The Tights Ball
2013 - 2015
Jason Wen
This powerful project uses the most innocuous, gentle and pretty of clothing items, tights and stockings, to encourage people to reconsider waste and recycling. Using techniques borrowed from advertising, this bright, fun, humorous endeavour draws in the audience to happily engage before exposing how easy it is to be fooled into thinking that the small things don’t matter or make little impression on the planet’s environment.
Background
Although bright and happy is our approach the project has a darker side. The politics of tights and stocking revealed during live performance interventions, through people telling personal stories, gives insight on how hosiery is viewed, regarded, consumed, disposed of and recycled.
The Tights Ball is an anti-product with it spherical shape representing mother earth. Growing as more tights are added, each pair adds another story of how women are viewed and view themselves.
The Problem
Every week millions of pairs of ladies tights are consigned to the bottom drawer or the bin. A large number contain nylon, a non-biodegradable material that often ends up in landfill. During spring 2013, artists Lenka Horakova and Anna Kompaniets created The Tights Ball, consisting of over 300 pairs of tights, stockings and socks, each carrying an individual memory, a fleeting story of personal time.
It’s About The Little Things
Tights can be seen as beautiful, but they can also carry sinister messages for some, and for our planet, exposing how easy it is to be fooled into thinking that the small things don’t matter or make little impression.
Impact
The ball continues to be a growing physical manifestation of the impact even the smallest decision makes on our planet, expanding exponentially as we move around the city - collecting broken tights, stockings and personal stories, this is a beautifully horrifying art intervention.
The Tights Ball and Veolia Songs
Throughout 2014, Platform-7 co-produced, along with The Royal Central School Of Speech and Drama MA Music Theatre students and the London borough of Camden a series of public performance interventions.
Interventions took place in libraries and on the streets across Camden, using tights donated from across the borough, before being re-purposed through free workshops and becoming part of a major musical performance, Veolia Songs with a working bin truck!