The Making of ‘All Those Nice Things’

It started with a children’s book found in a garbage can.

Most of the songs composed for Rites of Warming were done so by Composer and Director Ammon Taylor, with contributions provided by lyricists Bridget Brewer and Alejandra Murga, and closely followed the melodies and through-lines that make up Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet and orchestral concert work, Rites of Spring.

But for the final waltz in the song cycle, Taylor and Brewer wanted to approach things a little differently.

When Brewer found a children’s book in a garbage can at a school that was being forced by the state of Texas to close its doors, s/he was struck by the parable of the children who loved living in their beautiful cottage in the middle of the forest, yet didn’t feel compelled to preserve or care for the space around them. Brewer used an erasure approach to create blackout poetry from the original text, painting over most of the words on the page but leaving select words that formed new phrases and large, blank spaces. This method, s/he felt, at once spoke to the urgency of ecological preservation and the silences already emerging from the “erasure” of human and more-than-human life on our planet as late capitalism wreaks havoc on every culture and ecosystem.

Taylor then set the new phrases and silences to haunting music, and the result was the closing number in Rites of Warming: ‘All Those Nice Things.’

Take a look at the blackout poetry below as you listen to a recording featuring the cast from the worldwide premier of Rites of Warming in 2019!