As a professional dancer for over two decades Derryl Yeager has had experience in evey style and medium. Originally from Amarillo, Texas, he came to the University of Utah and received his BFA and MFA while becoming a principle dancer with Ballet West. He then went on to perform in several Broadway Shows such as Aof five children is a testament to the depth of his talent and abilities.

As a choreographer he has also worked in every style and medium by choreographing music videos for such stars as Stevie Nicks and Julio Iglesias, numerous successful and crowd pleasing ballets for professional and semi-professional ballet companies, Equity Theatre musicals such as Pippin and South Pacific, and several film and television projects that has included the major television miniseries The Stand by Stephen King. He also has choreographed for the Utah Shakespeare Festival and at Tuacahn near St. George.

As director and teacher he has been on the faculty at two major universities and was Artistic Director of the Theatre Ballet at Brigham Young University for two years. As Co-Artistic Director of Center Stage Performing Arts Studios in Orem, he has helped develop one of the finest dance studios in the state of Utah.

With Odyssey Dance Theatre, Mr. Yeager brings all of his experience and talent to bear to create a truly exciting and innovative company that produces works that range from the timely to the timeless. Odyssey Dance Theatre has been a hit in Utah around the United States and in Europe.

Connie was featured on "Touched by an Angel" with Debbie Reynolds in October of 2001. Her highlights include several local shows and commercials. She's been acting for over twenty years on stage and film. She also has fourteen years of dance experience. She was a spokesperson for Marine Products, NextVoice, and Bath and Body Works. She's currently working on a film called "Love Thy Neighbor."

Connie Young began performing at the age of three which lead to the "Best Youth Performer in Utah" at age eleven. Her experience as a child and teen actor really allows her to connect with young talent. She's been featured in a variety of commercials as well as serving as spokesperson for various product lines. Her work with Robert Redford at the Sundance Film Lab lead to critical acclaim and she's been most recently been seen as the female lead in "The Singles Ward."

A devoted Latter-day Saint until his early adulthood, Young retained certain conceptual paradigms from Mormonism even after abandoning most Mormon religious practices; these paradigms would reappear in various terminological adaptations and spiritual contexts throughout his career. Below I offer an examination of Young's music that will seek to problematize common generalizations regarding his musical and philosophical influences by considering his work within the context of Mormon thought. In doing so, I do not mean simply to replace one originary myth with another, but rather to demonstrate the extent to which polar models such as "Eastern" and "Western" (which, at best, contrive to fabricate the Exotic, and worst, seek to indict the Other), impose a false sense of opposition or incompatibility between perceived worldviews. This, I hope, will suggest a new way in which to connect Young's biography with his compositional practices and the meanings he projects onto them -- not by pitting polarities against each other, but by exploring the affinities shared by seemingly distant cosmologies. Ultimately, after examining these strands of influence, I will consider his music -- and the dialogue with which he surrounds it -- in rather pragmatic terms: Where and of what kind is Young's Heaven, and how exactly does he plan to get us there?

The first composer to have created music made up entirely of long sustained tones and arguably the founder of the "minimalist" musical style, though his work bears little resemblence to that of later, better-known figures such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley.

Raised a Mormon, Young claims that the first sound he can remember hearing was wind whistling through the Idaho log cabin he was born in, and that during childhood he became fascinated by the humming of step-down power transformers and telephone poles (sounds which would clearly influence him later in life). In 1940 his family moved to LA, where he tapdanced and performed "cowboy songs" to earn money. Later, in high school and college (UCLA and UC Berkeley), he joined several jazz groups playing alto sax (and apparently had a fan in Ornette Coleman). However, by 1957 he had abandoned jazz in favor of his compositional studies.

One of the principal architects of the minimalist aesthetic, La Monte Young was among the true innovators of 20th century music, his rejection of traditional melody and structure in favor of hypnotic drone epics influencing not only the avant-garde music created in his wake but also proving seminal in the development of punk, Krautrock and ambient. Young was born in Bern, Idaho in 1935, beginning his studies of the alto saxophone at age seven. After the family relocated to Los Angeles, in high school he played alongside the likes of Don Cherry and Billy Higgins, continuing his exploration of European classical and contemporary composition at Los Angeles City College and later UCLA. In time, Young also began delving into the classic musics of India and Japan; the barren atmospheres evoked by the music of Anton Webern were another key influence.

In 1959, Young composed Trio for Strings, regularly cited as the earliest work in the minimalist canon; the piece, with its emphasis on lengthy, sustained tones -- intercut with equally extended rests -- baffled his professors at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the wake of several other similarly controversial projects he relocated to New York City. There he studied electronic music, in time joining Fluxus, a loose confederacy of conceptual artists -- among them John Cage, George Macuinas, George Brecht and Yoko Ono -- dedicated to re-establishing the arts in new and different contexts. In 1962, Young first began to conceive of the Dream House, a continual sound and light environment related to his composition The Four Dreams of China; the project remained in limbo for some years to follow, but was a clear forerunner of the principle to guide his subsequent career -- music with no beginning and no end.

