‘Disposable Goods’ prove quite valuable

On Friday, Feb. 26, four dancers clothed in recycled clothes will command the FlynnSpace, Burlington stage in a performance titled “Disposable Goods.” However, seemingly antithetical to the environmentally-aware themes pervading the show, they will also share the floor with a brand-new toaster oven. Instead of still holding burnt crumbs from the ’80s, the toaster’s marks are more like scars from having its price tag prematurely ripped from its side. But it’s not the performers’ fault, really.

“I set out to make it very low-maintenance,” Artistic Director and College Artist-in-Residence in Dance Tiffany Rhynard explained. “I tried not to buy anything new. A lot of the costumes are used; I found them on eBay, or I found them in thrift stores. The toaster oven was new. That was the one thing that we had to buy because the first one that we brought in that was used started smoking.”

Preventing the show from going up in flames — literally and figuratively — was only one of Rhynard’s many tasks. While she gives herself a specific title in the program notes, Rhynard has her hand in pretty much every aspect of the performance. At the same time, every production she engages in is extremely collaborative.

“I enter the rehearsal process willingly communicating that I don’t have it all figured out, and that I don’t know yet,” Rhynard said. “And I leave some things open and we’ll come back to it … or I’ll ask them [the dancers], ‘What does that feel like? How does this transition feel when we go from this section to this section?’ They give me feedback and that informs my decisions too.”

In her program notes, Rhynard says the origin of “Disposable Goods” arose from listening to the CEO of Stonyfield Farms, Gary Hirschberg, at last year’s graduation ceremony. “He spoke about a magical place called ‘away’ where everything goes that we don’t want to deal with,” Rhynard’s notes say. “And in this case, he was talking about trash and how his company deals with its waste. So of course I thought about my own crap too. Refuse. Rubbish. Riffraff. Scum. The Unwanted. We ship it out in metric tons by the truckload every day. Gone. Out of sight, out of mind.”

With idea in hand, Rhynard received a grant from the Vermont Arts Council to produce the dance, which has already shown a few times and will premiere in other locations in the next few months. Following Burlington, the four dancers — Ellen Smith-Ahern ’05, Yina Ng ’08, Simon Thomas-Train ’09 and Rhynard — will travel to New York City.

No matter the venue, Rhynard hopes her viewers walk away having had their consciences peaked. “I don’t have this expectation that the audience will all go, ‘Oh. A-ha!’” and have the same conclusion at the end,” she said. “I hope that it poses questions and gives the audience something to think about, to ponder, to chew over … I willingly accept or sign the contract that some people might not like it, or might not grasp on, or have the same interest in the subject matter. There are certain things that are out of my control.”

Despite the realization that not all are ready to be challenged, Rhynard will still attempt to provoke a “shift in perspective” or a “kinesthetic response.” Although it is a comparatively low-maintenance performance, “Disposable Goods” distinguishes itself through the participatory opportunity for the audience. In this way, the dancers hope to further elucidate and convey their message. As the Web site for Rhynard’s dance company, Big Action Performance Ensemble, explains, the group is “not interested in entertaining, pleasing or holding your hand.” Instead, Big APE’s dancing is about forcing you to “think, feel, react, move, sit up, stand up and take action.”

Composed of four parts — “Spill,” “Away (from here),” “Trash” and “Necessity,” — the show centers on the question, posed by Rhynard, of why we are driven to consume.

“There are two threads running through ‘Disposable Goods,’ which is this mass consumption and excess and the frivolous nature that people in our culture lead their lives, myself included. I mean, I recycle, but I’m no saint. I’m not perfect,” Rhynard laughed. “And then the other track is tzhis question: Why are certain people thrown out of the community? Is it because they’re breaking the law? Or not fitting in? Or not able to make the right choices?” People, it turns out, are “disposable goods” as well.

One of the dancers, Ng, elaborated on the piece “‘Disposable Goods’ is a piece that is falling apart, and makes its point falling apart,” she said. “It’s almost like a collage but yet it’s not a piece of choreography that follows the ‘stream of consciousness.’ It makes a more substantial point than that … But the feeling of separation or dissection … each part away from the others … informs us much of the position we are in when we’re disposing unwanted material or consuming excessively.”

With the upcoming performance in Burlington, Rhynard was particularly enthused, urging newcomers to attend. “I would say that if you haven’t gone to a dance performance before, or don’t know that much about dance, I would encourage you to come to the show because I think that it is accessible in that the dancers, the performers, are portrayed as real people . . . The dancers are regular people, they’re not nymphs or fairies or superhero virtuosic dancing machines — I mean, they are fabulous dancers — but there’s not this distance between dancer and performer where the audience is in the dark witnessing this spectacle of virtuosity. My goal is never to just entertain you. It’s never that safe. I think there’s something accessible about the intimacy that happens in the exchange between the dancers and the audience.”

“Disposable Goods,” as a show meant to confine the viewer in towards a message not particularly comforting to most, might not be “safe,” as Rhynard says, but in forcing one to confront the problems of the world, it at least creates the hopeful sense of knowing that someone believes enough to blast it out loud for the world to hear. Or in this case, to see.