I knew that TikTok’s algorithm had my best interest at heart for once when I was presented with a split-screen video of a discarded takeout meal in a plastic bag twitching gently in the wind, and next to it, a man in a coordinated outfit carefully mimicking the bag’s movements.
Since I first saw it, the video has garnered nearly three million views, entering the realm of virality for good reason. The artist behind the account is choreographer and California Institute of the Arts MFA graduate Shoji Yamasaki, whose series Littered Mvmnts (2020–ongoing) focuses on isolated pieces of litter strewn about in Torrance and other areas of Los Angeles County, as well as in Japan on occasion.
Putting a pin in the low-hanging Katy Perry plastic bag jokes for a second, I had the chance to chat with Yamasaki about this choreography project that had taken several different forms before making its way to social media. As COVID-19 restrictions and quarantining set in during March 2020, the artist resorted to walking around the neighborhood as a form of reprieve and to clear his head, and began picking up trash he saw along the way — but not before recording it. Yamasaki was specifically interested in how certain pieces of garbage “danced” during light breezes, filming them in brief segments and stitching them together for a short film in 2021.
Yamasaki continued with this newfound interest throughout his choreography Master’s program, which culminated in an assemblage installation that required viewers to look at the work from different perspectives to find nestled devices playing split-screen videos of him imitating the motions of specific pieces of trash.
“I think I’ve always been interested in what we as human beings decide to keep or throw away throughout our lives,” he told me. “You know, we might have differences, we might speak different languages, but trash is something that’s very ubiquitous. We all produce it, and in a way, it unifies us.”
Yamasaki said that the universality of trash became most apparent when he began posting 15-second segments of his split-screen performance recordings on TikTok earlier this year, eliciting broadly similar comments and reactions from people all over the world.
But first … what kind of preparations go into those perfect 15 seconds? Yamasaki starts off with two rules: Any object he chooses to emulate must be garbage and not something organic like dead leaves, and any costume he picks out must come from his own closet in an effort to prevent the creation of additional waste throughout this series.
When it comes to selecting his muse, it must be isolated and accessible in the bodily sense.
“As cool as it may be, I’m not at the point of doing jump spins in one-handed handstands,” Yamasaki clarified, noting that pieces can’t be flying around or too twisted and tangled up.
“From then, I take a lot of time to understand the motions and how they feel in my body,” he continued. “I can’t tell you how many takes I need for each choreographed segment because it honestly varies, but from finding the trash, recording it, recording myself imitating it, and editing the footage together, it’s a lot of hours.”
What excites him about sharing this project is that it spotlights forms of dance outside the Eurocentric vocabulary of choreography.
“When I tell people I studied dance or I’m a dancer, they immediately jump to ballet or The Nutcracker, when this series is the furthest thing from that,” he said.
Littered Mvmnts has gained a bit of traction since Yamasaki debuted it on TikTok. However, the popularity has brought on trials and tribulations he hadn’t considered before — several people or high-profile TikTok accounts have reposted his segments without permission or even crediting him.
“I’m very honored and grateful that my art makes people laugh or makes their day, but when someone just takes my videos and gets over five million views and engagement whereas my own account gets stuck at just a couple thousand views is annoying because of how much work goes into it,” Yamasaki lamented.
He also said he had no intention of bringing the project to Instagram but had to start posting there because people were uploading his videos as Reels.
However, in the broader sense, Yamasaki views Littered Mvmnts as a means of connecting with nature with a sense of humor, saying that as human beings, “We’re living in a choreographed world on a micro- and macroscopic level.”
“Cells divide, DNA zips and unzips, our galaxy swirls and expands, our planet rotates on an axis while orbiting the sun, giving us seasons — that’s all choreography,” he left off.
