Bodybox
TRUSS
val smith
About the work
TRUSS is a solo performance and installation combining sculpture, sound, and durational movement to explore queer time at the speed of light. Strapped with dozens of dildo-lights, the performer crawls, rolls, twists, and bends across the container space, repeatedly tracing a living constellation of queer illumination. Each beam enacts the speculative notion that “light is queer consciousness” (smith 2025), casting queer futures across walls, floors, and bodies.
Visitors are invited to blow clouds of vape smoke into the performer’s orbit, softening sharp beams into glittering atmospheres and theatrical fog that carries spirit. The smoke sustains the performer, keeping them moving, alive, and buoyed by community care. Over hours, the work traces a slow crossing through darkness, a crawl toward collective survival, a queer march of light, desire, and hope. TRUSS composes an ecology of breath, movement, and illumination, a durational act of collective survival and queer futurity.
About the artist
val smith
Tāmaki Mākaurau, Aotearoa
Dr val smith (Pākehā, they/them) is a choreographic artist based on the lands of Ngāti Whātua, Aotearoa/New Zealand. With over 25 years’ experience as a performance artist, educator, writer, and producer, they have created work for theatres, galleries, community spaces, and outdoor sites in Aotearoa and internationally. Their practice explores socio-political dimensions of queerness, transness, and more-than-human relationality through performance, critical somatics, and collaboration.
In 2022, val received an Outstanding Doctoral Award for their practice-led PhD, contributing queer and trans somatic choreography methods to Performance Studies. They are a 2019 Arts Foundation Laureate and were the 2016 Caroline Plummer Fellow at Te Whare Wānanga o Ōtākou, University of Otago. They are currently developing The Glimmering, a choreographic body of work exploring light, fascia, and trans embodiment, while pursuing a diploma in Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy with Body Intelligence.