At the same time, Young became obsessed with notions of tuning, specifically that of Just Intonation, a system in which all of the intervals can be represented by ratios of whole numbers, with a clear preference for the smallest numbers compatible with a given musical purpose. He soon set up an improvisational group including his wife, the visual artist Marian Zazeela, guitarist Billy Name (later one of the regulars at Andy Warhol's Factory) and percussionist Angus MacLise; enormously influential within the downtown NYC underground scene, the ensemble's live appearances closely mirrored the principles of Young's latest compositional work, with pieces becoming so epic in scope that performances -- while typically lasting for hours at a time -- still represented only a fraction of the project as a whole.

By 1963, the group's line-up included Young and Zazeela on voice-drones, Tony Conrad on violin and John Cale on viola; variously dubbed the Theatre of Eternal Music and the Dream Syndicate, the ensemble's collective input pushed Young's ideals to their logical conclusion -- sustaining notes for hours at a time, their improvised dissections of specific harmonic intervals rejected the compositional process altogether, instead elaborating shared performance concepts. Upon disbanding in 1965, Conrad, Young and Cale all later staked claim to authoring of the "Eternal Music" aesthetic; Young also held on to the group's live tapes. Regardless, his music from that point on remained pointed in the direction of infinity -- The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, a work tuned to the pitch of his pet turtle's aquarium motor, was begun in 1964 but its theoretical evolution continues into the present, each performance a part of a greater whole.

By the beginning of the 1970s, Young's approach to eternal music required tours of six to eight players, slide projectionists, a technician and over two tons of electronic equipment; needing a week for set-up time alone, these multi-media Dream House installations then remained intact for another week, with sine-wave generators and shifting light patterns creating continuous sounds and images throughout the residency. By 1973, his focus was a piece titled The Well-Tuned Piano, an installation which required at least a month of tuning and practicing in the intended performance space prior to its public debut; as the work developed, Young's performances grew from a standard three-hour duration to well over four. He also returned to his earlier works -- a Dream House installation of The Tortoise, mounted in New York, ran continuously from 1979 to 1985.

Rarely recorded throughout much of his career, Young signed to Gramavision in 1987, with a flurry of releases -- The Well-Tuned Piano, The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from the Four Dreams of China and Just Stompin', a raga-blues effort recorded with his Forever Blues Band, among them -- soon appearing. Still, throughout his career Young remained a largely shadowy figure, often discussed (his connection to the nascent Velvet Underground the most common point of reference) but seldom heard; his influence on the rise of ambient music and drone-rock is undeniable, yet almost subliminal. Undaunted, he continued composing and performing regularly into the 1990s, with his latter-day works including The Lower Map of the Eleven's Division in the Romantic Symmetry and Chronos Kristalla.

EXPERIENCE: Composer, 1954- ; Performer, 1954- ; Lecturer, 1959- ; Instructor, 1959- ; Artistic Dir., MELA Foundation, NYC 1985- ; Mus. Dir., 6 Harrison Street Dream House Project of Dia Art Foundation, NYC 1975-1985; Instructor, Admin. Dir., Kirana Center for Indian Classical Music, NYC 1971- ; Dir., The Theatre of Eternal Music, NYC 1962- ; Member, Advisory Committee, Zeitgeist, 1991- ; Artistic Consultant, Fluxus Section, "The Roots of Modernism" Exhibition, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, W.Germany, 1988; Member, Advisory Board, Just Intonation Network, SF 1987- ; Member, Advisory Board, Meet the Composer, 1974- ; Member, Advisory Council, Independent Electronic Music Center, Trumansburg, NY 1967-1968; Music Editor, S.M.S., NYC 1968; Editor, Co-Publisher, An Anthology (NYC 1963); Dir., Concert Series at Yoko Ono's Studio, NYC 1960-1961; Mus. Dir., The Ann Halprin Dance Company, Kentfield, CA, 1959-1960; Teaching Assistant, Music Dept., UC Berkeley, 1959-60.

Lighting Designer/Technical Director. As a professional designer for the past 15 years, Tim Young has had the opportunity to light the stage for a wide variety of performers and events. Some of his concert design credits include lighting for Ray Charles, Ann Murray, The Vocal Majority, The Utah symphony, and Diamond Rio. But theatrical design is his first love, and with design credits almost too numerous to mention, some of his favorite projects have been lighting for Man of La Mancha, Our Town, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and The Secret Garden. Tim has had the opportunity to work in a wide variety of theatres including the Snow Drama Theatre at Ricks College (BYU Idaho) where he served as the campus' Resident Lighting Designer for 9 years. Some of the other theatres he has worked in include The Colonial Theatre in Idaho Falls, The Playmill Theatre in West Yellowstone, The Pink Garter Playhouse in Jackson, Wyoming, and The Marriot Center for Dance. He has also served for 5 years as the Assistant Lighting Designer for the Hill Cumorah Pageant in Palmyra, New York. Currently, Tim is one of the Resident Designers at the LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake City. His most recent projects there include Light of the World and the NBC broadcast of the Olympic Aid Conference.

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Web page created 7 June 2002. Last modified 7 March 2005.