Do you ever wish you could shut off all the voices in your head? Who are you when the voices go silent, even if just for a moment?

​

“Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.” - Rumi

​

Director / Choreographer: Holly Wilder

Writer / Dancer: Shelby Claire

Actors: Tracy Einstein (inner monologue), Hunter Hoffman (the past), Julia Proctor (body image), Annie Wilder (support system)

Cinematographer / Editor: Duncan Wilder

Original Score: Peter Wise

Production Assistant: Yoshie Fujimoto Kateada

​

AWARDS:

FIRST PLACE - 2018 Verve Dance Film Festival

FIRST PLACE - 2019 Richmond Dance Festival

BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM - 2019 Santiago Independent Film Awards

AUDIENCE FAVORITE - 2019 Opine Dance Film Festival

BEST DIRECTOR - 2019 Utah Dance Film Festival

BEST STORYTELLING - 2018 Verve Dance Film Festival

EXECUTION OF CONCEPT – 2019 Capitol Dance & Cinema Festival

​

OFFICIAL SELECTIONS:

2018 San Francisco Dance Film Festival

2018 Dallas Dance Film Festival

2018 Verve Dance Film Festival

2018 Spark Summer Film Festival

2018 mouthfull presented by OB || HB

2019 American Dance Festival's Movies by Movers

2019 Paris Play Film Fesitval

2019 Dumbo Film Festival

2019 Los Angeles Dance Shorts Film Festival

2019 Richmond Dance Festival

2019 Utah Dance Film Festival

2019 Phoenix Dance Film Festival

2019 Third Coast Dance Film Festival

2019 Opine Dance Film Festival

2019 Film-Art-Dance Festival

2019 Barnstorm Dance Festival

2019 Versatility Dance Festival

2019 Divulge Dancers' Film Festival

2019 EnCore Dance on Film Festival

2019 Capitol Dance & Cinema Festival

2019 R.E.D. International Film Festival

2019 Cascadia Dance & Cinema Festival

2019 Santiago Independent Film Awards

2019 Thessaloniki Cinedance International

2019 Kinetoscope: International Screendance Film Festival

​

REVIEWS:

"Wilder’s raw narrative movement vocabulary hits close to the heart." – Amanda Sieradzki, for Arts Atlanta || Read the full review

​

​

​

To Be Me — Without Apology

by Caitlin McCarty, Journalist & Dancer

​

I started going to therapy for the first time this month. You’d think that someone who has had an eating disorder since age sixteen would be no stranger to therapy but I haven’t started going until now, almost ten years after my relationship with my body started becoming toxic.

 

Driving home from rehearsal the other night, I was on the phone with my mom and feeling down about my body and hating my outside self from the inside. I’m at a point in my recovery where I’m done with dieting, done wanting to be skinnier, leaner or more aesthetically pleasing on stage. I want to be healthy, I want to be happy, and I want to not hate my body.

 

One of the first things my therapist asked me was, “So, what made you decide to want to come to therapy on this day, on this year, in 2018?” At first, I didn’t have a solid answer for her. Part of me knows it’s because I’m dating a man I can see being my forever and that I want to be better for him. Another part of me knows that I want to have a family one day and if there’s anyone I need to get it together for, it’s my one-day children. Perhaps the largest part of me and the biggest fear I have is that I’ll be like this forever, that I’ll never be happy and I’ll always hate the way I look.

 

When Holly Wilder of Wilder Project reached out to me at the end of May 2018 to share her most recent dance film, The Field, I felt for the first time that someone, and maybe more than one someone, knew what I was going through. It sounds cliche, but the only way to describe The Field is to say that it gave me hope, a sense of hope I had been lacking for a long time.

 

So often we sleep walk through this life, wanting to change but feeling completely exhausted and scared. The Field accurately addresses the loud voices inside and outside our heads. It is a completely relatable example of what it feels like to be constantly inundated by others’ opinions and expectations of who we should or should not be without really paying attention to what we truly want.  

 

After being pulled in a million different directions, I’m ready to cut the ties that bind me. We don’t always have control of what happens on the outside, but we can have control of what happens on the inside. We can choose to rewrite our narrative. We can choose to be soft with ourselves and free ourselves from negativity and self-doubt.

 

A good friend said to me recently, “I know it’s just the big, bad eating disorder voice in my head. I shouldn’t listen to it.” And she shouldn’t. The Field showed me that we have the power to break free from the voices that surround us on a daily basis. We have the ability to quiet the criticism and the harshness. We even have the ability to quiet the voices in our own heads.

I’m vowing right now  to live my life with only positive thoughts about myself and others. I want to love myself as much as I love my best friend and my Mother. I want to run through a field, breathe deeply, and laugh loudly. I want to live. Happiness is a choice as much as choosing to listen to negative thoughts is, but today I choose to quiet those thoughts, to think something good for every negative thing I hear, to hope that I can change my dialogue about myself, and to know that in time I will change for the better. Today, I choose to be happy. I choose to be me -- without apology.