Earth Tomes is a collaborative project featuring Roots in the Sky, Montana’s premier chamber choir, and James Sewell Ballet, a dance company based in Minneapolis, MN, in partnership with the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, MT. 

As a whole, Earth Tomes explores a series of juxtapositions that were apparent to us from the outset of the project’s conception – ballet/choir, historical/contemporary music, urban/rural settings, and sacred/secular perspectives on death and grief. Structured around J.S. Bach’s funeral motet Jesu, meine Freude, Earth Tomes is fundamentally about relationships, and seeks to ask questions about the ways in which we view ourselves in relation to others – to those we love, to those we will never know, to the earth, and to the heavens – through a counterpoint of ballet and choir.