Trey McIntyre is back and ready to Bowie
What does it take to be a performer, especially for a guy who dances?
Choreographer Trey McIntyre is not thinking about the physical aspects — all the years of building strength and technical virtuosity — but more prickly, psychological questions about “peacocking behavior” among male performers. As a spiritual person, he says, he’s been conflicted for decades by his need to be seen.
“Pretty Things,” McIntyre’s eighth commission from Houston Ballet, explores narcissism but also celebrates the personal qualities it takes to put oneself out there in front of an audience.
“I’m trying to reconcile feelings and judgments about myself, to have a more loving take on it,” he says.
The work premieres March 12 as part of the company’s “Forged in Houston” program, which includes Christopher Bruce’s “Hush” and Jorma Elo’s “ONE/ end/ONE.”
“Pretty Things” unfolds to eight iconic songs by David Bowie: “The Man Who Sold the World,” “Life on Mars?,” “Oh! You Pretty Things,” “Little Wonder,” “Ashes to Ashes,” “Ziggy Stardust,” “Young Americans” and “Changes.” McIntyre was aiming to create a progression, almost like a symphony, to give the ballet an arc even though it is abstract.
He likes Bowie’s audacity, his sense of fantasy and the way he embodies the grandiosity of theater. “I also just love his music,” he says. He wanted to capture Bowie’s spirit but not to illustrate the lyrics or make it about the man. “I don’t want to steal what he created. It’s my job to add depth to to the music, add a different perspective.”
This philosophy has driven McIntyre’s work for years, giving him a reputation as a choreographer who can tap evocatively into pop music and give it a sense of substance that’s hard to achieve in dance. Houston audiences experienced that ease most recently with 2018’s production of “In Dreams,” his 2007 ballet using songs by Roy Orbison.
McIntyre shows classical music the same respect. Last month San Francisco Ballet premiered “The Big Hunger,” an ambitious, 35minute ballet that uses exit signs as a metaphor for death. The music is Sergei Prokofiev’s devilishly hard Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, whose long passages of rapid notes gave liberties to superstar pianist Yekwon Sunwoo, making for a tricky collaboration that McIntyre says was “a pure joy.”
From boredom to ‘blowing up’ ballet
A native of Wichita, Kan., McIntyre knew he wanted to be a choreographer when he was 12 and bored with ballet.
His ballet teacher caught him skipping class outside in the parking lot, showing his own steps to other kids. Rather than scold him, she coaxed him inside to share his dance with his classmates.
He attended high school at the North Carolina School of the Arts, studying ballet because there wasn’t a program for choreographers. But Houston Ballet Academy had one each summer, and he got recruited. Even before he advanced into the corps, he was making dances for the professional company.
Being exposed to great choreographers — the lyrical humanism of Christopher Bruce, the storytelling heritage of Ben Stevenson and Kenneth MacMillan and the contemporary fluidity of Jirí Kylián — was mind-blowing to a kid.
“In the beginning, I wanted to just blow up ballet. As a creative person, I felt so restricted,” he says. “But Ben kept saying, ‘Remember your classical inheritance. Don’t forget this language you have.’ ”
Houston Ballet produced “Peter Pan,” his only full-length story ballet to date, in 2002, after another company dropped it, well into his creative process. (He says he finally has a new story ballet rumbling now.)
With his own company, Trey McIntyre Project, from 2005 to 2014, he had a platform to create 23 works as well as films and site-specific works.
McIntyre’s also always had a pretty steady stream of freelance commissions from companies such as Memphis Ballet. With age and experience, the stakes of that game have changed. “My attachment is different: Is this enjoyable, a valuable thing to do?,” he says.
Living in Brooklyn, N.Y., for the past two years, he is also channeling energy into another of his passions, photography.
“It’s a different role than I play with them in the studio, where I’m quite specific about what I want,” he says. “With photography, I’m trying to capture unconscious moments. It’s a more intimate exercise for my heart and brain. And you have a thing in your hand at the end, a print, unlike a ballet that comes and goes.”
Tackling ‘Pretty Things’
At 50, with more than 60 dances under his belt, McIntyre is returning home, in a sense, to a company he has only just met.
“Pretty Things” calls for 11 men. Given multiple casts, McIntyre worked with almost all of Houston Ballet’s 29 male dancers. But only veterans Ian Casady and Oliver Halkowich were with Houston Ballet the last time he created a dance here, in 2003. Some of them worked with him in 2018 when the company added “In Dreams” to its repertoire, but that was a much faster, simpler process.
The company’s spirit, humanity and integrity haven’t changed, McIntyre says, but the level of dancing has. Today’s corps members can do everything only principal dancers were capable of in the past, he says. “And they’re eager, present, creative dancers.”
“Pretty Things” is his third collaboration with scenic and costume designer Thomas Mika who has created a stage-upon-the stage amid a constellation of disco-ball ‘planets’ and shooting stars. Each costume has a unique bolero with a print abstracted from a different painting of a beautiful man.
Soloist Harper Watters, an Instagram star who is one of the company’s visible performers, spoke of the rigorous physicality and the choreographer’s knack for presenting his performers as “real, honest people” — not specifically themselves but also not contrived characters. “When two men partner, how people interpret it might be different,” Watters said. “What he does beautifully is that it’s neither here nor there, all just people encountering each other. The ebb and flow of emotions is very real.”