A Choreographer Is Born

Make no mistake: Trey McIntyre, guest artist at Ballet Memphis, will never
be described as the enfant terrible of the dance world. The
choreographer might be young, but with his affable nature and easy-on-the-eyes
good looks, he seems more like the boy next door than anything else.

McIntyre’s latest, High Lonesome, will debut at Ballet
Memphis’ Red Hot & Blue triple bill this weekend. And it won’t be
all swans and Strauss. At the ripe old age of 31, McIntyre is a new generation
of choreographer.

“With most people, how it works is you’ll have a career as a
famous dancer and when you retire, because you’ve achieved some sort of
notoriety, you’ll get the opportunity to try choreography,” he says.

Instead of dancing into choreography, McIntyre took another
route.

“I was a music theater kid,” he says of his early
Wichita, Kansas, days, “but I was sort of short and awkward and fat. I
would go to auditions and I couldn’t do the dance part.” To improve his
coordination, his mother stuck him in ballet classes. At first, he didn’t like
it: It was too hard and too boring. When his parents dropped him off, he says,
he would skip class and go next door and get a Slurpee. One day, while he was
supposed to be in class, he was showing a friend some dance steps he had made
up when his ballet teacher saw him from out the window.

“My instinct,” he says, “was to start making up
steps even before I knew what choreography was.”

Instead of chastising him, the ballet teacher invited him to
teach the steps to the class. A choreographer was born.

“From that point on, my early dance training, even when I
was a dancer with Houston Ballet I always felt that was my schooling to become
a choreographer,” says McIntyre.

After going to Houston for an intensive summer workshop, the
artistic director of the Houston Ballet, Ben Stevenson, created a special
position for McIntyre as choreographic apprentice. During the next few years,
he both danced and choreographed for the company. “I was learning what it
was like to be a dancer in a professional company, learning the work of the
most famous choreographers in the world. But I was also making work for that
company and starting to work with other companies.”

And while he thinks his age has perhaps worked against him in
terms of experience, he sees an opportunity to connect with a different
audience.

“Your older audiences are going to die off and you have to
cultivate a new audience. The ballet companies have to create their audience.
It’s not like in Europe where it’s part of the society and you grow up knowing
about that kind of thing and you go with your parents,” says McIntyre.
“If ballet companies don’t evolve and become contemporary, then why
exist?”

One way McIntyre’s High Lonesome taps a more contemporary
feel is his choice of music. The entire 22-minute ballet is choreographed to
songs from Beck’s Odelay album.

“You can’t beat his work,” says McIntyre. “It’s
amazing music and incredibly danceable. It has a lot of layers the way
classical music would.”

The title of the ballet comes from the name of a Louis L’Amour
novel. McIntyre says his grandfather used to read L’Amour’s Western series,
and his father would always joke about how corny they were. When McIntyre’s
father got a little older, he began reading them as well.

“As sort of a continuing legacy,” says McIntyre,
“I picked up one myself. It’s terrible writing but an incredible read.
It’s like a soap opera.”

But the piece is not about the wild, wild West or the plot of a
L’Amour novel; it, rather, focuses on McIntyre’s family.

“It’s not a narrative piece; it’s not the story of my
family,” he says by way of clarification. The ballet is instead an
exploration of family relationships. For the piece, McIntyre drew on his own
experience as well as the strengths of the dancers.

“One of the most important things to me in a dancer is not
how great their technique is or what their body can do, but what they think
about and how their mind works. That’s the most apparent thing, especially if
you’re not a trained dancer watching a performance. What you’re clued into is
what the person’s thinking and what they convey,” says McIntyre.
“[Ballet] is an abstract art form: nobody’s saying anything. They’re not
telling you this story. You’re having to somehow connect on a level that you
can’t speak.”

Also on the bill for Red Hot & Blue are
Dracula, which was performed by the ballet two years ago, and
Kindling, a new pas de deux produced by Ballet Memphis associate
artistic director Karl Condon.

“I think Ballet Memphis is unique in that it’s ahead of the
curve. It’s a really progressive company,” says McIntyre. “I hope
people here are proud of that.”

Red Hot & Blue

Saturday-Sunday, October 27th-28th

The Orpheum