Tahni Holt and Emma Lutz-Higgins
Unceded land of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many others who call this region home, otherwise known as Portland, OR
Horizon
World Premiere
Directed by Tahni Holt
Choreographed in collaboration with 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
Performed by Tahni Holt and Emma Lutz-Higgins
Access notes: Audio description will be provided on the Sept. 7th performance.
DESCRIPTION
Horizon is 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 lightwave 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.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Tahni Holt is a dance artist and somatic practitioner whose work is rooted in collaboration and community. Born and raised in what is now known as Portland, OR, she has spent most of her life in the shadow and glow of Mt. Hood. Her work has been presented nationally at On the Boards, Seattle, WA; Velocity Dance, Seattle, WA; Fusebox Festival, Austin, TX; DiverseWorks, Houston, TX; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and White Bird, Portland, OR. She is a recipient of an NDP Touring Award and Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship, to name a few. Internationally, her work has been performed in Bulgaria and Portugal and supported through residencies in France, Greece, and Romania. Holt is the founder and one of four current stewards of FLOCK Dance Center.
Emma Lutz-Higgins is a Portland-based dance maker and performer whose choreographic work uses movement, text, and nonlinear narrative to explore perception, identity, and possibility. She has performed at AUNTS, Brooklyn, NY; Movement Research, New York, NY; Gibney Dance, New York, NY; New York Live Arts, New York, NY; Triskelion Arts, Brooklyn, NY; and Danspace Project, New York, NY. In March 2025, she premiered her first evening-length work, FLOOR, through PWNW’s Alembic Residency. Her performances have been reviewed in Oregon Arts Watch and The New York Times. Lutz-Higgins holds a BA from Bard College.
Luke Wyland is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and cultural organizer who has lived and worked in Portland, Oregon, for over twenty years. As a person who stutters, his practice is rooted in disability justice and the rich terrain of speech diversity. In collaboration with the nonprofit SPACE, he curates the Library of Dysfluent Voices, a first-of-its-kind living archive that reimagines stuttering as a generative, expressive mode of communication. Through sound, community exchange, and immersive installations, he explores the textures of voice and the politics of fluency, inviting new ways of listening and learning. Wyland has been releasing critically acclaimed records for the past 20 years in the groups AU and Methods Body, as LWW, and under his own name, working with such labels as New Amsterdam, Beacon Sound, Balmat, The Leaf Label, and Aagoo Records.
Jess Perlitz makes sculptures that explore how the body gets defined through landscape, public spaces, and social structures. The work seeks to disrupt established expectations and direct attention to both incongruous experience and the potential for connection. Born in Toronto, Canada, Perlitz received an MFA from Tyler School of Art, BA from Bard College, and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. She is currently based in Portland, Oregon where she is Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College. Perlitz is the recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Oregon Arts Commission Joan Shipley Award, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. In 2019, she was named a Hallie Ford Fellow. Her project, Chorus, is currently installed at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA as part of the museum’s ongoing artists installation series.
James Mapes is a lighting designer, writer, and board game creator who's lived in Portland all his life. Working primarily in dance, he's toured all over the world with companies like BodyVox, Éowyn Emerald and Dancers, and Mammalian Diving Reflex. At home, he's the Festival Director for Risk/Reward and works a whole bunch of places. He has a family, who is great, and a library, which is secret.
Al Knight-Blaine is a lighting designer and technician working in Portland and the surrounding Pacific Northwest. Alongside his day job lighting events and music festivals with Outlaw Lighting, he is the resident lighting designer for Open Space Dance and Night Flight Aerial, is the festival lighting designer for Risk Reward, and is the head of lighting at PICA. Knight-Blaine is a graduate of Southern Oregon University, with a BFA emphasizing in lighting design (and three math minors!).
Kate Bredeson is a dramaturg, director, translator, and theatre historian. Her project as a scholar and artist is to research, document, and practice the ways in which performance can be a tool for radical activism and protest. As a dramaturg, she has worked with Tahni Holt on Pulse Mountain (with Muffie Delgado Connelly, 2022), Rubble Bodies (2018), and Sensation/Disorientation (2017), theatres including the Court (Chicago) and Yale Repertory Theatre (New Haven), and is the recipient of two fellowships from the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. She is the author of three books, all published with Northwestern University Press: Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May ’68 (2018); The Inheritor, co-translated with Thalia Wolff (2024); and The Diaries of Judith Malina, (forthcoming from Northwestern, 2026). She is currently editing Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances by Anthony Hudson (forthcoming, 2026). Bredeson is Professor of Theatre at Reed College.
Kim Smith Claudel is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, OR, whose work intersects painting, sculpture, installation, and performance through a wide range of media. Smith Claudel's work has been exhibited internationally, including shows in Japan and Sweden, as well as throughout the United States. Recent solo exhibitions include the Painting Center, New York, NY; Mt. Hood Community College, Portland, OR; and Carnation Contemporary, Portland, OR. She is an active member of the artit collective WAVE Contemporary and Carnation Contemporary. She is the recipient of the 2025 Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission and Ford Family Foundation, and was recently awarded an artist in residency at Building 5. She holds an MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, as well as an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY.