Saturday, April 25th at 10am
Rice Woodland Trail Opening & site-specific performance

Performed by Tahni Holt, Shannon Stewart, Oscar Trujillo, and Baldwin Woods

Costumes by Kelly Vogel
Map by Chris Millspaugh

Address of Trail Parking lot: 1727 N 500 Road
Baldwin Woods, Douglas County, KS

Supported by: Showcasing Open Space through Accessible Adventure Grant from Outdoors Unscripted and the University of Kansas Department of Theatre and Dance.

INFO: This performance is part of multi-year, multi-locale project between choreographers shannon stewart and Tahni Holt and ecosystem collaborators called FOREST. As a collaborative team, our choreographic work resides in the study of interconnected systems–ecology, histories, performative bodies (including non-human), and expansive understandings of communication.

With FOREST, we wanted wanted to bring our choreographic practices into a shared process of exploring difficult and persistent questions involving identity, belonging, and right relationship to place–not to answer them, but to sit with them.

FOREST performances and activities aim to create a place for sensing, listening, and questioning—moving from analytical to embodied and individual to collective.

Given the opportunity to be a part of the KU Field Station’s Rice Woodland trail opening, we invited Kansas City dance artist Oscar Trujillo to join for two weekends of research and creation on site.

Horizon
January 30th, 8:00 pm
Studio Series at Whitman College, Walla Walla Wa.

Get tickets: HERE

With guest performer Olive Elodie

HORIZON
The perceived line where sky meets earth—a locator in constant motion. Horizon is a dance.

Supported in Part by RACC’s Projects Arts Grant and PICA

SEPTEMBER 5th-7th, 2025

Get your tickets HERE

Directed by Tahni Holt. Choreographed in collaboration with Emma Lutz-Higgins. Performed by Tahni Holt and Emma Lutz-Higgins. With composer Luke Wyland, visual artist Jess Perlitz, lighting designers Al Knight Blaine and James Mapes, costume designer/visual artist Kim Smith Claudel, and dramaturg Kate Bredeson.

HORIZON
The perceived line where sky meets earth—a locator in constant motion.

Horizon is a dance. In this dance, we move with a porous body within a porous performance space. We reside in a shifting landscape of attention. We shift attention between seeking, dispersing, and disappearing.

Horizon is a constant reshaping of relationships between sculpture and sound, light, bodies and space, forming and reforming islands of kinship and sentiment. There is an opening, a slit, a crack that allows for new iterations of togetherness to emerge. As we rest in this togetherness, lines are blurred between the animate and inanimate. It is a precarious state of becoming. Becoming a rock. Becoming a cloud. A sculpture becoming a body. A body becoming a vessel. A light wave becoming a rainbow. There is a silver lining here. A tangle of impulse, of nerve endings, of charged particles in motion. 

Horizon is loose in identity, sharp in perception.

Supported in Part by RACC’s Projects Arts Grant and PICA

Photo credit: Adrian Hutapea

Join Fumi (incense house) for their Talk Story Tea Time at Apa Kabar. Tahni Holt will be in conversation with Fumi’s Mia Braverman on June 5th at 5pm-6pm. Talk story is a Hawaiian Pidgin term for informal, improvisational conversation ~part oral history, part everyday exchange.

A field, A forest
with Tahni Holt and Shannon Stewart
February 1st, 8:00 pm
Studio Series at Whitman College, Walla Walla Wa.

Dense, vertical, tangled. Connective tissue to roots and branches, blood to sap, wood to bark and slowed down energetic tree pulse. A field, A forest is the second performance expression of a migrating movement research project done collectively in collaboration with our tree kin and each other by Flock Steward Tahni Holt and Shannon Stewart.

Kim Smith Claudel, Artist in Residence at Building 5

Closing Exhibition and Performance: Featuring Emma Lutz-Higgins and Tahni Holt

Sunday, November 10 at 4pm

Building 5 at NW Marine Art Works

Ghosts in the Void takes its name from a chance encounter between the artist and a man who worked in Building 5 for 30 years, when it was a bustling machine shop creating large components for sawmills and dams. Standing in the emptiness of the space, he talked of the many ghosts in the palpable void. His clear and detailed memories provide the threads that are both woven together and unraveled to create an installation that touches on loss, absence, and the ghosts of our memory. Ghosts in the Void uses light, ethereal paintings, and performance to call attention to the spiritual presence within this space—a space in which history lingers, machines no longer roar, and a buried lake lies beneath. Layered in complexity, it is a place in which yesterday’s technological optimism confronts the present moment: the profound depletion of the natural ecosystem amidst the lasting remains of a forgotten industry.

I am headed to Whitman College in Walla Walla WA. to work with Shannon Stewart on our on-going beginning-of project with the trees. We will be there from 1/08-1/14. ….”we connective tissue to roots and to branches and to sap and to wood and to bark and to slowed down energetic tree pulse.” We are planting the seeds for a community gathering research sharing at FRONT Gallery in New Orleans in February. More news to come…

Photo still from video by Shannon Stewart

Come to our First of a series of three Improvisation performances at Building 5!

Oct. 26th: Tahni Holt, Emma Lutz-Higgins and Luke Wyland

Nov. 2nd: Juma DeJesus + Yaara Valey

Nov. 9th: Linda Austin + Stephanie Lavon Trotter

“To infinite possibilities”: An interview with Muffie Delgado Connelly and Tahni Holt
Interview and editing by Kate Bredeson

On August 15, 2022, Muffie Delgado Connelly, Tahni Holt, and I sat down to talk about their dance collaboration Pulse Mountain, for which I am the dramaturg. Originally scheduled to open on July 21, 2022, Pulse Mountain was postponed due to COVID-19. We took advantage of the unexpected pause in production to think about this new work and the process of making it. Before we started our formal conversation, we chatted about Delgado Connelly’s work as choreographer on the upcoming production of Tick, Tick, BOOM! at Portland Center Stage, and how narrative and music as dramaturgical devices invite audiences to think and feel. Our discussion then segued into Pulse Mountain. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.