Bodybox
TRUSS
val smith
About the work
TRUSS is a choreographic meditation on trans community, grief, and collective luminosity. This nocturnal performance follows a solo trans nonbinary body trussing itself with dozens of glowing prosthetics—an assemblage of fascia, light beams, and fluid motion. Twisting, gliding, and sparkling along pathways toward the harbour, the performer becomes a queer*trans prism, transmitting light through darkness and reaching toward transcestors across the night sky.
The work draws deeply from fascia: an elastic-viscous connective matrix within the body that shimmers, communicates, and transforms between solid and fluid states. Fascia becomes a choreographic method and a metaphor for trans kinship—durable, intelligent, adaptable, and sensorial. As smoke, wind, and water drift through the light beams, the performance activates a grief ritual honouring trans histories of sex, intimacy, and loss. Audience interactions become part of the structure, forming a transitory architecture of care and community, echoing the work’s namesake: a truss that holds, supports, and strengthens.
TRUSS invites audiences into a radiant field of queer time, shimmering change states, and shared trans presence.
About the artist
val smith
Tāmaki Mākaurau, Aotearoa
val smith (Pākehā, they/them) is a choreographic artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Their performance practice engages critical somatics and friendship-based collaboration to explore the socio-political dimensions of whiteness, queerness, and transness within the cultural context of Aotearoa. Recent work investigates more-than-human kinship, queer intimacies, and temporalities through outdoor urban performances.