Feb 18, 2005  |  By: BRIAN MOYLAN  | COMMENTS     

music juxtaposed to it.”

The ballet itself has a long, storied history. A commission by gay producer Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballet Russes, the score was written by Igor Stravinsky and the original choreography was done by gay ballet great Vaslav Nijinsky.

When it debuted in Paris in 1913, the audience was so upset by the jarring score and the angular movement that it nearly started a riot.

With the gift of hindsight, it is considered one of the greatest pieces of music written in the 20th century and Nijinsky’s four ballets for Ballet Russes, including “Rite of Spring,” are thought of as the basis for modern dance.

In the late 1980s, Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet tried to reconstruct Nijinsky’s work, which tells the story of a group of pagans committing a human sacrifice. A number of other choreographers — including the great Pina Bausch — have set movement to the work.

Glen Tetley created a successful work in 1974 in Germany that debuted in the United States two years later with Mikhail Baryshnikov in the lead. The Tetley version just had a revival in Seattle with the Pacific Northwest Ballet last month.

“My concern is that they would influence me too much … but I don’t think [they] have at all,” McIntyre says of his new version.

“Whenever I hear in rehearsals about a ballet that is really provocative, it has turned out to be really successful,” Webre says about McIntyre’s latest work. “So far I’ve heard about a lesbian scene, male semi-nudity, a rape and matricide, so I’m cautious. But I’m confident Trey can pull it all off and reach the audience in a compelling way.”

McIntyre says he started by creating a cast of characters for the narrative of the ballet and, after listening to the score and setting the characters in motion, both the story and the movement came naturally.

The story involves a central woman who has been forced by her domineering mother into accepting an engagement to a man she doesn’t love. The ballet is set at her engagement party (hence the gowns on the dancers) where the woman’s true love, a member of her staff, is working.

“It’s that pull between being who you are and being a slave to duty and privilege and social status and the havoc that is wreaked by not being true to yourself,” he says.

Those sound like themes that would be important to any gay man or woman. McIntyre caused waves in 2000 with “Blue in June,” his first work for the Washington Ballet, in which the central love duet was between two men.

Webre, who started at the company in 1999, was skeptical about putting on something so provocative so early in his tenure. “I was nervous about that premiere,” he says, “but it was the hit of the season.”

But that is less of a big deal today.

“People were always surprised that there would be people of the same sex manipulating each other on stage,” he says. “People have stopped calling my attention to that, so I think it’s less of a novelty now. It’s now more accepted. It’s just part of the vocabulary.”

McIntyre says he wishes that he could incorporate more gay themes into his work. “If I were going to be as truly honest as an artist as I want to, then all the relationships would be about gay relationships, because that’s what I have,” he says.

And