‘mother : un/tethered’ is 32 remarkable minutes

HOLDTIGHT’s first major film is a gorgeous, moving distillation of what the interdisciplinary company does best.

There is something bracingly simple at the center of mother : un/tethered: However disconnected people become from one another or the natural world, everybody arrived here the same way.

Everybody has a mother.

HOLDTIGHT builds a staggering 32-minute short around that elemental fact. Directed by Gwendolyn Gussman and edited by Gussman and cinematographer Alex Taylor, mother : un/tethered is stunning, funny, painful and remarkably sleek for a company making its first substantial leap from live performance into filmmaking.

Although mother was originally conceived as a live performance, the shift in medium feels necessary. Rather than representing pregnancy theatrically, this dance documentary can capture three women’s real-life experiences with pregnancy and motherhood as their bodies change.

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Bodies change before the camera. A woman dances in a field with her pregnant belly tenderly displayed. A mother plays with the child who, moments earlier in the edit, was still inside her. Grief settles into another dancer’s body as she folds herself among ancient trees.

The camera makes those connections tangible, allowing pregnancy, grief and landscape to speak to one another without forcing the metaphor.

Divya Maus in HOLDTIGHT’s mother: un/tethered. | Photo: Alex Taylor

Birth, death and everything in between

Gussman structures the short in five clean movements. It begins with dancers Divya Maus, Chelsea Retzloff and Bailey Harper answering, “When I think about my mother,” moves through a section devoted to each woman, then returns to the trio for another question: “When I think about Mother Earth.”

Maus’ chapter pulses with anticipation and play. Taylor’s camera finds her heavily pregnant near California’s Pelican Cove, holding her belly as water rushes around her, then cuts to domestic scenes with the child who was once inside it. Those ordinary moments of play are funny and tender without pretending that creating and caring for another human is anything less than enormous.

Retzloff’s section cuts deeper. Speaking about caring for her mother as she died, she describes allowing herself to experience grief fully, recognizing that its intensity exists because love did first. Gussman and Taylor place those recollections against Retzloff moving through the redwoods and rocky Northern California coast.

Her body curls, reaches, rests against stone and disappears momentarily into the scale of the landscape. Retzloff’s mournful dancing creates the film’s most emotionally charged sequence, expressing what words alone cannot.

Harper, filmed eight-and-a-half months pregnant at Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Land Library, brings the cycle around again. Preparing to become a mother has made her newly conscious of processes much larger than herself: what it means to give, sustain life and participate in natural cycles that were operating long before any of us arrived.

Bailey Harper in mother: un/tethered. | Photo: Alex Taylor

Knowing when enough is enough

Taylor’s luminous images repeatedly move between domestic intimacy and open landscape, while Daniel Weidlein’s percussive electronic score keeps the short surging forward without overwhelming its quieter disclosures.

That momentum matters because these ideas — motherhood, mortality, environmental responsibility, the cycles connecting human and ecological life — could easily become ponderous. They never do.

HOLDTIGHT told OnStage Colorado that there is enough additional material to imagine a feature-length version. Perhaps there is. Yet expansion could sacrifice what makes this version so potent.

Every chapter has a purpose. Every return to nature deepens the central metaphor. Then, after 32 minutes, it ends.

That restraint may be mother : un/tethered’s greatest achievement. Gussman and her collaborators have not made a definitive statement about motherhood. They have captured three lives at specific moments and trusted those fragments to suggest something much larger.

HOLDTIGHT may have jumped mediums to finish its un/tethered trilogy. In doing so, it found a form that fits this final chapter extraordinarily well.