From the Hill Country source for exceptional, award-winning documentaries, the First Tuesday SMTX Film Series screened the cult favorite, “Trash Dance” last week at the Price Center in San Marcos.
The winner of multiple awards, “Trash Dance” played to a packed, standing- room-only crowd who showed their appreciation with thunderous applause.
In 2011, choreographer Allison Orr convinced the men and women who pick up Austin’s trash to carry out an original, one-ofa- kind performance – with their trucks – on an abandoned runway in Austin.
Austin filmmaker Andrew Garrison captured Orr’s process from her first meetings with reluctant workers, to her ride along sessions in which she learned the tasks they performed, to the onenight- only performance before an audience of thousands in a persistent rain.
With a background in anthropology and social work, Orr used a methodology called ethnographic choreography that engaged the workers as coauthors as well as performers. Her award-winning choreography is distinguished by elevating the overlooked movement of work into the visible. Some of her unlikely performers have been firefighters, Venetian gondoliers and power linemen.
The unprecedented double-winner of the Audience Award for Best Feature Documentary at the American Film Institute’s DOCS and the Full Frame Film Festival, “Trash Dance” earned SXSW’s Special Jury Recognition at its premiere.
“The Washington Post” called “Trash Dance,” “sublime,” and called it “… a vibrant, moving document of such an evanescent state of grace is a small miracle in itself.”
So moving was Orr’s process, that tears of gratitude for her recognition of humanity flowed freely down the faces of audience members. By the film’s end, the audience witnessed the audience witnessed the performers experience awe and a newfound sense of dignity and accomplishment.
Wimberley’s own Jeffrey Brown is the curator and organizer of the First Tuesday SMTX film series.
Brown heads up Big Day Pictures and has produced a number of award-winning narrative features and feature documentaries in Europe, Africa, Asia and the U.S. His films have played at Sundance, IDFA, Tribeca, SXSW, Full Frame, Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Edinburgh, Jeonju, Durban and Rio de Janeiro film festivals. His films have been released in cinemas internationally, and on Netflix, HBO, Showtime, PBS, Amazon, Hulu, ESPN, AMC, Sundance Global, Sky TV, Starz, AXS TV and others.
Learn more at firsttuesdaysmtx.com.
