Holly Seitz MARCHANT

Visiting Artist

“The further I got from the childhood landscape that felt native to me, it became more apparent how that sense of place had influenced my body. Even as a dancer training in ballet and modern dance, I kept referencing that in my time, space, and shape preferences. I could feel it in me.”

Holly’s long career as a dancer and instructor has roots in the Montana landscapes of her childhood. Now she has come full circle, integrating her interest in site-specific performance at Tyson to better understand the human relationship to the natural world. These insights contribute to a site-specific movement and performance practice she and her partner David Marchant are calling somatic ecology, as well as her own dance instruction in the classroom.

“I infuse my teaching with improvisational practices to help my dancers acknowledge that those personal choices are a way to understand our own body’s shifts and changes and become increasingly sensitive to our internal and external environment. In the artwork itself, one of our hopes is to help people hear the mounting evidence about our human impact on our planet. A lot of people have a defensive response to climate change and therefore refute or ignore the evidence. Perhaps they feel there is too much to deal with? I want to be a voice that helps people confront their own personal relationships with nature and sensitize them to the hard information.”

Holly was an artist-in-residence at Tyson during summer 2019.