Trey McIntyre Project
For his second August season at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Trey McIntyre was not afraid to take audiences to some dark, disturbing places. After opening with the relaxed, upbeat Like a Samba, in which the choreographer skillfully sustains the elongated lines and verticality of classical ballet while allowing hips to undulate and torsos to stretch and bend, his 11-member Trey McIntyre Project continued its compact but richly satisfying program with more exploratory works.
In Just, McIntyre offers his version of a “leotard ballet”: a lean, unadorned and quietly persuasive interpretation of an intriguing 20th-century score. In Henry Cowell’s “Set of Five for Violin, Piano and Percussion,” exotic percussion sounds intrude on the moody melodies. McIntyre incorporates this tension and uses it to create fluent, often surprising movements.
Artur Sultanov and Jonathan Jordan spring with a plush earthiness and muscular attack, while Alison Roper and Anne Mueller are more severely classical. The women move through sharp, angular shapes, but never seem cold or forbidding. McIntyre follows the music’s twists and turns fluently, as brief encounters—the two women winding subtly around each other—make a vivid impact. When both couples dance together, they fall in and out of unison, through sleek partnering sequences in which a woman’s leg may jut between her partner’s, and a man may rest his head on a woman’s chest as she arches back exquisitely. McIntyre alludes to the familiar, yet takes us somewhere new and quite fascinating.
Go Out is an ambitious 30-minute work that begins and ends with death. In 11 sections that fluently follow one another, we glimpse the secrets, fears and passions of the group that is discovered mourning for a man lying downstage. Towering above him, as the lights come up, Roper is an implacable, proud figure in a crimson gown, who stalks offstage calmly, leaving the rest to cope with what she has wrought.
Sandra Woodall’s costumes evoke the 1930s Dustbowl, or a generic vision of simple, hard-living folks. Bluegrass tunes, with their captivating rhythms, provide part of the score, but McIntyre has mixed in oddly disturbing recordings of church services and fervent preaching. Couples meet and court warily, and Roper, who manages to sustain a vivid presence without turning her difficult role into a caricature, looms nearby. The dancing has a robust, at times desperate force, and, even though the women are in pointe shoes, much of it has a modern-dance flavor.
When four couples share a rare moment of celebration to the glorious sounds of the Sacred Harp Singers, Roper suddenly appears within their circle. There’s no escaping her from that point on. She asserts her dominance in a commanding solo, and then claims the innocently youthful Jon Michael Schert. A craggy voice sings, asking to be spared for one more year; but there is no mercy—Schert’s lifeless figure slides out from under Roper’s skirt.
Susan Reiter is a critic for Danceviewtimes.com and contributes articles on dance to a variety of publications.
