Kate Holden

photos by Kevin MacCormack

What She Holds (2025)

Stage:

Choreography and Performance: Kate Holden

Original Music: Joshua Van Tassel

Poetic Collaboration: Lindsay Zier-Vogel

Costume: Sarah Doucet

Premiered:

Coastal Currents, Live Art Dance

May 23rd and 24th, 2025

Sir James Dunn Theatre, Halifax




Film:

Directed by Kate Holden and Kim Campbell-Sullivan

Videography and Editing: Kim Campbell-Sullivan

Costume: Sarah Doucet

Location: Maple Creek Centre, New Germany, Nova Scotia


Premiere: Dance made in Canada

Official Selection

A self choreographed, solo work, that explores my experiences and sensation of mothering young children: love, isolation, fear, brain fog, deep connection and deep fatigue, a shifting sense of self, an elastic sense of time, a desire for space. The movement research was developed in collaboration with Poet (and parent) Lindsay Zier-Vogel, whose words and reflections resonate within my body and in this work. A few of Lindsay’s poems, generated from our research together, are available to read by clicking the link above.

    Motherhood is not something that can be generalized and I don’t assume a universal experience of parenting. There are challenges and privilege both seen and unseen and I recognize my own privilege in my experience. My hope in sharing these images, is that you might think about parents, your own, yourself or strangers with a little curiosity and a little less assumption. These shades and colours of human experience are worth looking at. 


Thank you to Kinetic Dance, Kinship Performing Arts Centre and Canada Council for the Arts for supporting the initial research phases of this work. Thank you to Maple Creek Centre for their support of the making of the dance film version of the work.



photo by Omer Yukeeker

For inquiries please contact me at kate.e.holden@gmail.com