HOLDTIGHT and Somebody People have crafted a vibrant, multisensory dining experience that combines food, dance, live music and visual art.

Dinner and a show is a familiar concept. Wild Oscillation, the sporadically produced, one-night-only collaboration between Denver-based immersive dance-theatre troupe HOLDTIGHT and plant-forward restaurant Somebody People, asks a bolder question: What if dinner is the show?

On November 17, the restaurant’s airy South Broadway dining room was transformed into an intimate performance space for a multisensory experience where food, movement, live music, storytelling and painting blurred together into a single, slow-simmered meditation on wildness, wilderness and order.

Conceived and directed by HOLDTIGHT founder and performer Gwendolyn Gussman — with choreography and performance by Bailey Harper, live composition by Nicholas Caputo and live painting by Kristina Davies — Wild Oscillation carried the audience of just over 20 diners through a structured but supple evening that is equal parts fine-dining dinner party, experimental performance and communal ritual.

Somebody People’s team, led by collaborators and restaurateurs Sam and Tricia Meyer, delivered a thoughtful tasting menu that wasn’t simply paired with the performance but embedded within it, becoming its spine and its driving metaphor. What emerges from this unusual fusion is an experience that invites the audience to slow down, pay attention and participate in a kind of temporary community.

Photo: Chelsea Chorpenning

Entering the wild

The evening began in a state of gentle social chaos. After checking in and choosing between alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage tracks, diners mingled with citrusy welcome drinks in hand.

For those who arrived alone (myself included), the experience could have tipped into awkwardness, but the room’s energy was warm and curious. A circulating appetizer, coal-roasted sweet potatoes with Hatch chile miso, served as the first signal that the meal itself would move in tandem with the performance.

Then came the first “ask” of the evening: Gussman and Harper climbed atop chairs to lead a free-flowing conversation about wildness. The performers were not playing characters; they were themselves, speaking directly to us about being wild and how our daily lives domesticate us.

Moments later, napkins were passed out with the suggestion that we tie them on as bibs. Before anything touched our lips, Gussman and Harper led the room through a loose, silly burst of collective movement: napkins raised high above our heads and whipped through the air, a brief storm of linen that loosened bodies and social armor alike.

Only then were we split into two lines — one for alcoholic and one for non-alcoholic — to receive a communal shot poured directly into our mouths. Sticky, a little chaotic and joyfully unceremonious, it was an early reminder that the evening would reward a willingness to play.

Afterward, the tempo dropped again as the performers nudged us into quiet reflection on what it might mean to be wild in our daily lives before slowing us down for a cucumber tea sandwich with alfalfa and herb aioli. This time, Gussman insisted we really look, smell and taste in slow motion, voicing sensations aloud before allowing us to finish the bite. Only after that miniature mindfulness ritual were we invited to take our seats for the first course.

First course

Once seated for the main courses, the evening shifted into a more meditative rhythm. Davies, dressed in denim overalls, began painting a large-scale canvas at one end of the room, while Caputo created an evolving soundscape with piano, electronic textures, trumpet and accordion that looped and layered in real time.

Davies worked with deliberate unpredictability, rotating the canvas throughout, scraping away paint and painting intuitively to the music. Her process became its own performance, a steady counterpoint to the dancers’ more explicitly theatrical moments in the middle of the dining room.

Meanwhile, the service itself became choreography. Servers moved through the space with uncanny attention, refolding napkins as guests rose, pouring water with silent precision and replenishing drinks as glasses emptied. Hospitality became a kind of dance, reminding diners that service, too, is a performed art.

The menu unfolded with playful intentionality. Crispy mushrooms arrived alongside Harper’s sinuous movement sequence, her body echoing the contradictory qualities Gussman described: mushrooms as both poisonous and medicinal.

Grilled cabbage, paired with bundles of fresh herbs, became a cross-table exchange as the performers fed each other and then invited the audience to do the same. A pasta course then arrived with a gleefully goofy dance from Sam Meyer himself. The actions, which could have easily felt gimmicky, instead served as an open invitation to reconsider our eating habits.

Photo: Chelsea Chorpenning

Stories that ground the abstraction

One of the night’s most affecting moments came when Harper offered a quiet, personal story about horses and the philosophy of “gentle instruction.” Instead of “breaking” an animal into submission, she described a horse trained with patience and partnership, an anecdote that crystallized the evening’s thematic throughline: Wildness isn’t something to suppress but something to meet with curiosity and respect.

That ethos permeated the pacing. For a performance built on many moving parts, nothing felt rushed. The experience unfolded with the natural ebb and flow of a dinner party, with conversation blooming naturally between strangers, moments of silence welcomed rather than feared and the music expanding to fill space when words weren’t needed.

Toward the end of the night, the performance’s most surprising act arrived. Davies stepped back from her near-complete canvas and invited the audience to take over. Dessert, an apple cake with semi-sweet cream, arrived as diners approached the painting, adding lines, colors and symbols.

In any other context, marking up an artist’s work would feel transgressive. Here, it felt liberating. After everyone had added to the painting, the team then cut the canvas off its bearings as they lowered the collaboratively painted piece to the floor.

Moments later, the canvas was cut into squares and distributed like communion wafers as tangible proof of the community we had just spent three hours building. My own square of the final piece bears the markings of at least eight or nine hands and is messy, layered and beautiful.

A toast to what’s possible

Wild Oscillation isn’t the most abstract or cerebral work HOLDTIGHT has made, but it may be one of its most generous: a piece that uses food, hospitality and shared ritual to gently guide the audience toward vulnerability rather than demand it. The result is a warm, meticulously paced evening that is also, quite simply, a delight.

HOLDTIGHT and Somebody People haven’t announced future performances yet, though Gussman hinted there may be more in 2026. If so, make a reservation early. These intimate evenings fill quickly, and for good reason.

In a year full of noise, Wild Oscillation offers something quieter, richer and far more radical: a reminder that we build community not by forcing order, but by letting a little wildness in.