The exposed brick interior of the New Hazlett Theater is a mass of odd fiberboard shapes, with a massive row of tables housing a lighting board, computers and snaking cables. The floor resembles a jigsaw puzzle.

Amid the chaos, creator and composer/choreographer Grisha Coleman pauses to talk to lighting designer Tony Mulanix about one of the myriad connections that will go into the world premiere of "echo::system-The Desert," a live art installation with music and dance that will re-create a surreal desert environment modeled after scientific data.

It seems that it will take a village to raise this performance, beginning tonight and running through next weekend. The team of collaborators has been gathered from the performing arts, natural sciences, computer technology and metaphysics and includes Coleman, Mulanix, population biologist Mike Bryant, architect designer John Oduroe and Pittsburgh-based Lubetz Architects, videographers Maya Ciarrocchi and Peter Kirn, sound designers Leon Rothenberg and Mark Huang, Pittsburgh-based fashion designer Namiko Ogawa and writer Onome Ekeh. Vocals and movement will be performed by Coleman and five dancers.

There will be no sand, however.

Coleman, a performance artist and fellow at Carnegie Mellon University's STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, is more interested in the science/art connection. The New York City native has performed with the noted dance ensemble, Urban Bush Women, and established HOT-MOUTH, her own music and performance group that was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for "Most Unique Theatrical Experience" in 1995.

Coleman plans to create five separate echo systems across the country -- "The Desert" is the second. Collectively she will present them in a series of alternative environments that she calls "action stations."

Coleman created the first action station in Los Angeles in 2003. Called "The Abyss," it explored an environment that not many human beings have visited, places like the miles-deep Mariana Trench. "It was all based on the scanty data that we do have of the bottom layer of the ocean, but also your imagination," says Coleman.

The piece included a trio of divers moving down the outside of a building, meant to represent a ravine, and connected to data that was presented in random fashion. That data subsequently dictated the progress of the performance.

The desert will, in many ways be the complete opposite. Humans have lived in and visited the planet's deserts more frequently. It began as "the birthplace of most religions of world," according to Coleman. She also notes that the desert has also had a lot of weight in literature, film, travel and current events -- witness the wars currently taking place in desert territory.

That will produce a different kind of feeling, because the desert is much more complex. Coleman and her partners will create three streams -- a mythological stream that depicts the evolution of this species in the desert, a virtual world that is a simulation of the desert and a physical or sensory world, composed of lights and sound.

It has been a mammoth project that began nearly five years ago, when Coleman presented the idea of creating this alternative environment to her collaborators. She was interested in how people from different disciplines would go about analyzing and observing the desert from their point of view.

"We exchanged the material that we generated and tried to find resonances where the concepts mimicked each other," explains Coleman. They met on and off at Banff Center for the Arts, New York City and California. Sometimes everyone would be "off doing their thing, but not undirected."

But it all comes down to the final few weeks, making this "Desert" blossom like a rare flower in a contemporary environment.