Only a brief collection of moments before...

Each day in the final stages of the process, a new aspect of the artistic collaboration is added. Today, our soprano, Rachel Morris, joined us in the studio. That changed everything. Her incredible voice filled the space and her presence made sense of the gestures the dance soloist has been doing into thin air! Seeing the energy of the vocal and dance soloists come together was beautiful.

Next week, the composer Dylan Findley arrives to work with the full orchestra. The film of the joint visual creation by Michelle Nixon and Justin Wheatley will also be projected at the back of the stage for the first time. And the short essay about the piece by Isaac Richard (writer) will be printed. Isaac's essay, entitled 'How to Watch A Brief Collection of Moments' succinctly contextualises the piece and its process. I have copied it below.

I look forward to slowly stepping back to watch the piece live in the bodies of the performers. I feel deeply grateful to have had this opportunity from The Center for Latter-Day Saints Arts. I am also grateful to have worked with such wonderful collaborators. They are all well accomplished in their own right, in their respective fields.

How to Watch A Brief Collection of Moments

The world is so wide, so brimming, that it can’t possibly be captured in a single moment or body. Whenever people try to accomplish this miraculous feat, they offer, at best, a gorgeous map or an illuminating snapshot. We call these snapshots “works of art.”

A Brief Collection of Moments is one of these—a scale model of the world in just about fifteen minutes and thirty seconds. That small time frame compresses countless hours of behind-the-scenes collaboration into a single experience. In fact, time is one of the performance’s central themes. The lyrics begin with “this world… this moment… You find yourself here… now.” 

You might be interested to know that it was originally titled, “A Brief Collection of Humans.” But isn’t a human just a brief collection of moments? We’re stuck in time; time is our most inescapable constant (in both life and art). We dance between birth and death, chaos and order, individual and community, the many and the one. Even the backdrop of this ballet represents how time unfolds gradually, almost imperceptibly, like a watercolor painting.

Notice the conflict and power in the middle of the plot. This is where humans exert their agency and try to “make a new thing”—a phrase repeated eight times in this section. Watch how the performers “work as one / Together order chaos, make things thrum.” In life, people come and go. The seventeen dancers slowly join the stage in a Fibonacci sequence: first one, then two, then three, then five… but wait, “the toilet paper’s gone from its roll again.” Petty inconveniences interrupt our calendars, reminding us how time has passed. What was once part of a field becomes an apartment complex. Even a roll of toilet paper is a clock.

In the final movement, the tempo increases as the performance rewinds itself. Dancers disappear offstage in the same order they first appeared. But there’s no such thing as going back in time. As viewers, we remember all that came before, and that memory is what makes the symmetrical resolution so satisfying. We almost return to where we began: alone in the dark—but something is different. Time has passed. We’re changed by what we have witnessed.

The best part is that all of this is brand-spanking new. It’s an innovative contemporary ballet choreographed by Vanessa Cook. Dylan Findley composed the original score. The poetic lyrics were written by Darlene Young. The backdrop features visual art by watercolorist Michelle Nixon and mixed media artist Justin Wheatley. Commissioned as the winner of the Ariel Bybee Endowment at the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, it’s performed by the Utah Metropolitan Ballet and soprano Rachel Morris.

As a whole, A Brief Collection of Moments is a stunning testament to the thrills of interdisciplinary art. Few performances feature as much genuine novelty in such a short amount of time. All of its creators are sharply aware of the constraints and affordances of their genres. Together, they and all of you—the audience—are the lucky collection of humans that get to share this one brief and dazzling aesthetic moment.

Isaac James Richards

The Pennsylvania State University