Dear willing Trash Dance participant
I ask you take your rubbish from home or a wheelie bin, or trash bag and use it as you normally would during the week preceding this intervention. Upon the requested time I ask you to assemble in the selected location for Trash Dance performance. In the meantime please inform me of your chosen song and style of dance for the performance and I will make arrangements for Trash Dance with Sparwasser HQ and New York based curator Karin Laansoo. Your stage will be an empty dumpster or trash filled alleyway, using a portable ghetto blaster for sound and a video camera to capture your Trash Dance. You may crump, waltz, salsa, modern, ballet, freestyle, hump, jiggle, head-bang or jump around with your trash in whichever style you feel suits your ideas and personality best in connection with your collected used trash receptacle. Please dance only for the duration of your song and thank you in advance for your energy and willing participation.
Yours Truly, Brydee Rood.
Trashdancer from Brydee Rood on Vimeo. Dancer: Alexa Wilson.
Background
My work responds to issues and processes of
consumption; exploring relationships between human and waste in a
changing world and reflexively working through critical visual material
as a reference to environment and time. Often utilizing solar lights
and collected items of waste or things which I interpret to be
implicitly connected to processes of consuming; I tread lightly into
the less expected places and aspire to transform a physical moment
where the public and art collide. As a child I studied dance for seven
years. More and more I seek to explore moments of dance in my art
practice, only I am too shy (yet) to do the dancing myself. So I ask,
within the concept of being mildly exploitative if others will do the
dancing for me?
With this work I hope to crumble
some of recognised habits humans have created around waste disposal, a
process which regardless of how much we now speak of consumption and
/or hear about it in the media, still manages to elude our daily
consciousness. We lift a lid and throw something away... In New Zealand
we even use rainbow coloured rubbish bags and bright shiny looking
wheelie bins but there is nothing in these processes to encourage
change around how we individuals relate (or not) to the waste we
continue to create every day.
© Brydee Rood, Auckland //// New Zealand