FREE screening of Plastic Harvest at American Dance Festival’s Movies By Movers, an annual film festival dedicated to the celebration of the conversation between the body and the camera.

Plastic Harvest is a Covid-era dance film that explores the omnipresence of plastic. The film continues the synergistic collaboration between choreographer Jody Sperling and composer Matthew Burtner, both acclaimed for their creative engagement with climate change and environmental issues. Ironically, while plastic is a proliferating pollutant, it is also something we share and that connects us across virtual spaces—we wear it, we bathe in it, we even breathe it. How we live in plastic tells us about who we are.

In Covid’s wake, Sperling began rehearsing remotely with the dancers of her company, Time Lapse Dance, who were dispersed across the country. Each dancer fashioned a unique costume for herself from plastic bags and investigated a different relationship to the material. Anika Hunter dancer luxuriates in a bathtub filled with plastic bags. Maki Kitahara glides ghostlike in a plastic-bag kimono in a church sanctuary. Sporting a plastic tutu emblazoned with a yellow-smiley face, Andrea Trager frolics amid traffic on a busy avenue while her remote partner, Frances Barker, sports a red target on her back on an empty suburban street.

Plastic Harvest was created in part during a 2020 artist residency at The Center at West Park and with support from Dance/NYC’s Coronavirus Relief Fund.

Director’s Statement, from Jody Sperling:

I shot “Plastic Harvest” in 2020 with the members of my dance company as the pandemic wore on and we were searching for ways to dance together remotely. We found that plastic was something we all shared–we are bathing in it, ingesting it, even inhaling it. We realized that our relationship to plastic is influenced by our identities and this was an entry point to considering race following the murder of George Floyd. When one of the dancers fashioned a costume with a Target bag on her back, we realized it perfectly visualized her status as a target in the eyes of the police. Her exuberant dancing in the street was a way to reclaim public space and proclaim Black joy. A red stop sign in the background signals a pertinent message.