Bodybox
TRUSS
val smith
About the work
TRUSS is a choreographic meditation on trans community, grief, and collective luminosity. A collaboration between val smith, Eleven Greenstones and Cassie Gilmore-Freeth, this nocturnal performance follows a trans body trussed 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.