Environmentally Friendly Fun on Australia Day

Sustainable performance troupe Junkyard Beats will take the stage at the Hills Shire Council’s Australia Day event at Bella Vista Farm, where they’ll be providing a family friendly and all-around fun performance with instruments made out of recycled materials.

Creator of Junkyard Beats Oded Prior gave Hills to Hawkesbury Community News an idea of what local residents could expect from the performance: “It’s gonna be a big, proper show – our first of 2024. We’re going to be premiering a bunch of new material that we’ve been working on in the past six months and never tried before.

“It’s been a bit of a strange time in the world, and we just want to bring back the entertainment, the fun, the creativity, and hopefully inspire kids and adults to reuse, reduce and recycle as much as they can through music!”

Oded began Junkyard Beats in 2015 after years of fascination with non-traditional percussion instruments. “As a drummer, I’ve never really felt comfortable just sitting and drumming on the back of a stage,” he says.

“I’ve always loved collecting things and bringing them home to give them a new purpose, reusing them for different things. With Junkyard Beats, we combine drumming, rhythm, movement and comedy with junk percussion to turn it into an all-at-once kind of style.”

Watching a show from the performance troupe, the energy and showmanship of Junkyard Beats is genuinely infectious. Their unique mixture of dance, percussion and audience interaction makes for a show that the whole family can enjoy. Oded says: “I always tell people to bring your grandkids and your grandmother; it really works from 5 to 85 years old!”

Though you’ll be finding it hard to keep from tapping your foot to the energetic rhythm that Junkyard Beats bring, they’ll also be teaching kids and adults alike an important message about the value of recycling. He says: “We live by the words ‘One person’s trash is another person’s treasure,’ and we really try to encourage this.

“We hope that there’s even just one kid out of the thousands of people who’ll be watching us who now knows they can use plastic bags to make music, that they can get more creative by reusing things. I hope we can show some people other ways of looking at music and how to be creative in that space without having to buy anything new.”

Oded guarantees a show that’ll appeal to everyone on Australia Day: “Kids will like the slapstick and comedy a bit more, while the adults can appreciate the really complicated choreography and rhythms.

A lot of our shows also include crowd interaction, we rely on the energy that comes from the audience, and we get a lot from it. So we don’t really let the audience rest – it’s a roller coaster that has something for everybody.”