Sonnet XXX-

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

Hannah is the CVHS Dance Sterling Scholar 2022-23 and Regional Runner Up.

Vincent Van Gogh’s most famous piece, Starry Night, that we see today is actually the 15th version that Van Gogh worked on. This is because he was never satisfied with his work. He saw too many imperfections within his piece. As a dancer and in my life I can relate to this ideal. I am always striving to push past my imperfections. Sometimes I can only see the imperfections in my work, just as Van Gogh did. But, Van Gogh’s work is now seen as a masterpiece. Sometimes what we see as imperfections is actually a masterpiece to others. Starry Night was not painted as a starry night, but as a twilight moment in time right before sunrise. If we look at our starry nights as twilights we can love and see past our imperfections. Sometimes, as dancers, we need not seek perfection but strive for the imagination and love that a five year old has when they just dance and believe that they are creating a masterpiece.
– Hannah Brandt

Dance Company & the Colla Voce choir will be performing a large-scale work titled “I Never Saw Another Butterfly”. It is a song cycle set to poems written by children in the Terezin concentration camp during the holocaust. These hauntingly beautiful poems are brought to life through song and dance. Finding hope and beauty in the world around them.

“If in barbed wire things can bloom. Why couldn’t I?
I will not die!…. It is wonderful to be alive.”

“Terezin is full of beauty.”

This is not a statement that one would expect to be written about a concentration camp. Children, however, have a remarkable way of seeing what adults cannot. They find the wonder, the beauty, and the hope in deplorable circumstances. The poems you will hear tonight were all written by such children.

I. It all depends on how you look at it

Terezin is full of beauty.
It’s in your eyes now clear
And through the street the tramp
Of many marching feet I hear.

In the ghetto at Terezin,
It looks that way to me,
Is a square kilometer of earth
Cut off from the world that’s free.

Death, after all, claims everyone,
You find it everywhere.
It catches up even those
Who wear their noses in the air.

The whole, wide world is ruled
With a certain justice, so
That helps perhaps to sweeten
The poor man’s pain and woe

II. Man Proposes, God Disposes

Who was helpless back in Prague
And Who was rich before
He’s a poor soul here in Terezin
His body’s bruised and sore

Who was toughened up before
He’ll survive these days
But who was used to servants
Will sink into his grave

III. Terezin

The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads
To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.

We’ve suffered here more than enough,
Here in this clot of grief and shame,
Wanting a badge of blindness
To be a proof for their own children.

A fourth year of waiting, like standing above a swamp
From which any moment might gush forth a spring.

Meanwhile, the rivers flow another way,
Another way,
Not letting you die, not letting you live.

And the cannons don’t scream and the guns don’t bark
And you don’t see blood here.
Nothing, only silent hunger.
Children steal the bread here and ask and ask and ask
And all would wish to sleep, keep silent and just go to sleep again…

The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads
To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.

IV. The Butterfly

The last, the very last,
So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.
Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing
against a white stone .. .

Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly ‘way up high
It went away I’m sure because it wished to
kiss the world goodbye.

For seven weeks I’ve lived in here,
Penned up inside the ghetto.
But I have found what I love here.
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut branches in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.

(this isn’t in the song) The butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don’t live here, in the ghetto.

V. The Garden

A little garden
Fragrant and full of roses
The path is narrow
And a little boy walks along it

A little boy, a sweet boy
Like that growing blossom
When the blossom comes to bloom
The little boy will be no more

VI. The Little Mouse

A mousie sat upon a shelf,
Catching fleas in his coat of fur.
But he couldn’t catch her- what chagrin!-
She’d hidden ‘way inside his skin.
He turned and wriggled, knew no rest,
That flea was such a nasty pest!

His daddy came
And searched his coat.
He caught the flea and off he ran
To cook her in the frying pan.
The little mouse cried, “Come and see!
For lunch we’ve got a nice, fat flea!”

VII. On A Sunny Evening

On a purple, sun-shot evening
Under wide-flowering chestnut trees
Upon the threshold full of dust
Yesterday, today, and the days are all like these.

Trees flower forth their beauty,
Lovely, too, their very wood all gnarled and old
That I am half afraid to peer
Into their crowns of green and gold.

The sun has made a veil of gold
So lovely that my body aches.
Above, the heavens shriek with blue
Convinced, I’ve smiled by some mistake.
The world’s abloom and seems to smile.
I want to fly, but where, how high?
If in barbed wire things can bloom
Why couldn’t I? I will not die!

VIII. Yes, That’s The Way Things Are

In Terezin in a so-called park
A queer old granddad sits
Somewhere there in the so-called park
He wears a beard down to his lap
And on his head a little cap

Hard crusts he crumbles on his gums
He’s only got one single tooth
My poor old man with working gums
Instead of soft rolls, len

XI. Birdsong

He doesn’t know the world at all
Who stays in his nest and doesn’t go out.
He doesn’t know what birds know best
Nor what I want to sing about,
That the world is full of loveliness.

When dewdrops sparkle in the grass
And earth’s aflood with morning light,
A blackbird sings upon a bush
To greet the dawning after night.
Then I know how fine it is to live.

Hey, try to open up your heart
To beauty; go to the woods someday
And weave a wreath of memory there.
Then if the tears obscure your way
You’ll know how wonderful it is
To be alive.

There will be a 10 minute intermission.

CHS Dance Sterling Scholar 2022-23

“Flowers in the Snow” is a powerful dance piece that tells the story of growth and resilience in the face of adversity. The choreographer drew inspiration from her father’s trials, and the resulting performance is a moving tribute to the strength of the human spirit.

Costume designed by Madeline Wood and constructed by her mom, Stephanie Wood.

Superior 1 ranking - Southern Utah Performing Arts Festival and Utah High School Festival.

Sleeping Insanity is about Lady M sleepwalking because the garbage in her mind has taken over her subconscious thoughts leading her deeper into insanity, where the stain of blood cannot be undone.

“Yet here’s a spot….. Out, damned spot! Out, I say!… Hell is murky!… Yet who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him… What, will these hands ne’er be clean?… Here’s the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand… Wash your hands, put on your nightgown: look not so pale. – I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried; he cannot come out on’s grave…. To bed, to bed! What’s done cannot be undone. To bed..”

2023 Youth American Grand Prix