Poetry in motion is a phrase that could describe the wind rustling an aspen glade in Glacier National Park, or the cascading tendrils of Birdwoman Falls as it plunges from a hanging valley on Mount Oberlin. But it also describes a troupe of five ballet dancers who twirled and leapt skyward in the park in a bid to capture its heart and soul in dance.

While the winds howled back in late June at Sun Point along the north shore of St. Mary Lake, the dancers, without any supporting or guiding music, were going through motions choreographed by Trey McIntyre.

“We had sustained winds of 30 mph with gusts up to 50 miles per hour,” recalls Terre Jones, the president and chief executive officer of the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts. “You might say, ‘How does a dancer dance in that stuff?’ He (McIntyre) loved it because it created this incredible physical dynamic and also showed a fascinating part of the park, which is this strong wind that blows through and down this valley.”

For Mr. Jones and the non-profit foundation, the trip to Glacier earlier this summer was to capture the park for the latest chapter of Face of America, a series the foundation launched in 2000 to offer Americans a slightly different portrayal, or interpretation, of their national parks.

“It was an idea that we would sort of give a gift to the nation for the millenium celebration. And what we decided was that since Wolf Trap National Park is the only national park dedicated to the performing arts in America, we would do something that would relate to performing arts and convey the stories of other national parks,” he explains.

“So we began with Yosemite....that’s where we had aerial dancers dancing beside Yosemite Fall. Pretty spectacular stuff,” Mr. Jones continued. “We’ve filmed five to date. We started with Yosemite, the last one was Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, and Glacier is the sixth of the series. It really is designed to capture the spirit and the essence of the national parks, through the performing arts, so through dance, through music, through storytelling.”

The series, which likely will continue to move through the National Park System in the years to come, is a multimedia artistic feast. When the Glacier show debuts August 19 at the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts outside Washington, D.C., it will feature storytellers, musicians, and, of course, video of the dancers. While most of the production is a celebration of Glacier National Park, a segment also captures the impact climate change is having in the park, which is expected to lose all its glaciers to the warming climate by 2030 at the latest.

“You’re going to see the beauty and grandeur of Glacier, but the rest of the story, if you will, is conveyed through music and video that we’ve captured there ourselves,” Mr. Jones explains. “We’ve got people like Philip Aaberg. Philip will be here live doing his music. We’ll have scenics in the background. We’ve got Blackfeet Indian singer/songwriter Jack Gladstone, and then Rob Quist, the cowboy singer, will all be here. So there are many components to the evening of Face of America: Glacier National Park.

“Parts of it you’re going to see that spectacular scenery, that glorious scenery, parts of it will be telling the story of loss and that human emotion of loss, which is conveyed in a lot of different ways,” he said. “But in this case specifically a loss as a result of climate change and human action.”

To produce the program, the crew not only filmed dancers in the park and contacted musicians, but also spent time in and around Glacier with folks who have long ties to the park, its mountains, rivers, meadows, and wildlife.

"We like very much to try to connect, when we can, the music and all of the elements of the arts to people who have a connection to whatever location we’re shooting at. ... So we really try to make that connection, so we have a stronger, deeper connection with the environment, with the location," said Mr. Jones.

“We’re doing a segment as part of the show called -- at least the working title is Voices of Montana -- so we interviewed a variety of people, from the Salish Tribe, the Kootenay Tribe, the Blackfeet Tribe, old-time Western cowboys, people who have been there their whole lives, said Mr. Jones. “There’s one ranger called Ranger Doug (Follett). He actually is an interpretive ranger at the park (working out of Apgar). He does poetry, so there’s this one section of Voices of Montana where there’s this ranger, I think he’s been there 50 years, he’s going to be something like 80. It’s those kinds of stories that will be integrated into it through this section called Voices of Montana.”

In addition to the performance at Wolf Trap, Mr. Jones has been trying to work out a deal with the Public Broadcasting System to produce a television show from the production. In the past, PBS has assembled a 90-minute compilation of previous segments of Face of America.

As for which parks might show up in future Face of America productions, we'll just have to wait and see.

Last fall Mr. Jones "drove solo 19,000 miles across the U.S., visited 87 national parks in 33 different states. I’m also a photographer and have a book that will come out about that. But part of that sabbatical was to begin looking at the next series of parks. So out of that 87 I will narrow down to six or eight possibilities and then we begin the research process again.”