Feb 18, 2005  |  By: BRIAN MOYLAN  | COMMENTS     

With just a cursory scan of the rehearsal studio at the Washington Ballet, it’s easy to spot the choreographer. For one thing, he’s 6-foot-5 and wearing a knit cap, hooded sweatshirt, jeans and athletic shoes, rather than ballet slippers, tights and an enormous ball gown.

It’s readily apparent that Trey McIntyre is the man in charge.

“I have a very specific way of working,” he says. “It has to be very focused and everyone has to be focused and I need a lot of quiet. That’s hard when there are 30 dancers in the room and they’re all wearing point shoes and these crinkly skirts.”

It’s easy to tell that McIntyre is focused, driving the dancers to perform the same section of dance repeatedly, each time tweaking things, making the movement perfect and instructing everyone. And, on this day, only two weeks remain before the Feb. 23 opening of “Rite of Spring,” his newest original work for the Washington Ballet.

“By opening night I have an ideal of what every moment should look like,” he says. “But performances are so fleeting and you work your hardest to get the perfect performance out of people and the dancers make new choices every night on stage. There’s a lot of frustration in that.”

Such statements make the gay ballet choreographer sound like a temperamental control freak, but talking to him outside of the studio belies that stereotype. In person, McIntyre, 35, is as casual as his dress. He is funny, charming, well spoken and displays a youthfulness in appearance and manner that makes him appear to be younger than he is.

It’s difficult not to develop a crush on Trey McIntyre. Just ask People magazine, which named him one of its 25 most eligible bachelors in 2003 — an honor he says he turned down in 2002. But that status was short-lived because McIntyre met his current boyfriend, a ballet dancer, a few months after the article appeared.

“In certain areas it opens up doors more than anything else I’ve done in my life,” he says. “If that helps me reach more people or make more people take a look at ballet, then fine. It would make me sad though if that was my one achievement.”

But really, McIntyre’s 15-year career as a choreographer is an achievement on its own. A native of Wichita, Kan., McIntyre’s mother enrolled him in ballet class at a young age because he was an awkward kid. From there, he went to train at the North Carolina School for the Arts and Houston Ballet, where he created his first work at 20.

After a few years as the enfant terrible of the ballet world, he has since settled into a prolific career, serving as the choreographic associate at Houston Ballet and the resident choreographer at Ballet Memphis.

He’s also just penned a deal to be choreographic resident at the Washington Ballet.

“He has a high level of knowledge and comfort with classical ballet and he’s doing really interesting contemporary ideas and combining them with ballet, which is our essential language,” says Septime Webre the gay artistic director of the Washington Ballet.

The upcoming “Rite of Spring” will be the fourth full-length work McIntyre has created for the Washington Ballet. He made his company debut in 2000 with “Blue Until June,” followed by “The Reassuring Effects of Form and Poetry” in 2003 and “Memory of a Free Festival” in 2004.

With the current arrangement, McIntyre is scheduled to create another work, in addition to “Rite of Spring,” for the company’s 2005-2006 season.

“Right now I’m interested in developing relationships with specific ballet companies,” he says, adding that he would rather work choreographing full-time than deal with the partially administrative duties of being an artistic director.

“It’s important to me to work with the same people over time and establish a way of working and establish a vocabulary,” he adds. “When I keep going to new companies, I’m just starting from scratch, and it limits me as a choreographer.”

The initial impetus to tackle “Rite of Spring” came from Webre.

“It’s my favorite piece of orchestral music … [Webre] suggested that it be set in a cocktail party,” McIntyre says. “I like the idea of a proscribed social situation with a barbaric bombastic ...