Trash Dance, Andrew Garrison’s sublime documentary about a choreographer, two dozen sanitation workers, their trucks and one enchanting evening of unlikely poetry and humanism, won the audience award at last year’s Silverdocs Documentary Film Festival in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Happily, audiences will get the chance to see it again when it arrives on DVD this week. In the meantime, “Trash Dance” is streaming from the film’s Web site, trashdancemovie.com.
The film chronicles the work of Austin choreographer Allison Orr, who specializes in creating dances with non-professional performers. In 2009, she arrived at the city’s Solid Waste Services Department to talk with its staff members about their work, their aspirations, their relationships with the people they serve and whether all of that might lend itself to moving in a balletic, coordinated fashion in front of an audience.
That last part elicited its share of skepticism, if not outright hostility, a reaction Garrison captures with the same alert sense of humor that courses through “Trash Dance.” If viewers first consider Orr a well-meaning but misguided dilettante, they quickly see that she’s actually a deep, compassionate listener whose full attention and respect begin to empower the men and women she interrogates to see themselves as worthy of artistic self-expression.
When she goes out on the road with various teams (at one point squeamishly helping dispose of dead animals), she starts to conceive of a performance that will integrate workers and their machines in a logistically complicated but visually elegant performance.
That recital forms the thrilling, exuberant climax of “Trash Dance,” which may start out as a quixotic bagatelle but ultimately becomes a powerful ode to resilience, humor, professionalism and human dignity. That Garrison has created such a vibrant, moving document of such an evanescent state of grace is a small miracle in itself.
‘Trash Dance’ to be released on DVD
