And speaking of music, Butler acknowledged that she imagined it would be Tchaikovsky, because he “checks all the boxes for me like a classical ballet. There are these big waltzes, there’s the drama, the romance, the slowness of the adagio. “Sleeping Beauty” gave me all the things I was looking for, but it would be less recognizable than something like, “Swan Lake” or “The Nutcracker.” 

Add to that a soprano clad in a red gown and brandishing a cream-colored parasol, her long scarf waving in the wind, all while singing on the fender of a tractor and this is, literally, “high” art, which begged the question, “Would the farmers be in overalls?”

Butler said she was thrilled that someone in the network believed in her costume vision and supported getting the farmers, well, fitted tuxedos, with “white button up shirts and bow ties,” adding, “I found a local tailor to do the tailoring for them, and they'll keep the suit at the end of the show, so it's a gift.”

With farmers having their own kind of embodied intelligence—rhythm, timing, spatial awareness—Butler said she identified and amplified those qualities as dance. “A lot of it happened quite naturally, and I think it's sometimes an understatement when I say they're essentially doing what they do every day, and I'm just putting a frame around it.

“Because it is a highly choreographed show,” she continued, “and over the three years of the process, I found that when I introduce and teach everything on a whiteboard—I map it out so they learn it and then I have them walk it, once they walk it, we get in the tractors with the walkie-talkies—then they drive it.”

In short, Butler believes the choreography “comes quite naturally to them. They also have the ability to listen to each other and are immensely respectful to me. They are interested in what I’m offering. They ask questions.”

Some also recalled growing up around these machines, with one of the farmers telling Butler that when he was a “defiant teen, he would lock one engine, and it could turn.” “That’s a fouetté!” she told him, while Eichten explained that Sarah and Andy Enge, or, more familiarly, Farmer Andy, Butler’s main collaborator and whose farm, Enge Farm is the “host farm,” would sit down over the last two summers and watch classical ballet videos and discuss the parallels that keep cropping up (no pun intended) in both movement quality and articulation.

“I was showing him videos of ‘Swan Lake,’ the 32 fouettés,” Butler enthused, “and the port de bras, and I'm talking about the technique of that, and he's telling me about basically the technique required for farming, and how he just grew up inside of it. So, it's part of his genetic makeup.” 

To hear Butler and Eichten describe these fruitful relationships is not only the essence of their collaboration, but also of their work with the locals. And while Butler said she was “coming into [the project] with a vague understanding of farm work, through these exchanges I now know how to drive a tractor, rake a field. I grew up in ballet. Andy grew up in farming, [and] that exchange, that recognition of depth and the artistry of both things and all the people involved, has been really beautiful.”

By showtime, Butler and crew will have had between five and six weeks of rehearsals. As to the audience, Butler said there will be room for some 450 in both bleacher and, “hay bale seating. Me being from California, I assumed the whole Midwest was quite flat, but the show doesn’t happen on a flat field. It has these deep pockets and it’s against a forest and there’s a lot of variation in the hillside. 

“In a lot of ways,” she continued, “it’s kind of like an old-fashioned raked stage, because there’s premium seating on hay bales and the next tier down is bleacher seating. 

A true community project, Butler acknowledged that because the 18 farmers are, “allocating time away from their farms, a lot of other community members are then filling in the farm work they're missing.”