Bodies, waste, and the weight of a nation

A cage sits on a man's head. He stands motionless in a single spotlight, arms folded, face obscured by wire mesh, while across the darkened expanse of the floor, another figure stretches her arms wide — cruciform, wrapped in layers of torn and patched fabric, casting a long shadow behind her. The audience watches in silence. No one moves. This is 'Rupantor: The ReSonance Show', popularly known as "trashion" show.

Presented by the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) on 18 April, the show ran for 80 minutes inside the Experimental Theatre Hall of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. It was loud, visceral, politically charged, and unmistakably the work of young artists who had been asked not just to perform, but to think. The results were extraordinary.

A theatre built from rubbish

Every costume in the trashion show was constructed from materials that had been thrown away. Cardboard panels, salvaged netting, broken mirror shards, strips of old fabric, wire, plastic sheeting, discarded newspaper, and whatnot. But the results were anything but cheap.

One performer stalked the floor in a warrior's ensemble: layers of shredded cloth trailing behind her like a battle standard, a crown of jagged found objects rising from her head. Another wore the cage itself as a helmet — a birdcage repurposed into a mask, simultaneously a prison and a disguise. 

A third character arrived clad in a patchwork coat stitched together from clashing fabrics — floral prints alongside camouflage, household materials beside industrial waste — her face painted raw red, her expression one of quiet, direct accusation.

These were not costumes. They were arguments. Each one had been designed, built, and worn by a ULAB student as the culmination of a semester's engagement with the show's theme: "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness" — a provocation drawn from the Media Studies and Journalism Department's spring 2026 curriculum.

The show is curated by A F M Moniruzzaman Shipu, artist, educator, and Assistant Professor at ULAB. For Shipu, the act of building a costume from waste is a philosophical gesture as much as a creative one.

"Students decide everything they do. I only give them some outlines. For example, they have to use discarded materials only. One basic concept of Rupantor is transforming discarded materials into stories, so the materials must carry the meaning of those stories. The mood of the performance also has to be contemplative," Shipu said.

This semester's theme pushed students to interrogate not just what Bangladesh throws away in the literal sense, but what it discards culturally, politically, and socially. Shipu was deliberate about the difficulty of the assignment.

"Rupantor is a new art form I have been developing since 2022 with media and journalism students at ULAB. I work with new students every semester and have already worked with more than 400 students. I think I will need six more years to fully develop this art form. By then, I hope to have worked with 1,000 students in total. Each student contributes to it. This art form is a living practice – like a tree. Every part of the tree – including leaves and flowers – reflects my students' contributions. I shape it through guidance, much like shaping a tree by controlling sunlight and other elements," he added.

The use of theatre-in-the-round at the Shilpakala Academy was deliberate. There is nowhere to hide in this space — not for the performers, and not for the audience. It is a staging choice that mirrors the show's central demand that we look, and that looking be understood as a responsibility.

The performance unfolded in a series of charged visual scenes. In one, a figure dressed in orange and golden patchwork — a cardboard placard mounted on his head bearing Bengali text — faces a performer wearing enormous wings of shredded material, white and ragged as something between an angel and a ghost. 

In another sequence, a tight circle of elaborately costumed performers converge over a fallen body at the centre of the stage — figures in deep red, in layered earth tones hung with dangling talismans, bending low over the prone form. And elsewhere, a lone dancer commands the entire hall, turning slowly, lifting a vast translucent shawl that billows outward in the amber light like a wing, a wave, or a flag.

The students who built and inhabited these scenes spoke afterwards of the intensity of the process and what it demanded of them.

"I spent three weeks building my costume. Every piece I attached, I thought about what it meant — why this scrap of fabric, why this broken thing. By the time I wore it on stage, it felt like I was wearing a story. Not just my story — a story about all of us," said one performer.

Another student reflected on the weight of the theme itself. "The hardest part was the concept. National consciousness sounds abstract until you start looking at what it actually does to people — who it includes, who it forgets, who it hurts. My character came from that question."

Violence and tenderness

Hossain lingered after the formal programme ended, speaking with students and examining the costumes up close. "He looked at my costume for a long time without saying anything. Then he said, 'You made something that matters.' I don't think I'll forget that for the rest of my life," one student recalled.

The hall remained hushed in sustained attention until the final bow, leaving the audience deeply unsettled. "I expected a fashion show," one attendee remarked, "but I left feeling implicated. I'm still asking: am I part of the waste they described?"

Department head Dr Sumon Rahman praised the students' research and late-night labor: "They are politically aware and hardworking; I felt pride in what education should be."

'Rupantor' perfectly captures this shift from discarded materials to wearable art, and from students to a performance company with an urgent message. The show offered no easy answers regarding national consciousness or its exclusions. Instead, through falling bodies on an amber floor and costumes built from refuse, it made a powerful, wordless argument that was impossible to avoid.