Make Hay While the Sun Shines featured the world premiere of Hay Rake Ballet, with an opening performance by Wild Space Dance Company. Rooted in the fertile space between culture and agriculture, this one-time event, where choreographed farm machinery, harvest rhythms, and live music converge, invited audiences to celebrate the harvest and our enduring connections to the land!
Make Hay While the Sun Shines Highlights
Hay Rake Ballet
Created by choreographer Sarah Gordon Butler in collaboration with 18 local farmers, Hay Rake Ballet framed mowing, tedding, raking, and baling within a classical dance aesthetic. Musical arrangement by Scott Gendel reimagined Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty for a live chamber ensemble and Grammy award-winning soprano Sarah Brailey, provided grand and sweeping accompaniment for the harvest choreography. This project, three years in-the-making, honored the craft, coordination, and beauty embedded in family farm-scale agricultural practices.
Wild Space Dance Company
The opening performance by Wild Space Dance took place in an adjacent hay field. Created by artistic director Dan Schuchart in collaboration with eight dancers, the work explored diverse cultural landscapes and was accompanied by violinist Allen Russell. Based in Milwaukee, Wild Space cultivates creative experimentation, innovation, and collaboration by investing in local artists and engaging audiences in shared experiences of place and community.
The History of Hay Rake Ballet
Hay Rake Ballet made its modest but moving debut during the 2024 Farm/Art DTour.
In 2025, with generous support from the Ruth Arts Foundation, we continued our collaboration with choreographer and former artist-in-residence Sarah Gordon Butler. That research-and-development season explored the creative possibilities of both humans and machines while ensuring the farmers’ essential work was not interrupted—at least, not too much.
The work brought together a cast of adventurous local farmers led by Andy Enge. The Enge family has been dairy farming in Wisconsin since the 1850s. Today, four generations—ranging in age from ten to ninety-five—live and work at Enge Farms in Sauk County, where they care for a milking herd and sustainably produce hay as its principal forage crop.
Much like farming itself, the work requires adaptability and flexibility, with its final choreographic form dependent upon daily conditions and relationships with the farmers who “read” the score of the land based on their unique knowledge.
Through rehearsals, field tests and ongoing collaboration with the farmers, the creative team took Hay Rake Ballet from pilot to full-scale production. The work culminated in 2026 with Make Hay While the Sun Shines, a two-hour event unfolding alongside the complete process of making hay.