deeper level. Whether there is a connection with the patriarchal system in which we are raised.”
Esmee: “The biggest misunderstanding is that an eating disorder is about food. Conversations with therapists are mainly about nutrition. Calories, weight. During this project I learned that the eating disorder has something important to say. There is a desire expressed. As long as people don’t listen to this, you run the risk that the cause of the problem will not be addressed.”
Brother: “It’s complicated. Care providers consciously only talk about nutrition because they do not want to give the eating disorder a voice. I want to investigate what the eating disorder has to tell us.”
How did the eating disorder come into your lives?
Alysha: “I was fifteen. Corona played a role, gloom. The world sometimes overwhelms me. Expectations of others, of society, of myself. By stopping eating, I made my world smaller and clearer. It gave a feeling of control. It had nothing to do with wanting to be beautiful. Deep in my eating disorder, I felt more alive than ever. Nobody could do anything to me. I was on a kind of high, like I was immortal. Only later did I realize how bad I had made it.”
Bo: “When I was fourteen, I moved back to the Netherlands from Australia with my parents and brother. Everyone at school here seemed nicer, prettier, funnier and tougher than me. One evening I wrote in my diary that I was sad and didn’t know what to do about it, but that I could at least try to lose some weight. That that might solve something. Ultimately, it took sixteen years and dozens of treatments before I recovered.”
Esmee: “When I was thirteen, I contracted a viral infection during a holiday in Portugal. Since then I have suffered from chronic migraines and migraines POTS, a condition that prevents me from standing for long periods of time. After living with these complaints for two years, the eating disorder voice emerged when I was fifteen, which actually seemed to help me. The eating disorder made me feel alive again. Because I was underweight, my body stopped producing hormones. The migraine attacks subsided, and I was able to participate in life again. The eating disorder became a way to avoid being sick. In addition, my spiritual struggle became visible. Finally I felt taken seriously by the doctors who had made me feel unseen for so long.”
Bo: “That makes it so difficult to stop: you seem to benefit from it. As a child I wanted to be exceptionally good at something. By losing a lot of weight and becoming very thin, I felt for the first time what it is like to excel at something. That gave me back a little self-confidence. I had to, and still have to, learn that I don’t have to be Einstein or Beyoncé to just exist.”
In the performance you talk about Persephone, who lives in the underworld in autumn and winter and returns to the world above in the spring.
Alysha: “That’s how it really feels, as if I’m traveling between two worlds; the world of eating disorders and that in which my friends and family move. Dark and light. The strange thing is that it is not always clear to me which of the two represents light and which represents darkness. The eating disorder feels like a safe place, while the ‘real’ world often scares me. That is the contradiction: you put yourself in mortal danger in order to live.”
Brother: “It is all paradox with this disease. By losing weight, girls literally take up less space, they ‘disappear’. But because of how they look, they also draw attention to themselves. Girls can try to conform to a feminine ideal of beauty, but by losing weight they no longer produce hormones and physically become like children again. Doctors try to free you in the hospital from the grip that the eating disorder has on you, but in return they impose an equally strict regime from the medical staff. The woman with the eating disorder receives treatment after treatment, but you could also ask: whose problem is it that she is actually trying to solve?
What do you mean?
Brother: “When I was 17, my mother once had to go to therapy. It made me feel uncomfortable, without knowing why. Only later did I understand that my eating disorder was also a response to her trauma. Something I carried with me, but which was not ‘mine’. That is the most important thing I want to highlight with this performance: girls with an eating disorder often do the therapeutic work for others.”
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