Student Choreographs Ballet Dedicated to Trinity Community
-Sky Michael Johnston, PhD
Like everyone in the Trinity Christian College community, Grace Merrill has been grappling with the college’s impending closure. Grace’s expression of her thoughts and feelings about Trinity, however, are decidedly unique. She choreographed a ballet.
That ballet, entitled “Of Grief and Grace,” was performed on March 21 and is now available to view here. Merrill, a first-year Business Major at Trinity and a Founders Scholar, choreographed the piece for the Emerging Artist Showcase presented by the Ballet 5:8 Studio Company. In May, Merrill graduated from Ballet 5:8’s pre-professional program and has been a member of the studio company since August of 2025. She earned her spot in the Emerging Artist Showcase through a competitive selection process in December of 2025. At that time, only a month after Trinity leadership announced the college’s closure, Merrill knew that she would process the news through art and dedicate her piece to the Trinity community.
A central question guided Merrill’s reflections: Why does God give us good gifts that He would take away? This was a nearly impossible question to answer, and that is part of the reason Merrill turned to art. She notes, “I knew that dance was a way to process really difficult questions that don’t have a straightforward answer.” Dance created a space where Merrill could bear to approach the difficult reality of losing Trinity. Merrill describes this experience poetically, “Art is beautiful, but it can let us sit with broken things.”
For Merrill, any insights or comfort that dance could bring to the situation was never just about herself. She had the Trinity community in mind throughout the whole process of creating her dance. She reflects, “At the time, I really wanted to see if I could use the opportunity… to use [it] to bless the Trinity community because I knew that art had an opportunity to connect with people where other things fall short.” Now, thanks to Merrill’s expertise in ballet, the Trinity community has a moving work of art that others can access as part of their own processes for grieving the loss of Trinity.
The roughly 11-minute piece has three movements which reflect Merrill’s experience at Trinity before and after learning the news of the college’s closure. The first movement is titled, “The Gift.” This movement is celebratory and reflects the good things Trinity’s community shared together. The second movement is “The Grief.” Here, umbrellas are a symbol of the denial stage of grief. In this movement, grief is portrayed as the “shadow of love,” a concept that Merrill gleaned from C.S. Lewis. The final movement, “The Giver,” approaches an answer to the original question behind the piece and posits that our affection should be for the Giver rather than the gift. In this movement, there are no props. Rather, as Merrill explains, “There is just pure unity.”
The piece offers a profound theological reflection on the difficult circumstances that have stirred everyone who cherishes Trinity Christian College over the last few months. Through dance, narrative, and deep wisdom, Merrill has created a treasure. Ultimately, the piece itself is a testament to the story it tells: Through the experience of loss, it is possible to gain even more than what was taken away.
Merrill describes the dance and her process in choreographing it in this video.
