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Original score by music professor Dylan Findley premieres with Utah Metropolitan Ballet

Dylan Findley, assistant professor of music composition and theory at 69ֱ��, was featured as the composer of a new ballet’s original score on April 23, 2026. The ballet A Brief Collection of Moments debuted with the Utah Metropolitan Ballet at the Covey Center for the Arts in Provo, Utah, to positive reception from audiences.

Findley collaborated with choreographer Vanessa Cook and poet Darlene Young, both of whom he met at the Artists Residency at the Center for Latter-day Saints Arts in New York City. Findley also connected with visual artists Michelle Nixon and Justin Wheatley, as well as essayist Isaac Richards. The connection between these six interdisciplinary artists at the residency resulted in a long-term periodic Zoom call to discuss artistic questions, update each other on individual milestones in their work, and eventually, to combine their efforts for a project together.

The project that became A Brief Collection of Moments was commissioned by the Ariel Bybee Endowment at the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. This endowment commissions original scholarship or new art each year to honor the legacy of the distinguished mezzo-soprano Ariel Bybee, who sang for 18 seasons with the Metropolitan Opera. While it is frequently focused on a single artistic medium, this year was a distinctive experience as the choreographer Vanessa Cook wanted to collaborate with her fellow residency participants to create art that would be multi-modal: original musical score, a singer on stage during the ballet, choreography, visual art, and even original poetry and prose components. Findley agreed to compose the music as Cook choreographed, which necessitated great attention to the many moving parts of the collaboration.

“Everything between the dance and the music had to be extremely coordinated, and we worked all summer. Every single week we had a Zoom call, she’d note what worked for the dance and what was too complex,” Findley said. “The soprano on stage ended up becoming the focus as much as the dancers, and you had this dialogue between her presence and the presence of the dancers.”

The resulting ballet explores human relationships through a series of eight brief vignettes over 15 minutes, and in each vignette the total number of dancers on the stage grows, following the Fibonacci sequence from a single dancer, to two, three, five, and onward through the vignettes.

Findley can see many potential applications at Wooster for his experiences participating in this collaborative project. While composing original music always keeps his teaching process lively and engaged, composing in collaboration with multiple artists could be a potential opportunity for Independent Study projects.

“If students know I’ve been doing this kind of collaboration, I hope they’ll be more willing to experiment and take that leap into this terrain,” said Findley. “The people you’re around as an undergraduate are some of the longest collaborator relationships you’ll have. These are the people I go back to again and again, and the more people you collaborate with, the more opportunities you get.”

Findley has collaborated in his composition work before and plans to continue to do so in the future; he finds the lessons along the way, as well as the final products of these efforts, enriching.

“My vision cannot compete with the vision of everybody else, and I have to be able to take a back seat sometimes, then sometimes I have to take a step forward in a way that isn’t stepping on people’s toes,” said Findley. “This negotiation works really well with people who are all listening and finding wiggle room in their own vision to make something powerful.”

Posted in Faculty, News on May 27, 2026.