Written By: Julia O’Brien | Photos By: Cary Davis at Human Stories Photography
I’ve danced for Borne Dance Company for the past three years, and each year our season ending National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) Awareness Showcase event raises hundreds of dollars for the organization. This year, we were lucky to have hosted our event at Green Space with the beautiful LIC skyline as our backdrop. It was our first in-person show back since 2020, and it was an eventful return to the stage.
Borne Dance Company was first created in 2015 by Katie Kilbourn-Santiago and Kiana Moye with the goal of creating work that challenges the stigmas surrounding mental health difficulties and eating disorders. Awareness week is created and initiated by NEDA, and each year collaborators of NEDA host workshops, groups, and events during Awareness Week to celebrate recovery, educate the public, and connect people to resources they need to access adequate eating disorder treatment.
Borne’s 2022 work, titled Out of Darkness, explored the phenomenon of succumbing to bad habits or negative influences that distort our realities and manipulate our behavior. This could include negative people in our lives, vices, or cyclical patterns of behavior that do not help us be who we desire to be. The piece, which totaled about 34 minutes in length, was separated into nine movements including group numbers, solos, duets, trios, and spoken word poetry. Black and white feathers were used throughout the performance to symbolize the choices we are faced with - to either surrender to maladaptive patterns of behavior or fight to make a different choice.
As a long-standing member of Borne, the core of our work centers around raising awareness through our performances and community mental health workshops. It is at these events we are able to educate our audiences and participants on the impact of these illnesses and create a community where people feel safe to embrace themselves fully - diagnosis or no diagnosis, mental health struggle or allyship with those who struggle.
When I am not creating and dancing with Borne, I am studying Clinical Mental Health Counseling and Dance/Movement Therapy at Rider University in New Jersey. I also work part-time at a residential eating disorder facility for adolescent women. With my education and clinical experience, in addition to being 10 years in recovery from anorexia myself, I know and see first-hand the devastation of these diseases.
Eating disorders are formally the deadliest mental illness of all psychiatric illnesses. Now they are in second place, only surpassed by the opioid crisis within the last few years. Eating disorders take many forms, and for lack of better words, there is no “one size fits all” criteria for who is susceptible to an eating disorder or what it will look like.
Common eating disorders include Anorexia, Bulimia, Binge Eating Disorder, Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, Unspecified Feeding and Eating Disorders, Pica, and Orthorexia.
It is beyond the scope of this article to explain the differences between all of them, but many times these illnesses get the stigma that they only affect middle class, heterosexual, white, cis-gendered women, which is far from the truth. Eating disorders affect people of all ethnic and racial groups, religious groups, genders, sexual orientations, and ages. They do not discriminate.
Here are a few facts that are coming straight from the National Eating Disorder Association to demonstrate the severity and prevalence of these illnesses:
Young people between the ages of 15 and 24 with anorexia have 10 times the risk of dying compared to their same-aged peers.
Males represent 25% of individuals with anorexia nervosa, and they are at a higher risk of dying, in part because they are often diagnosed later since many people assume males don’t have eating disorders.
Subclinical eating disordered behaviors (including binge eating, purging, laxative abuse, and fasting for weight loss) are nearly as common among males as they are among females.
Binge Eating Disorder is 3x more common in the USA than anorexia AND bulimia combined.
The best-known environmental contributor to the development of eating disorders is the sociocultural idealization of thinness.
What makes these disorders increasingly complex is the common prevalence of comorbid conditions, or co-occurring disorders that complicate treatment and make recovery for these individuals that much harder to attain. Common co-occurring disorders include anxiety disorders, mood disorders, personality disorders, substance use disorders, and PTSD or stress-related disorders. Current research shows two-thirds of people with anorexia also showed signs of an anxiety disorder several years before the onset of eating disorder symptoms (NEDA).
In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted those with eating disorders by either exacerbating current eating disorder symptoms or influencing the onset of eating disordered behavior. We are already seeing the mental health repercussions of the 2019 pandemic, and will continue to do so for the next few years. This makes attention to mental health that much more important now than it has ever been before, including in the artistic sphere.
Borne believes art can help us heal and that recovery is possible. It is our mission to help give voice to those on every part of the recovery spectrum. We were so grateful for the opportunity to perform this year and continue to share our message. Thank you to our wonderful guest artists, and thank you to Green Space for giving us the opportunity to share our message our stories, and raise awareness for the cause.
Please feel free to follow our Instagram @bornedancecompany and Facebook page for company updates, future workshops, and performances. Or visit us online at www.bornedance.com.