Choreographer Tero Saarinen has been intrigued by the Shakers since the late 1980's, when he first saw a documentary about Doris Humphrey's Shaker-inspired choreography. The strong communal values and strikingly beautiful, functionalistic aesthetics of this radical religious movement of the 18th and 19th centuries made a strong impression on him. At the start of the 21st century, Saarinen came across The Boston Camerata album Simple Gifts and in 2002, he contacted Joel Cohen, then Artistic Director of The Boston Camerata, about the possibility of a joint production. It took eighteen months of hard work for Saarinen and his collaborators to finalise the choreography and the visual form of Borrowed Light. The work is named after the architectural practice, common for the Shakers, of building windows into interior rooms, thus maximising daylight and productivity. Despite the strong influences of the Shakers, Borrowed Light addresses the themes of communitarian society on a general level: "My main source of inspiration was the Shakers and I ended up using only original Shaker music, but this work is not about Shakerism. It is about community and devotion. To me the nature of total commitment - whether religious, artistic or political - is fundamentally the same."