Trey McIntyre (in hat) has agreed to be choreographic resident
at the Washington Ballet. The upcoming ‘Rite of Spring’ will be his
fourth full-length work for the Washington Ballet, following ‘Blue Until
June,’ ‘The Reassuring Effects of Form and Poetry,’ and ‘Memory
of a Free Festival.’ (Photos by Rudy K. Lawidjaja)
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BRIAN MOYLAN
Friday, February 18, 2005
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 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 because of the relationship he has, the busy choreographer is now taking
control of his personal life, saying no to many offers for the next year and
moving his home from Brooklyn to San Francisco to be closer to his boyfriend.
“The downtime is just as crucial as the working time,” he says.
“The piece has to reference some kind of life experience and if my only
life experience is making other ballets, then I’ll become very derivative
of myself.”
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