why we dance with trash




    We pick up trash. We pick it up from the street, from the dumpster, from the park. We feel its weight, texture, size. We carry it around. Show it to people. Dance with it. Some we keep, to wear, create, or use, we rescue the salvageable trash from landfills and oceans.

    We live in a time where the old saying: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, can’t hold true any longer.  In reality, there is no way there could be enough people dedicated to picking up and finding uses for all the trash that gets produced in the world minute by minute. It’s not getting recycled either. No one is cleaning up our mess, and we’re reaching a breaking point. 

    We need to stop looking the other way.

    That’s why we pick up trash and make people hold it in their hands and dance with it, we make people see it as part of a costume or a performance. 
    We want to put trash at eye level, at the center of it all. Because trash is a treasure, it is VERY valuable. It was produced with costly resources. It took designers, factory workers, electricity, water. It took oil and natural gas. It took land. It took lives. And we throw it away. Because it became cheap.

    How come something that costly to make became so cheap to consume, so easy to dispose?

    Who is absorbing the real cost of trash? 

    Poor people, brown and black people, indigenous people, and nature.
     
    The United States and other powerful economies violate the sovereignty of many countries in order to gain control over land resources. They feed corruption, train and arm police, paramilitary or terrorist groups, or take direct military action. They also take control of the markets, making others dependent on their manufactured products. By destabilizing and weakening the social network of these countries, they also get cheap labor, further economizing in the making of their products. That is called colonization and slavery.  

    A poor person is someone who is trapped in a situation they can’t control. Someone who can’t quit their jobs, can’t negotiate their salaries, can’t protest. A poor person is someone who has been stripped of their autonomy.
    In many places around the world, indigenous people have lived and could continue to live off their land, with small farming practices, fishing, hunting, with the knowledge of how to build, repair, and heal. When land gets taken, their lives get taken too. They are forced to participate in the global economy, as cheap labor. That is when they become poor, immigrants, refugees. No more fish, no more hunt, no more medicinal plants, no more knowledge.

    We have been stripped away from ancestral knowledge. 

    The operating ideological system in the U.S. has been for the individual to get ahead, no matter the cost. That makes people poor too. They work long hours so that they can access “good” housing, education, or healthcare. The high cost of living and well-being in the U.S. is pushing large parts of the population to eviction, homelessness, and jail. They have become the human trash of this society.

    The livelihoods of immigrants, refugees, and indigenous peoples around the globe, have been sacrificed for the benefit of the markets, of the very rich only. 

    We have also traded natural diversity, clean water, clean air. We have pushed species to the brink of extinction, decimated entire ecosystems, to produce things that get used once. To produce food that doesn’t get eaten. There’s no quantitative worth to nature, so it doesn’t add up to the cost of trash.

    Trash is trash because some human lives are considered less valuable than others. That’s what racism is. That’s what the colonizer made the poor and the slave believe. And we all have assimilated these values. We have been made complicit, through consumerism, in the violence that is made against each other and against nature.

    We need to wake up and see that the reality that has been served to us is incomplete. That it doesn’t account for diverse forms of life, nor for a sustainable future on this planet.

    As movement artists, we offer an embodied practice to change our consciousness. Before we move with trash, we reconnect to mother nature, as a way to heal from the violence of the impact of our actions. Through sensation and movement, we get in touch with the love and gratitude for life. We bring to our process the awareness of the equal value of all existing life forms, an awareness de-centered from Western capitalistic values. If we are able to recognize and eradicate our assimilated hierarchical behavior, then we are able to decolonize our bodies, our homes, our time. It is by reconnecting to nature and its processes, and through the recovery and the defending of autonomous ways of living, that we can stand strong together and make a change.

    Non-exhaustive list of actions (you can add your own in the next section):
    • Educate ourselves about and stand with indigenous and environmental resistance movements at home and around the world.
    • Educate our children about the impact of consumerist actions.
    • Spend time in nature. Observe animal life.
    • Stop buying plastic.
    • Learn about the real cost of things, their carbon footprint, their manufacturing processes.
    • Learn how to’s (cook, build, repair, heal).
    • Observe hierarchical thought at work, challenge it.
    • Get used to demand our right to a dignified life (access to housing, healthcare, education) from employers, institutions, politicians.
    • Reduce incrementally the amount of waste we and our families produce. Talk about waste.
    • Get involved. Find strength in the community of people who are fighting for justice. 

    By Maira Duarte Quiroga, December 1, 2019
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    Signed in solidarity and action for change by: 

    1. Jo Stone. All of the actions
    ​2. Nicole Touzien,     All of the actions + thinking critically about how I choose to use my resources (energy, time, money, etc.)
    3. Pavel Machuca. Spend time in nature, observe animal life.
    4. Mel Orozco. All of the actions
    5.     Jill Sigman, jill sigman/thinkdance. All of the above and continue to make artistic work that shares and embodies these values
    6. Shantel Moses. Reduce incrementally the amount of waste we and our families produce. Talk about waste.
    7. Stephanie Wenzel, PS 147. All of the actions
    8. Charles Milliken. All of the actions.
    9. Isabel Varela. Continue creating art from discarded clothing!
    10. só gutiérrez lo. All and dignity for street dwellers and houseless beings.
    11. Tina Khan. Use less single use plastics!
    12. Billy Schultz. All actions. 
    13. Joanna Futral. All actions.
    14. Ana López, SE MUEVE Project. All of the actions!
    15. Zoë Rhinehart. All actions & encourage sharing of trash/treasure/resources/necessities - not just in zero-waste shops but in my home, on my stoop, on my street - with everyone.
    16. Jose Padial. All actions.
    ​
Comments:

Another thing we need to consider is the way capitalist society creates markets for our trash, so it incentivizes the production of it. People make money off of our consuming AND disposing. This is particularly true around e-waste.

Want to share my work with you all...
https://www.hfsbooks.com/books/ten-huts-sigman/

Jill Sigman

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thank you Dance to the People and this trash manifesto.
viewing the object and moving to intimate relationships with the disposable is the kind of communal growth i want to see.
gracias y maricando abya yala

só gutiérrez lo

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I am specifically trying to live a single use plastic free life. Which has changed the way I eat, cook, live and even wash my body. It has helped me to slow down and actually eat healthier! I also observe now how much plastic is in the world and how UN-necesary it is.

Jo Stone

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Love what you guys promote and how inspiring you are to everyone around you!

​Tina Khan

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I think that's also important to recognize our inherent interconnection with ALL living beings, not just humans! When we acknowledge this distinction we can become more resourced in ourselves and compassionate with ALL elements of nature. 

Want to share my work with all of you:
https://www.instagram.com/semueveproject/

Ana María López
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