HOLDTIGHT’s ‘mother : un/tethered’ shifts from stage to screen

Denver company completes its dance trilogy with a 32-minute “art documentary” at the Sie FilmCenter.

HOLDTIGHT’s un/tethered trilogy was supposed to end onstage. Instead, the final chapter will premiere on a movie screen.

“It all just started to feel too challenging to have this be a live performance piece with what we wanted to capture,” HOLDTIGHT founder Gwendolyn Gussman said.

mother: un/tethered, a 32-minute “art-documentary” directed and edited by Gussman, premieres Wednesday, Sept. 9, at the Sie FilmCenter, with a second screening Sept. 24. The film completes a trilogy that began with together: un/tethered in April 2024 and continued with alone: un/tethered that December.

Gussman originally envisioned mother as another roughly 90-minute live performance. HOLDTIGHT developed a stage version during a 2023 residency at Carroll Hall in Brooklyn, where five women and musician Daniel Weidlein performed two workshop showings.

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As the company began planning a full premiere, however, reality complicated the theatrical vision. Cast members had moved across the country. One performer had a young child and struggled to travel. Another was planning a pregnancy. Gussman also questioned how a stage work could authentically document something as temporary as pregnancy when bodies were changing faster than the production could develop.

By 2025, she and cinematographer-editor Alex Taylor began asking whether film might accomplish what the stage could not.

“There was the thematic challenge of how to capture a moment like someone being pregnant in a live performance piece authentically,” Gussman said. “It just started to feel like it wasn’t possible to do mother live with where we’re at as a company right now. So then we started to just ideate around what it would be like to have this be a film.”

A film still from mother: un/tethered. | Photo: HOLDTIGHT

Three women, three landscapes

Changing mediums allowed HOLDTIGHT to follow its subjects through moments of pregnancy, motherhood and grief while placing their bodies directly within landscapes tied to their stories.

The film follows dancers Bailey Harper, Chelsea Retzloff and Divya Maus across what Gussman describes as a birth-life-death cycle.

Maus, a longtime HOLDTIGHT collaborator, was roughly eight months pregnant when she was filmed near Pelican Cove Park in California. Harper was eight-and-a-half months pregnant when HOLDTIGHT shot her at the Rocky Mountain Land Library in Fairplay, near a region she has long known through her family.

Retzloff’s story moves through grief. She returned to Eureka, California, where she and her late mother grew up, after caring for her mother during the final month of her life. HOLDTIGHT filmed her dancing among the redwoods and along the Northern California coast.

“We wanted wherever we shot to feel meaningful to them personally and then also meaningful to the stories they were telling,” Gussman says.

The film mixes interviews, choreography, voiceover and Weidlein’s original score. It opens with all three women responding to the prompt, “When I think about my mother,” before moving through individual chapters and eventually reaching a related question: “When I think about Mother Earth.”

“What we’ve really tried to do is have this still feel like a HOLDTIGHT show even though it’s a film,” Gussman says.

A still from the film mother: un/tethered. | Photo: HOLDTIGHT

Learning a new medium

Filming stretched from December 2025 through July 2026. Gussman estimates she and Taylor then spent “500, 600 hours” editing the project over the summer, learning much of the process as they went.

“It’s been a really great process, both in terms of learning and in terms of discovering what we are able to create in a different medium,” Gussman said.

That different medium may also change who encounters HOLDTIGHT’s work. Gussman believes the “true wall of the screen” can give viewers a little more distance from vulnerable subjects including pregnancy, death and grief than an intimate live performance allows.

The company is not planning to put mother online after its Sie screenings. Instead, HOLDTIGHT intends to submit the short to film festivals, pursue a New York premiere later this year or early next year and hold another free Denver event related to the project in October.

Gussman and Taylor are also hoping the short becomes something larger.

“There’s so much incredible, juicy, juicy storytelling that we could not put in this story,” Gussman said. “So the hope is that we get enough excitement around this short that we can make a full feature and then premiere that. I could see it as a little mini doc series because of the amount of footage we have.”