Hold

Thank you for attending Hold

a screendance installation

As an artist and event organizer, I acknowledge that this land, which is named for the Ute Tribe, is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute Tribes and is a crossroad for Indigenous peoples. I stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement and call upon my peers, colleagues, friends, and family to work toward creating an equitable present and future with racial justice and social justice at the center of our communities.

The work you see installed tonight is the culmination of many, many months of work and only possible due to many generous collaborators. As a living, breathing creative entity, HOLD is both very formal in structure and also quite personal to me. HOLD examines the weight of two bodies in space and their navigation of one another in that space. I hope that today, you too feel the aliveness that navigating in relationship to others in the space brings. In a world in which we tend to hold things and people so tightly, I wonder if creating space, shaping space, is a way to create room for unimagined possibilities.

The dancers in the duets you see tonight all worked improvisationally based on the same movement prompts. As the filmmaker, I often felt as though the three of us were dancing as a trio; the two dancers worked with one another and I worked with an embodied approach to filming the scene. If you want to know more about the movement prompts, I’m happy to share them with you - I’m probably standing near the door in the venue.

Tonight, I encourage you to move through the space, stand in may places, and examine your proximity to the people and the space. This work began before COVID-19 dramatically changed all of our lives and has become more potent in the months following quarantine and the lack of physical touch we are electing to keep our communities safe. I hope you enjoy these screendances as much as I enjoyed making them.

— Hannah Fischer, creator

Please feel free to take and post photos to social media. I ask that you tag @hannahbirdy and/or @fischerdance on Instagram. Thanks!

Performers and Collaborators:

Melissa Younker & Florian Alberge
Ali Lorenz & Rebecca Speechley
Rachel Andes & Corinne Lohner
Rebecca Aneloski & Tyler Fox
Joshua Mora & Kellie St. Pierre
Arin Lynn & Tori Meyer

Crew: 

Virginia Broyles & Arin Lynn

Special thanks to my husband Bran for his unending support, my thesis committee, Satu Hummasti, Brent Schneider, Cadence Whittier, for their feedback and expertise, Katrina McPherson for ongoing mentorship and wisdom, and all of the faculty and graduate students at the University of Utah for their commitment to creative work and play.

Thank you Jacklyn Briggs and Vestar, Gateway LLC for hosting this event. Thank you Virginia Broyles, Ty Turley, Joshua Mora, Stephanie Garcia, Kellie St. Pierre, and Elliott Keller for the extra boost of support here in the final stretch. Thank you Cole Adams, Isaac Taylor, and Ben Sandberg for your technical support (Ben replied to panicked texts from me over the 4 day weekend!).

This work would not be possible without the many collaborators who contributed to the development of this process, especially those at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where this research took form during my residency in February/March 2020. Atlantic Center of the Arts collaborators are notated*: Allison Shir, Marilyn Castenada, Jorji Diaz Fadel, Severin Sargent-Catterton, Gabe Cortese*, Sarah Manya*, Miya Sukune*, Matthew Kennedy*, Zach Gulaboff Davis*, Pilar Gallegos*, Will Cotton*, Emma Rose Brown*, Annette Tojar*, Karen Fennel*, Christine Lewis Vanderkaap*, Annie-B Parson*.