Tahni Holt and Luke Wyland w/ Eliza Larson
The Work:
We, Tahni Holt and Luke Wyland, have been in collaboration together of some form or another for the last couple of years. In this particular iteration we are playing with some material surrounding our current projects: Materiality of Tahni’s female identified body, messy sensuality and complicated body, intuition as main instigator, not resisting being defined by the gaze of the other, constant morphing into identifiable/indefinable parts, emotionality, embodied expression. Perhaps some of these things will show up in this iteration, we choose not to predict.
Bios:
Luke Wyland is an interdisciplinary artist and composer working in the fields of music, performance and dance. He is know primarily for his work behind the art-pop band AU, but has been composing music for dance, film and commercials for over 10 years now. A graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art (Studio for Interdisciplinary Media), he has presented his work live throughout North America and Europe to critical acclaim.
Tahni Holt is a choreographer, teacher, and organizer who has been creating performances for the past 18 years. She is deeply invested in the ecology of her field. Her work is shaped out of her curiosity around her relationship with what she thinks she knows along with counterbalancing against the political demands that are embedded in this field.
Her creative practice follows her curiosities by asking questions that demand rigorous specificity yet remain open to a terrain of inquiry – inviting rather than prescribing interpretation. She actively uses her intuition, improvisational forms, collaborations with other artists, her on-going somatic practice and any other thing that she obsesses about that catches her fancy to create work.
She is fascinated with how an audience sees to what a performer does and is always trying to keep the complexity of this relationship. Her work deals with perceptions of both audience and performer-always with the desire to never quite be in the know so as to avoid being something that is consumed.
In regards to her choreography her work has been presented throughout the United States, at On The Boards (Seattle), Fusebox Festival (Austin), and The Lucky Penny (Atlanta), and PICA’s TBA Festival (Portland) to name a few. In 2010 Tahni was curated into the PORTLAND 2010 Biennial and is an Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship awardee (2007). She has had the pleasure of being an artist-in-residence most recently at Caldera, as well as Anchorage, Boise, Atlanta, Walla Walla, France, Greece and, in 2013, Romania, with Bucharest choreographer Madalina Dan, funded through the Suitcase Fund of New York Live Arts. She is honored to be a 2014-2015 NDP Touring Award recipient for Duet Love, which toured to Velocity Dance (Seattle), Pica’s TBA Festival and DiverseWorks(Houston). This past year Holt received the Barney Award from White Bird Dance. The award commissions her latest work, Sensation/Disorientation, to premier Jan. 18th-22nd, 2017.
Holt is founder and director of Portland’s newest dance center, FLOCK housed in the Disjecta Arts Center. FLOCK is a dance center for movement exploration, creation and artistic practice, dedicated to Portland’s contemporary and experimental dance artists.
