Richard Harriman would have been happy to see the activity on September 18 at the teeming Folly Theater. Harriman, who died in August of leukemia, had an eye for what was going to be the Next Big Thing in music, dance and theater. That’s how he made the Harriman-Jewell Series into a national presenting powerhouse. The Trey McIntyre Project is clearly one of the Big Things in dance today, and its local debut here on Saturday was one of the most impressive dance performances I’ve seen in this city or any other. I’m quite sure Richard was up there watching — smiling in the amiable way that we all knew so well. This was an unequivocal hit.

Trey McIntyre’s choreography is all-encompassing — as gorgeous as Tudor, as innovative as Paul Taylor, as audacious asTwyla Tharp, and as inventively detailed as William Forsythe. Yet it is distinctive, with a huge vocabulary that is continually surprising and fun, even when dealing with serious subjects. The appearance of this nine-member company on the Harriman’s opening night (one of whom was missing because of a back injury) was an auspicious start to what promises to be one of the most interesting local performing-arts seasons in years.

Trey’s dance is so striking and intriguing that you can’t get it out of your head. Operatic lore says that audience members at the premiere of Bizet’s Carmen left the opera house “humming the tunes.” I’ve rarely, if ever, felt that way about dance, but I did after this show. At the same time, Trey’s choreography is overwhelmingly dense. In fact there’s so much going on at any given second that you’d need to be on amphetamines to take it all in the first time.

The opening Pork Songs showed off both his wit and his mastery of classical dance ethic. The ballerina in tulle (Annali Rose) dances the role of a pig, though she looks like anything but pork. She knows she must die so that we all can eat bacon, and she expresses her sadness with liquid and languid movements that are at time pitiful, at times defiant. Seven company members in mix-and-match black-and-white costumes loop about her, now dangling their arms loose like rag dolls, now breaking into arabesques and jetes. Much of the humor here is in the music, a splayed variety of songs about pork that are meant to reflect light-hearted aspects of Southern life:

“Black and white are the colors of me. I’m a porker, I live under a tree. Tomorrow they are going to kill me. So will I ask you to please stop eating pig meat. I’m a porker and I’m being killed (my life taken away) just because you guys like to have bacon for breakfast every day.”

The pig’s final solo is rubbery and loose in a hillbilly manner, then morphs into a sort of comic Dying Swan. She is strong to the end, railing against her destiny all the way. If the wide-ranging set of musical styles made continuity difficult here, Annali’s virtuosity was ample reward.

Arrantza was created for the Jaialdi 2010 International Basque Cultural Festival in Boise, Idaho, where Trey’s company is based. It is a celebration of Basque music and dance, set to recorded storytelling interspersed with recorded Basque music and a wildly percussive finale. It opens with the dancers in giant floppy bags, which they shed to reveal subtly Basque-flavored costumes. (Are they emigrants in rags, arriving in a new land after a long journey at sea?). The movement is a natural blend of Basque elements — like the side-to-side dangling swoops of the arms, fists curled inward — and soft Tayloresque curlicues, even outright ballet.

If one yearned perhaps for a more cohesive inner narrative, there was some dazzling dance here. During one recorded story, in which a Basque historian talks about his father, three men (John Michael Schert, Dylan G-Bowley and Jason Hartley) dance a breathless extended trio purely from cues off the spoken text. It was a mesmerizing moment that I will remember for a very long time: Extravagant and enormously complex — now slow-motion, now quick and explosive — the dance ultimately forced you to begin hearing the spoken text in rhythmic terms. A series of rapid-fire, fantastically detailed solos was the perfect ending, suggesting perhaps that each Basque arrival ultimately had to make his or own way in the New World. Yet the dances shared enough chorographic details in common to indicate an upholding of ancient cultural strands.

The program culminated in Wild Sweet Love, a 25-minute choreographic masterpiece created for Sacramento Ballet in 2007. One might expect a ballet set to such an eclectic array of music to look and sound like a mish-mash: The Zombies, The Partridge Family, Lou Reed, José Alfredo Jiménez, Roberta Flack, Queen and (did I forget to mention?) Felix Mendelssohn. But Trey’s narrative here was unusually strong, centered on the busy balletic romp of Ashley Werhun as a feisty, white-gloved woman trying to find happiness in a world where everyone seems to have paired off. At the outset she is the “odd woman out” to a sextet of cornball nuptial couples, who dance an ecstatic series of over-the-top displays of affection. Mendelssohn’s Wedding March accompanies this tossing-together of ballet and Trey’s unique take on contemporary dance.

Between songs, members of the Kansas City Ballet School appeared upstage lit only in silhouette, crossing the stage in a row forming sharp unison patterns. The pas de deux by Chanel DaSilva and Dylan featured unique and amazingly funny patterns to suggest the carefree romance of youth (set to “I Think I Love You”). The woman subsequently engages in another duet — at one point attempting to break up the couple — and finally grows desperate and angry.

The finale to Queen’s “Somebody to Love” finds her newly resolute, defiant even. She embarks on a frenetic Dance of Death within a rectangular “prison” of light far downstage — a modern-day answer to the sacrificial virgin’s final dance in The Rite of Spring? The company raises her high above their heads, but she slithers down into their huddle mass, as if subsumed by society’s rigid expectations — just as Nijinsky’s virgin was doomed by her own brutal ancient rituals.

For more information about Trey and TMP see www.treymcintyre.com. For tickets to upcoming Harriman-Jewell Series performances call 816-415-5025 or go to www.harriman-jewell.org.

To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, send email to phorsley@sbcglobal.net.